Frank Furedi

The politics of the hidden agenda
Spreading conspiracy theories – stories about a world warped by evil forces – remains the pastime of marginalised groups. But conspiratorial thinking, the idea that someone, somewhere is to blame for every misfortune, has become respectable.

The term conspiracy theory has become part of everyday life. As I write these lines I discover that ‘conspiracy theories are popping up all over South Florida this weekend’ to explain why a certain baseball player was dropped from a game (1).  A commentary about another of America’s favourite sports, basketball, notes that ‘nothing beats a good conspiracy theory, especially when it involves two of basketball’s biggest names’, before reporting on the suspect motives of a ‘group of Chinese investors’ who recently ‘bought a minority stake in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ (2).

The phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ is used in various different ways today. Anyone who questions a particular version of events can be labelled a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes the term is used fairly lightheartedly to dismiss another person’s opinion. For others, conspiracy theories provide powerful evidence that all is not as it seems; adopting and accepting certain conspiracy theories can be a way of communicating ideas about bad faith, malevolent behaviour and morally dubious acts.

The epidemic of conspiracy theory-talk is reflected in the world of publishing. Numerous books have been published on this subject, many of them devoted to exposing some alleged, behind-the-scenes conspiracy to defraud the public and manipulate our behaviour. Such books readily resonate with contemporary popular culture, where Hollywood films and TV shows forcefeed us a diet of revelations about alleged cover-ups and hidden agendas.

When the idea of conspiracies becomes mainstream, then the meaning of the c-word can mutate and lose much of its conceptual utility. That is a pity, because contemporary society needs a full and proper understanding of the conspiratorial outlook on public life today, and why it has such a powerful lure. Indeed, there are now more and more books that try to explain the mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking in the twenty-first century. Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch offers a useful journalistic account of the way conspiratorial thinking has taken hold in recent years. Conspiracy theories are often associated with bizarre right-wing cults, yet as Voodoo Histories points out, today they are not confined to any particular part of the ideological divide. Left-wing conspiracy theories about Trotskyist plotters or neo-conservative cabals now compete with far-right denunciations of worldwide Jewish conspiracies.

Unfortunately, however, much of the current literature that tries to account for conspiratorial thinking lacks a critical edge. It often fails to illuminate the specific features of the conspiracy theory. Too often, any questioning of the official version of events is interpreted as a variant of conspiracy-theory thinking. This idea is forcefully put by Mark Fenster in his influential book Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power. Fenster argues that conspiracy theories are based on the correct assumption that ‘we don’t all have equal access to power and capital’, an assumption which then creates a search for evidence of hidden corruption and abuse of power. So the conspiratorial approach to public life is ‘shared not only by the most committed conspiracy theorists’, says Fenster; ‘political novelists and investigative reporters also try to explain and narrate a world of unequal power’ (3).  From this standpoint, the conspiracy theory is simply another variant of everyday muckraking exposés of ruling-class intrigue and official deception. That is wrong.

Also, the idea that conspiracy theories convey some essential ‘truth’, only in a perverted form, is frequently put forward by the new analysers of conspiratorial thinking – which again tends to miss what is distinct about conspiracy theories. And often, critics of the conspiracy theory take a very selective approach to their subject matter. As Aaranovitch notes, Fenster is far more understanding about conspiracy theories directed at George W Bush than he is of conspiracy theories aimed at Bill Clinton. Fenster says accusations against Bush are ‘more grounded in logic and fact than those about Clinton’. That’s another way of saying: they have ‘conspiracy theories’ but we have legitimate accusations.

The fact that some authors now erode the distinction between conspiracy theories and legitimate exposés of manipulative behaviour is testimony to the confusion that surrounds this subject. Aaronovitch defines a conspiracy theory as the ‘attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended’. He believes that a ‘conspiracy theory is the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable’. This definition captures an important aspect of conspiratorial thinking. But is it is far too general to account for the specific features of the conspiracy theory.

Indeed, today, attributing agency to an accidental event is a key and common response to virtually every unexpected episode or act of misfortune. Yet the fact that more and more of us blame our neighbours or employers for some accident we have suffered, or blame officialdom for floods and other acts of nature, should not be seen as simply a milder version of that system of conspiratorial ideas which ‘proves’, for example, that the Jews were responsible for the outbreak of the First World War.

One way to overcome the confusion on this issue is to make a conceptual distinction between conspiratorial theories, conspiratorial thinking, and conspiratorial culture. It is useful to make this distinction because the current use of the term conspiracy theory has become problematic; it lacks clarity and it frequently distracts from the real problem today. That real problem is not so much conspiracy theories, but conspiratorial thinking and culture.

Today, as in the past, there are numerous real conspiracies and plots. Some of them never get off the ground, others never really realise their objectives, while some lead to real acts of sabotage and assassinations. Governments also frequently conspire to realise certain political goals. Sometimes governments raise the spectre of a subversive plot in order to clamp down on their opponents. The British government’s manipulative use of the forged Zinoviev Letter in the 1920s is a good example of how an invented conspiracy can be used to great effect.

However, real existing conspiracies and officialdom’s occasional fabrication of conspiratorial stories should not be seen the foundation or premise of conspiracy theories. Unlike stories about plots to assassinate Princess Diana or Marilyn Monroe, a conspiracy theory is a theory because it doesn’t simply claim to provide explanations for a single event, but for much more than that. Most conspiratorial fantasies do not constitute a theory; a conspiracy theory is something quite different and distinct, and should be recognised as such.

A conspiracy theory provides a view of the world that both explains the background to events and, more importantly, provides a warning for the future. Its focus is not merely on behind-the-scenes machinations and plots against groups and individuals; instead it offers a comprehensive perspective that purports to reveal the real workings of the world we live in. The main theme of the conspiracy theory is the heinous act of moral subversion, allegedly carried out by a cabal of powerful people. In order to shed light on the importance of some global conspiracy, conspiracy theorists use the ideology of evil. This ideology offers a view of the world where unexpected occurrences and acts of misfortune are re-presented as the product of malevolent forces. In providing a comprehensive account of the threats that face a community, this ideology of evil seeks to give meaning to an otherwise incomprehensible world. Historically, the concept of evil has helped to explain why bad things happened; it provided an answer to society’s need to understand the cause of misfortune and it provided guidance on who should bear the blame for such misfortune.

Fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century demonology is an important early example of the conspiracy theory. During the early fourteenth century, frightening rumours swept Europe about an impending conspiracy; in some accounts the conspiracies were orchestrated by Jews, in others by Muslims; some demonologists pointed the finger of blame at lepers and witches. In the aftermath of the catastrophe that Europe suffered with the Black Death (1347-1349), fears of impending conspiracies were attached to witches, Jews and ‘plague-spreaders’. It is at this point that the Catholic Church becomes interested in the activities of sorcerers and Satanic cults.

In late fourteenth century, the Catholic Inquisition, originally set up to stamp out heretical practices, gradually began to regard witchcraft as another important form of heresy. The Inquisition constructed an association between witchcraft and heresy, which gradually led to a fundamental reorientation in the church’s doctrine. Eventually, through the contribution of professional demonologists, an ideology of evil emerged which blamed a Satanic plot involving witches for the corruption of the world. This was an early form of conspiracy theory, which successfully captured the imagination of pre-modern Europe.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, conspiracy theories in the West have taken on an increasingly secular form. The growing influence of secular and scientific thinking has undermined the idea of powerful demonic forces. However, conspiracy theorists have not stopped raising the alarm about frightening plots hatched by wicked conspirators – for example, in the 1890s the publication of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was used to inspire a new spate of witch-hunts, this time against the Jews. Yet, in this form of scaremongering, the ideas of evil and danger were communicated in a non-religious secular form. As Aaronovitch argues, the modern conspiracy of The Protocols successfully influenced significant sections of the inter-war elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Today, conspiracy theories that insist the world is ruled by a secret cabal, such as the Bilderberg Group, continue to flourish. The idea that there is a New World Order run by a coterie of evil conspirators is most influential in the United States. However, these current conspiracy theories tend to have only a minimal influence over society.

Most of the discussion on conspiracy theories – including that in Voodoo Histories – is actually about conspiratorial thinking. Conspiratorial thinking is about attributing the problems and misfortunes faced by individuals to some intentional malevolent behaviour. In particular, unexpected and unanticipated events are often blamed on irresponsible, and by implication immoral, behaviour. Such thinking is underpinned by a sense of powerlessness and the perception that hidden forces are responsible for people’s predicament. Through conspiratorial thinking, people attempt to give meaning to otherwise incomprehensible events – and unlike conspiracy theories, which are now confined to the most disoriented sections of society, conspiratorial thinking has gone mainstream. Advocacy organisations, political activists and the media are attracted to the idea that behind every headline there lays a hidden agenda. The idea of hidden agendas has influenced discussions on the war in Iraq, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the outbreak of swine flu.

In previous times, such attitudes mainly informed the thinking of right-wing populist movements, which always saw the hand of a Jewish or Masonic or Communist conspiracy behind major world events. Today, conspiratorial thinking has become respectable; many of its most vociferous supporters are to be found in radical protest movements or within the cultural left. When, a few years ago, Hillary Clinton warned of a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ against her husband, then president Bill, it became clear that the politics of the hidden agenda had become part of everyday public life. Today, the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movement is as wedded to conspiratorial thinking as are its opponents on the far right.

Conspiratorial thinking gives meaning to otherwise strange events; it offers a sense of coherence and unity to otherwise disparate and unconnected happenings. The normalisation of this kind of thought is one of the most disturbing developments in twenty-first century public life. Indeed, it often appears as if Western societies have regressed and adopted a medieval perspective on acts of calamity. Back in the Dark Ages, people regarded accidents, disasters and other acts of misfortune as the work of hidden forces; accidents did not simply happen, but rather were intentionally caused by either divine or malevolent forces. Misdeeds were often seen as acts brought about by people who had been manipulated by evil forces.

Today, this primitive outlook informs how many people make sense of their personal failures, health problems and the disintegration of their communities. And since conspiratorial thinking encourages the belief that what you can’t see is more important than what you can see, it can be difficult to debunk. That is why even a fine study of this subject, such as Voodoo Histories, is unlikely to challenge it. As Aaronovitch points out, even people who question other people’s fantasies about conspiracies often embrace their own version of a hidden agenda.

Conspiratorial thinking is encouraged by a powerful cultural narrative that depicts people, not as the authors of their destiny, but as the objects of manipulative secretive forces. Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil and hidden figures pull all the strings. The flourishing of this imagination springs from mainstream society’s own inability to give an authoritative account of contemporary events. Virtually every aspect of public life is contested today, and there is little agreement on what are the causes of our current predicament. This crisis of causality continually calls into question the official version of events. Of course, the official version of events often needs to be questioned, but not through embracing a simplistic conspiratorial worldview that blames small cliques of evil people for what happens in the world.

Conspiratorial culture communicates the idea that nothing just happens by accident: somebody is at fault. Fantasies about international terrorist networks, paedophile rings, corporate conspiracies to fool people about an impending environmental disaster and neo-conservative cabals compete with one another to gain public attention. Virtually every misdeed, it seems, is the outcome of a carefully worked-out plot. Conspiratorial culture helps fuel suspicion and mistrust towards public life. It displaces critical engagement with society in favour of a destructive search for the hidden agenda. It distracts from any clarification of genuine differences and helps turn public life into a continuous crusade to unmask the perpetrators of malevolent deeds. The media fuel this attitude by frequently arguing that what is important is not what public figures say but what their real agenda is. The media incite the public to look for hidden motives; that normalisation of suspicion and mistrust is the key accomplishment of today’s conspiratorial culture.

The rise of conspiratorial thinking expresses the loss of causality and meaning in the contemporary world. History demonstrates that nothing is more frightening than when a community lacks a system of meaning through which it can understand the problems it confronts. In such circumstances, people feel powerless and confused and are sometimes drawn towards a simplistic version of events where everything is black and white or good and evil. What is truly disturbing about the contemporary era is that it is not only the frightened and dispossessed who have internalised this cultural narrative, but also significant sections of mainstream society. Who needs The Protocols or other elaborate conspiracy theories when contemporary culture continually incites people to fear invisible forces? What is needed is not so much the debunking of these fantasies, but the elaboration of positive, future-oriented ideals that help people to understand things and take control of their lives. It is all too easy to condemn the simplistic meanderings of marginalised sects; it is far more difficult to question mainstream prejudices about hidden agendas and to overcome our own predilection to gain meaning through blaming.

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch is published by Jonathan Cape. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

(1) See Joe Girardi puts to rest talk of Alex Rodriguez’s breather, New York Daily News, 21 June 2009

(2) No conspiracy: LeBron and Yao won’t become teammates in Cleveland, NBA Blog, 20 June 2009

(3) Mark Fenster interview

First published by spiked, 26 June 2009

People should not be punished for their beliefs
The proposal to ban British National Party members from teaching in schools is a far bigger threat to democracy than the BNP itself.

If recent events are anything to go by, then it is pretty clear that the far-right British National Party (BNP) does not have a monopoly on the politics of intolerance.

It is widely reported that the UK schools secretary, Ed Balls, is considering proposals to ban members of the BNP from working as teachers in schools. The campaign to keep far-right individuals out of the nation’s classrooms has been spearheaded by the teachers’ union, the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT). The NASWUT has called for an amendment to teachers’ contracts, which would mean no one closely associated with the BNP could take a job as a teacher.

Paradoxically, the call to fire BNP-linked teachers is justified on the basis of promoting diversity. Five members of the General Teaching Council of England wrote a letter to the Guardian arguing that the BNP’s ideas are ‘fundamentally inconsistent’ with the ethos of diversity, which ‘enriches learning opportunities for all our children’ (1). Their ideal of diversity is actually shot through with double standards. Diversity for them does not include anyone whose views contradict the prevailing consensus. So they can be very selective in how they uphold and apply the principle of ‘diversity’, and have no inhibition about banning those whose views run contrary to the contemporary ethos.

When trade unions take a lead in demanding that BNP members be denied a livelihood, it is clear that these organisations have lost touch with the positive ideals that inspired their creation. Their demands are motivated by political intolerance and frustration at the results of the recent local elections and EU elections (in which the BNP won two seats in the European Parliament). Having failed to isolate the far right through debate and democracy, some are now opting for bureaucratic measures to rid the country of the BNP.

What is really absurd about these illiberal anti-BNP crusaders is that they truly believe that they occupy the moral high ground. Nothing could be further from the truth. The proposal to ban BNP-linked teachers represents more of a threat to democracy than the racist sentiments expressed by the BNP itself.

Discriminating against people on the grounds that they hold the wrong views is no more legitimate than discriminating against individuals on the basis of their religion or race. In effect, the call to ban teachers who are members of the BNP is a demand to victimise them on the grounds of their beliefs rather than for anything they have done. It is not the competence or qualifications of BNP-linked teachers that are being called into question, but their beliefs. What is at stake is not what they have done but what they think. And penalising people for their views is, in many ways, an incitement of acts of intolerance. It also represents a direct challenge to the idea of an open and free society.

It is important to note that BNP-linked teachers are not only supporters of a particular party; they are also members of an allegedly democratic society. Despite their opinions they have a right to vote and a right to free speech. The attempt to treat them as a category of sub-citizens fundamentally calls into question everybody’s democratic rights. Once one group of people can have their rights taken away on the basis of their opinions, then it won’t be long before other people who hold eccentric or radical views are penalised.

Democratic rights turn into paper rights if they are applied selectively and treated in such a casual and opportunistic fashion. The call to ban BNP-linked teachers from schools treats freedom of thought as a negotiable commodity that need not be applied to those with whom we fundamentally disagree.

It is also an act of political cowardice. Those who are cobbling together a behind-the-scenes bureaucratic formula for undermining the legitimacy of the BNP have done little to confront and challenge the ideas that the party holds and which they so abhor. Instead of relying on the power of democratic ideals to counter dead-end racist sentiments, the anti-BNP lobby has opted for undemocratic acts of selective repression. The outcome of this exercise in intolerance will be to make it impossible to have an open and grown-up debate about the issues that motivate some people to support the BNP. Worse still, the denial of democratic rights to members of the BNP helps foster a climate where narrow-minded bigotry and intolerance are likely to flourish.

(1) No place for the BNP in the classroom. Guardian, 20 June 2009

First published by spiked, 23 June 2009

Why the state cannot save the economy
Instead of having arid debates about the state versus the market, we must create institutions and policies that can restructure the economy.

A question that comes up time and again in discussions of the economy is ‘What is the relationship between the state and the market?’ Underlying this query is a demand for some kind of rebalancing of the relationship – a demand premised on the idea that the current crisis is somehow an outcome of the deregulation of the financial markets.

One of the arguments that goes almost unquestioned, certainly in Europe, is that what is required is re-regulation, a systematic form of state intervention both in the financial markets and in other sectors. I find this outlook puzzling, since it is based on the assumption that the recent past has been an era of neo-liberalism where the state had a small and undistinguished role in social and economic life. In reality, the state already has a formidable presence in the economy, and has had for a very long time.

For example, in every major economy, we have seen very large government budget deficits in recent decades. In the UK and elsewhere, the public sector has played a crucial role in the creation of new jobs. Many of the financial policies now linked to the global recession are part-and-parcel of this state involvement in the economy, from low interest rates to encouraging consumer spending to the housing boom. The state has not been a neutral observer but an active promoter of these things.

Contrary to popular prejudice, the state is not a stranger to regulation. Listening to contemporary debates, you could be forgiven for thinking that the European Union (EU) is the most unregulated place in the world. Yet if you look more closely, you will find that while there has been some deregulation in some sectors, in the financial and banking markets for example, there has also been an expansion of state regulation in a whole number of areas in various different ways – including in finance and banking. Anyone who has had to put up with the rise of corporate governance and its many petty rules will know what I am talking about. The world of business is far more regulated than ever before.

So, what can the state do now? What is the role of the state today? Before we can answer these questions, we need to understand the fine balancing act that any democratic state has got to be involved in. On one hand, the state must restructure economic life and establish the basis for future growth, something that most governments recognise, at least rhetorically. On the other hand, the state also feels the pressure of political expediency and the need to maintain jobs and living standards. There is a contradiction between these two imperatives which, in the current period, most policymakers are reluctant to spell out. The UK government has been particularly loath to spell out the difficult decisions that have to be made in relation to this contradiction.

One way in which political leaders have sought to soothe this contradiction between future growth and current living standards is by promoting consumption. They believe that, somehow, if state expenditure is increased, the economy will be stimulated. And thus we can have prosperity and economic growth. This is naive. Giving more money to clapped-out car industries isn’t going to do very much for the future, nor will it even help the workers employed there in the long run because their living standards will be compromised.

So what kind of state do we need under these circumstances? It is wrong to counterpose the state to the market. The state has an indispensible role to play in creating the conditions for global recovery. It will do so not by becoming an even greater regulator, obsessed with micromanagment, nor by being the uninhibited printer of money. What is required is a strategic approach, diversifying away from consumer spending and financial services to a restructuring of the economy. In order to do this, the state will have to focus on at least five things:

- Science and innovation;
- An industrial policy, broadly defined;
- The improvement of infrastructure;
- The creation of a more productive and reliable energy sector;
- The encouragement of new, productive start-ups rather than on saving older industries.

We can all see what is wrong with the market, its imperfections and inefficiencies. But the state, too, is far from perfect. The public sector is far from being as efficient as it could be.

The first problem in relation to the state in the UK and the US today, and in other countries too, is the rise of risk aversion and the evasion of responsibility. As a result of these trends, the state has continually outsourced its authority. In some quarters, this process of contracting out responsibilities is regarded as a good thing; it is seen as part of a new reliance on private initiative. What is really happening is that the state is refusing to accept responsibility for the fact that it cannot provide, for example, world-class education for children.

Sometimes, the handing over of responsibility takes on grotesque forms. When two soldiers were shot at their barracks in Northern Ireland in March this year, what was really strange was that the barracks were being protected by a private security firm. Historically, the state has taken responsibility for the defence of the nation. Yet here we had private security guards – not famed for their high standards – protecting an army barracks in Northern Ireland. The guards themselves said that they could see what was happening, they could see the attackers coming with their guns, but they claimed that they didn’t have the training to deal with it. This process of contracting out is a bad thing, not because other people running things is bad, but because it is almost invariably driven by the state’s refusal to take responsibility.

When the UK Labour government announced that the Bank of England would become independent in 1997, that move was driven by the same impulse. The bank’s independence is itself not necessarily a bad thing, but this development showed that the government wanted to evade responsibility for economic decisions. This has also been a feature of national governments’ relations with the EU. Politicians are able to say ‘it wasn’t our decision, we were forced to do it by an EU directive’. Decision-making is done at arm’s length; responsibility is avoided.

The second problem is that the state has become very short-termist and one-sidedly tactical, far too subject to political calculations. The state therefore finds it difficult to make hard choices. Few politicians are prepared to say that the public sector will have to be cut back massively. Who spells out, publicly, the public expenditure cuts that were sneaked into UK chancellor Alastair Darling’s Budget in April?

Thirdly, something that I am most worried about as a sociologist, is the decline of the public-sector ethos. Again, this is particularly an Anglo-American problem, but it is affecting other countries, too. This ethos, which guided state actions in the past, was one that professed neutrality, objectivity, disinterestedness and professionalism. This has been eroded by an army of consultants coming in and out on a short-term basis. The civil service is no longer viewed in the same way as in the past. A distinct, institutional consciousness no longer exists. Try talking to a civil servant these days and you will find that they are more interested in you than you are in them. Why? Because they are looking to make contacts and find another job; always moving on.

Few people working in the civil service express the espirit de corps that is essential to any institution if it is to be effective. Ironically, you need a fairly conservative state institution in order to be experimentative. Unless you have a stable foundation on which to build, it is difficult to be innovative because you are constantly having to redo the things you did before.

Fourthly, the consequence of this is that the state as it is constituted in many parts of the West lacks any creative impulse to innovate. The UK government is constantly setting up quasi-state organisations whose mission is to innovate, to provide ‘blue-sky’ thinking, yet most of these organisations do not say or propose anything risky or interesting and instead churn out the same jargon and ideas time and time again.

Fifthly, something that is endemic to the state is a very inefficient public sector, particularly in Britain. The public sector cannot teach children how to read and write in a systematic way; the National Health Service is also highly inefficient given the amount of money that is spent on it. You only need to compare Britain’s health system to France’s in order to see that. The NHS is so inefficient it cannot even run a computer system. With a flu pandemic apparently on the way, the UK government has had to admit that it cannot even create a flu helpline, claiming it would take six months to do so. Setting up a helpline is not exactly rocket science.

This inefficiency will not be overcome any time soon. This is not to counterpose the state to the market, but rather to say that there are states which are weak or strong, smart or stupid. We are good at recognising failed states in Africa, but not so good at noticing the failed states closer to home. Similarly, markets are by no means always robust and there are some in major need of overhaul. What we need, and this is something we can all help to bring about, is a state with new policies that are more worthy of the twenty-first century and which is better able to meet our needs. We do need a state that can contain the most destructive effects of the global crisis, but we mustn’t think for one second that the state can save the economy. That is because we shouldn’t be trying to save the economy – we should be restructuring it.

This is an edited version of a speech that Frank Furedi gave at the Battle for the Economy in London on 16 May.

First published by spiked, 18 June 2009

How EU bureaucrats are destroying public life
A majority of Europeans refused to take part in the EU elections not because they don’t understand the EU, but because they do.

For the EU oligarchy, elections to the European Parliament are an administrative inconvenience that they simply have to put up with. Held every five years, these caricatures of democratic decision-making expose the contempt in which the European public holds the rulers of the EU.

This time round, in elections held at the end of last week, only 43 per cent of the EU electorate bothered to vote, down from the previous low of 45.5 per cent in 2004. Voter participation has declined in every European election since 1979. Still, that’s good enough for Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. ‘Overall, the results are an undeniable victory for those parties and candidates that support the European project and want to see the European Union delivering policy responses to their everyday concerns’, he said as he assessed the appalling spectacle.

When a leading European official describes the refusal of the majority of the public to participate in an election as an ‘undeniable victory’, you have to wonder what kind of political world he inhabits.

Voter apathy tells only part of the story, however. There is considerable evidence that disinterest in the EU elections is fuelled by a powerful sense of distrust, dissatisfaction and frustration. One German survey of 12,000 Europeans found that, for 60 per cent of respondents, one reason why they were not inclined to vote is because they are ‘being lied to in election promises’. Almost one in two respondents said they felt they ‘cannot improve anything by voting’. In Poland and Finland around two thirds of the respondents expressed this fatalistic attitude.

Typically, the EU political elite presents voter apathy as the unfortunate consequence of public misperception. Time and again they suggest that their good works are simply not appreciated by a public that doesn’t get what the EU is all about. Public disengagement is rarely seen as an indictment of EU institutions. ‘It’s not that people are staying away from these elections because they are critical of the European Union and its political process’, says Dr Hermann Schmitt of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. No, from his perspective, and in the view of the EU oligarchs, the public’s lack of interest springs simply from the EU’s own problems of ‘presentation’. So the European Commission sought to woo young voters with cool election ads on MTV networks.

In reality, there is much evidence that public disengagement is not the unintended consequence of poor public relations, but rather the outcome of an EU project that explicitly attempts to distance political decision-making from the gaze of European citizens.

Graham Watson, one of the leading lights of the Liberal EU Parliamentary Group responded to the most recent election results by saying he couldn’t understand why the turnout was so low, and therefore ‘we need to study why people don’t go out and vote’. Sadly, Watson’s lack of understanding of the realities of political life in the EU is not just an act; he is genuinely so out touch with public sentiment that he simply doesn’t get it.

Leading EU politicians frequently look upon their electorates as exotic and incomprehensible species whose habits and sensibilities must be ‘studied’. After the unexpected rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in the Irish referendum of 2008, the EU oligarchy responded with disbelief. Margaret Wallstrom, an EU commissioner, told the BBC that we must ‘analyse’ the Irish result and mount a public opinion survey to discover why the Irish rejected the sound advice of those who know best.

This language of incomprehension, with Eurocrats expressing confusion over people’s voting behaviour, gives the distinct impression that there must be some serious pathology at work in these elections. Otherwise, why don’t people bother to cast their ballot and vote to validate the legitimacy of the EU? The Eurocrats simply can’t understand. Yet if there is any pathology here, it is to be found inside the institutions of the EU itself.

The distinct feature of the EU’s political process is that it is self-consciously based on the principle of insulated decision-making. From the standpoint of the European political elites, one of the virtues of EU institutions is that it insulates them from the kind of public pressure and forms of accountability that they experience in their national parliaments. Consequently, the EU is able to adopt policies that would often prove contentious and difficult to justify in a more open national parliamentary setting. In effect, politicians can continually hide behind the EU’s invisible decision-making process and claim that such and such a policy ‘wasn’t my idea’, before adding that: ‘Unfortunately we have no choice but to go along with this Europe-wide directive.’

Insulated decision-making relies on institutions which are, in effect, outside the realm of public scrutiny. As Bruno Waterfield wrote in an important study for the Manifesto Club, ‘a unique form of twenty-first century statecraft has emerged’, which allows ‘expanding areas of public authority to retreat into a closed, private world of bureaucrats and diplomats’.

In effect the majority of EU legislation is formulated by the hundreds of secret working groups set up by the Council of the EU. Most of the sessions of the Council of Ministers are held behind closed doors and the EU’s unelected European Commission has the sole right to put forward legislation. Yet most of the decisions taken by the European Council are concerned with subjects that were previously discussed in national legislatures. These public-free institutions are designed to bypass conventional forms of democratic accountability.

The inevitable consequence of the institutionalisation of insulated decision-making is that it diminishes the capacity of European politicians to motivate and inspire their electorate. Low voter turnout doesn’t come from any problem of presentation; it is the logical conclusion to the EU’s system of behind-the-scenes political manoeuvring that is seen as unsuitable for public engagement and scrutiny. As a result of this, EU officials come across as they really are: bureaucrats rather than political leaders. Their ineptness has been exposed time and again as they have proven unable to win support for their proposed EU Constitution in national referendums. Is it any surprise that they have decided that referendums are not needed for the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, which is simply the Constitution rehashed?

When everything fails, the EU oligarchy tries to panic the electorate into voting. ‘If people don’t vote, the danger is that there will be more extremist parties or parties from outside the mainstream [in the European Parliament]’, warned Hans-Gert Poettering, president of the parliament. This is now the main message of EU rulers: people should vote to keep the extremists out, rather than voting positively for something. And it’s important to note that the word ‘extremist’ is used promiscuously today, to include not just the far right but also various kinds of Eurosceptic.

The paradox is that the culture of insulated decision-making has created an environment that is hospitable to the growth of political frustration and bitterness. The manipulative and dishonest style of rule-making confirms people’s cynicism towards conventional politics. Worse still, the insulation of decision-making directly contributes to the hollowing out of public life, which far too many people now see as pointless and irrelevant. In such circumstances, movements that are able to politicise people’s anger and dissatisfaction are able to make significant headway. So it is not surprising that right-wing nationalist parties gained some momentum in countries such as Holland, Hungary, Austria, France and Poland. Unlike the mainstream parties, these protest movements have no inhibitions about exposing the democratic deficit that afflicts the EU. The support for these parties is provoked by the cynicism of the EU elite itself.

First published by spiked, 10 June 2009

Now is the age of the discontented
The consumer culture has contaminated higher education and student complaints are rising. Some academics, fearing litigation or poor assessment, offer flattery instead of feedback. No one benefits.

In the current economic climate, higher education faces formidable pressures to restructure itself and cut costs. Inevitably its role and its institutional practices face criticism by policymakers and sections of the media. Recently, such criticisms have often taken the form of publicising students’ complaints to call into question the legitimacy of the academy’s institutional practices. Although the number of these complaints is tiny (900 in England and Wales in 2008) and the number upheld is smaller still (just 63), there is a growing perception of an explosion of student grievances. Newspapers and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA) continually point out that the numbers are rising. Complaints are rarely conveyed as just that, complaints, but are presented as markers of institutional failure.

Increasingly, the complaining student is represented as the personification of civic virtue. At times the very act of making a complaint - regardless of its validity - is interpreted as evidence of the fact that universities must change their ways. How many times have you heard the refrain that “students feel they must get their money’s worth” or that “consumer-minded students are more and more aware of their rights”? Consumer consciousness and the impulse to complain are invariably associated with the sacred concepts of “rights”. As Rob Behrens, the Independent Adjudicator, has noted, “The bottom line is that students are today more assertive in thinking about what their rights are and what things they can get from the commitments they make.” Such representation of student consumerism represents its implicit affirmation. According to Behrens, it is “not a bad thing”.

Thus the idealisation of assertive students who are fully conversant with their rights endows the act of complaining with the quality of an inherent virtue. And the exercise of such virtuous behaviour is sometimes interpreted as evidence of some institutional deficit in higher education. So it was that a recent editorial in The Sunday Times exclaimed that “Britain’s students are revolting - and with good reasons” before asserting “that the state of teaching in some of our universities is shocking”.

The conceptual leap from the act of complaining to the denunciation of the “shocking” state of university teaching is informed by the application of the consumer model of education. From this perspective, the dissatisfied customer serves as proof of institutional failure. It is self-evident that since the customer is always right, something must be done to respond to the complaint. The growing significance that policymakers and university administrators attach to student-satisfaction surveys is symptomatic of the ascendancy of a consumerist ethos on campuses.

In practice, the embrace of this ethos implies a role reversal between the authority of the teacher and the student. The authority of the customer trumps that of the service provider. Therefore, it is the opinion of the students and not the academic that determines the position of a university in the league table. Accordingly, if students assess their experience positively, then their university is judged to be a wonderful place of learning.

Of course the reality is that the customer is not always right, especially in higher education. What counts as a good student experience - friendly atmosphere, progressive marking, lots of spoon-feeding, great social life - may have little to do with the provision of a challenging and high-quality education. Is it bad manners to point out the obvious fact that students are often not in a position to distinguish between run-of-the-mill and quality education? The ability to discriminate and assess the quality of an academic experience is the product of years of hard work. That is why what surveys tend to indicate is how well customers’ expectations are managed rather than the quality of academic life.

It is also the case that the ethos of consumerism directly contradicts the fundamental premise of an academic education. From the standpoint of service providers, the customer is always right. It is not the service providers’ job to question or challenge the tastes and values of potential customers. By contrast, academics are often in the business of educating their students’ tastes and encouraging them to question their values. Indeed, one of the most distinct and significant dimensions of academic and intellectual activity is that it does not often give customers what they want. Academic dialogue and instruction does not provide the customer with a clearly defined product. It does not seek to offer what the customer wants, but attempts to provide what the student needs. That is why forcing universities to prove themselves to their customers fundamentally contradicts the ethos of academic education.

The celebration of the assertion of customer interests is part of a misguided attempt to hold higher education to account according to the doctrine of value for money. It is misguided because the customer model’s implicit assumption of a conflict of interest between client and service provider inexorably erodes the relationship of trust between teacher and student on which academic enterprise is founded.

It is also misguided because rather than improving the quality of university education, the advocacy and institutionalisation of complaining leads directly to its deterioration. Before dealing with this point, then, it is useful to reflect on the workings of the culture of complaint in British higher education.

It is important to note that the culture of complaint on campuses did not emerge as a response to quality-related issues that were intrinsic to the university. The advocacy of a complaining culture had its origins in developments that were external to higher education. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the Government launched a variety of consumer-oriented charters - The Citizen’s Charter, The Patient’s Charter, The Parent’s Charter - and promoted complaining as a vehicle for encouraging the efficient delivery of services in the public sector. A statement approved by a Conservative Cabinet seminar in February 1993, to the effect that “complaints are jewels to be cherished”, resonated with the thinking of all the main parliamentary parties.

The complaining consumer emerged as the righteous hero who would put right the many defects of the public sector. Even organisations that were opposed to the Conservative Government - trade unions, the National Union of Students - reinvented themselves as champions of the cause of the consumer. When the NUS launched its NUS Student Charter in December 1992, it was widely praised by the education establishment for its realism. Lorna Fitzsimons, the president of the NUS at the time, was widely commended for her statement “students as consumers have a right to quality education, equivalence and choice”. In the early 1990s, it was recognised that the NUS faced a crisis of identity. The retreat of the Left and the decline of student activism deprived it of a clear identity. In line with the prevailing mood of the times, it reinvented itself as a consumerist lobby group and played a significant role in the cultural transformation of the meaning of a university student to that of a customer.

Since the 1990s, the association of higher education with the act of consumption has acquired the character of an official doctrine. In recent years, how students feel about their university has been turned into an instrument for auditing the quality of institutions of higher education. During the past four years, the transformation of student sentiment into an indicator of quality has been achieved through the National Student Survey (NSS). This annual exercise, which purports to measure student satisfaction, is explicitly used to hold universities accountable for the “experience” they provide to their students. But whatever one thinks of the formalisation of the culture of complaint in universities, it is important to note that its main driver is the imperative of auditing and bureaucratisation rather than a genuine aspiration for quality education.

The cumulative outcome of the affirmation of students’ complaints is to render the process banal. There is little doubt that encouraging students to think of themselves as customers has fostered a mood in which education is regarded as a commodity that must represent value for money. Although this sensibility is rarely expressed explicitly, it influences the way universities manage their affairs and provides an idiom through which students sometimes express their grievances.

The constant affirmation of the culture of complaint inevitably influences some students to believe that because they paid for their education, they are entitled to demand satisfaction and a decent degree. That is why the vast majority of complaints are about the marks gained on essays, exams and the classification of degrees. One of the most striking manifestations of this trend is the growing tendency by students to question the marks they receive on their assessment. In some cases, students go through the motion of challenging their marks, only half believing that anything will come out of their complaint. However, since complaining is a one-way bet, there is little to be lost from having a go.

Supporters of the culture of complaint argue that its institutionalisation provides valuable information that can help universities improve the quality of the services they provide. One example that is used to show the usefulness of the NSS is its highlighting of student concern about the quality of feedback that they receive. This survey shows that students rate lowly the quality of feedback that they receive from their tutors. In response to this perceived deficit, many universities have sought to review their method of feedback and assessment.

However, complaints about feedback rarely express disappointment about the absence of a genuine dialogue and exchange with a tutor. In one social science department criticised for the quality of feedback, two thirds of the essays submitted were never picked up by their authors, who preferred to go online to learn their grades. As a result, they never had a chance to read the comments that their marker wrote on their essays.

One lecturer at a London university was taken aback when she was told by her students that they were not interested in holding a seminar discussion to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their essays. She was even more disturbed when a couple of months later she was accused of not providing good feedback by one of her students. Complaints about feedback are frequently a roundabout way of expressing disappointment about a mark that a student received for an assignment or exam. “We were not told what to expect or what we should be doing” is a common theme raised in such complaints.

There are, of course, many disturbing developments in higher education that students have every right to protest about. Universities face strong pressures to increase the number of bums on seats. Academic staff are forced to devote considerable energy and time to pointless bureaucratic exercises. Many departments charged with bringing in money end up reducing the resources they devote to teaching, research and the pursuit of scholarship. Officials who regard universities as an instrument of social engineering have forced many institutions to embark on the road of chaotic expansion. The cumulative outcome of these developments has encouraged some institutions to equate quality with quantity, which no doubt has led to the diminishing of the standard of higher education. In some institutions, students feel aggrieved by the mind-numbing experience of spoon-feeding lectures built around PowerPoint, formulaic seminars and the lack of intellectual stimulation. The discontent expressed recently by students at the University of Bristol about a planned reduction in teaching hours, large seminar groups and the proposal that essays should be marked by undergraduates is a rare but legitimate response that should be supported by academics.

However, the real issue at Bristol and other universities is not that customers’ rights have been violated, but that the quality of education has been compromised in the way that institutions have responded to the demands that confront them. Perversely, one of the pressures compounding this problem is the institutionalisation of complaining and the use of student satisfaction as an instrument for auditing universities. University managers have become very anxious about avoiding student complaint and litigation. Many of the routine practices of higher education - teaching, assessment, examining - are increasingly influenced by their impact on student satisfaction. However, the current fixation of university managers with customer satisfaction has the regrettable downside of distracting from their intellectual mission.

Since nothing pleases students as much as high marks and a good degree, many universities have felt compelled to bend over backwards to keep their customers happy. In the name of student satisfaction, departments that seek to maintain standards often face pressure to adopt a more “progressive” style of grading. The new modes of assessment that have been introduced have worked to facilitate grade inflation.

The current celebration of student satisfaction has fostered a climate in which institutions are obsessed with avoiding complaints and fear that disputes with fee-paying customers could lead to litigation. The culture of complaint has produced a form of “defensive education” that is devoted to minimising sources of disputes that have the potential to lead to complaint and litigation. Defensive education encourages a climate in which educators are discouraged from exercising their professional judgment when offering feedback or responding to disputed marks. Courses, especially ones that do not rate highly in student surveys, are modified and made customer friendly. Academics have become more defensive and circumspect about expressing their views with clarity. They write formulaic letters of reference and refrain from stating opinions that could provoke complaints from their customers. One of the most obvious strategies for avoiding complaints is to flatter students. Feedback is often used as a vehicle for validating the efforts of a student instead of pointing out weaknesses in presentation and argument.

Defensive education also dissuades academics from dealing effectively with cheating. In some universities, academics have been discouraged from charging students with plagiarism because of concerns that the institution may be sued. Dealing with complaints about plagiarism sometimes serves as a disincentive to pursue the dispute. The OIA’s Behrens turns this problem upside down when he speculates that the rise in complaints was partly an outcome of a “moral panic” over plagiarism by universities that led to “overzealous sanctions”. Anyone even vaguely familiar with academic life would be astonished to discover that campuses were overwhelmed by a moral panic fuelled by overzealous inquisitors. On the contrary, there is one powerful reason why acts of plagiarism are dealt with leniently or overlooked - the fear of student complaint. If there is a moral panic, its focus is the slothful academics who refuse to respond to the authentic grievances of their hard-working and fee-paying customers.

The promotion of a culture of complaint has no redeeming qualities. The internalisation of this culture by universities has created an environment where managing the expectations of students takes priority over intellectually challenging them. All too often students are flattered just for being students and not infrequently academics are forced to avoid acting in accordance with their judgment in order to avoid complaint. None of this is the fault of students, who have been socialised into perceiving themselves as consumers of education.

In the end, the culture of complaint undermines the unique potential for academic collaboration and dialogue and heightens the sense of conflict of interest. It is a bad, very bad idea.

UNJUSTIFIED STUDENT COMPLAINTS: CASES FROM THE OIA FILES

Fair penalty for bad behaviour

S was a first-year student who became friends with another student, R, on commencing his course and accompanied his friend in a series of violent incidents at the university, which included the sexual harassment of female students.

Both students were taken through the university disciplinary procedure and admitted the incidents, although S blamed R for initiating the behaviour. Both students were expelled. S appealed to the university and said that as he was only an accomplice he should have received a lesser punishment than R.

The Office of the Independent Adjudicator ruled the complaint not justified: the penalty was within the discretionary range available to the university and the decision to expel was reasonable in all the circumstances.

Dissatisfaction is no proof of bias

S was registered on a four-year degree from 2002 to 2006. He received a lower-second degree in 2006. He appealed against the classification on the basis that he was not satisfied that the university had taken his third-year mitigating circumstances fully into account and that the arrangements for vivas, in borderline classification cases, had been affected by the industrial action of lecturers in May 2006.

During the course of correspondence, the university offered to take the matter back for a full consideration of all of the mitigating circumstances. The university organised a new board of examiners, with the addition of two fresh external examiners. The board examined the evidence along with comprehensive statistical evidence showing how S’s results compared with the rest of the cohort. The board confirmed the decision that S had achieved a lower-second classification of degree.

The OIA ruled the complaint not justified: the question as to which degree classification a student’s academic profile warrants is a question of academic judgment, which is beyond the remit of the OIA. Dissatisfaction with a degree result does not amount to proof of bias. The mitigating circumstances were classified as minor. The OIA did not consider that decision to be unreasonable.

Supervision provided was comparable

S was an MBA student who was withdrawn after two unsuccessful attempts at her dissertation. She appealed against the deregistration decision on the ground that she had received inadequate supervision. The appeal was dismissed by both appeal panels convened under stage one and two of the university’s appeals procedures. Both panels found that there was no evidence to support the contention that the supervision S had received was inadequate. On the contrary, the panels found that the documentation provided by the department demonstrated that S had received supervision in accordance with the programme guidelines.

S complained to the OIA that the university’s finding - that she had received appropriate supervision - was unreasonable and that there were procedural defects in the hearing of her appeal.

The OIA ruled the complaint not justified: the OIA found that the supervision S received was comparable to other students resubmitting their dissertation at the same time. The supervision record kept by the supervisor also showed that she had received supervision in excess of the guideline amount set out in the programme handbook.

If the supervision was adequate or not was a matter for the university to judge.

Progression criteria were always clear

S wanted to enrol on a part-time masters course. He had no recent academic qualifications and was advised that he could enrol on a graduate diploma with the possibility of a transfer to the masters award if he achieved very good marks in his first two modules. S did not achieve these marks and so his various requests to progress to the masters award were turned down. When S completed the diploma he complained to the university that it had misrepresented it to him and that he had no better level of qualifications than when he started. S also complained that the university had not treated him with respect.

The OIA ruled the complaint not justified: the university had been clear and courteous to S throughout the communications about the criteria for obtaining progression to the masters and the appeals process.

First published by Times Higher Education, 4 June 2009

Taking the politics of fear to a new low
Unable to inspire voters, the isolated, illiberal oligarchs of the EU are using the threat of fantasy fascism to try to force us to be pro-EU.

The political class seems to have given up on formulating any positive reasons for voting in today’s elections to the European Parliament. Instead, it has reconciled itself to the fact that the institutions of the European Union (EU) lack popular legitimacy, and now acknowledges, more or less, that its ‘European project’ lacks content and meaning.

Surveys throughout Europe confirm that the public looks upon the EU with suspicion. Significant numbers of people also perceive it as a threat to their way of life. That is why the EU oligarchs, the Brussels bureaucrats who oversee this ‘European project’, have embraced the politics of fear. Unable to come up with positive arguments for voting, they have kickstarted a campaign of fear designed to scare people into casting their ballots.

‘If people don’t vote, the danger is that there will be more extremist parties or parties from outside the mainstream [in the European Parliament]’, warned Hans-Gert Poettering, president of the parliament. That is the main message of the EU oligarchy in this week’s elections: they are seeking, not a positive endorsement of mainstream EU parties, but votes cast to keep out the extremists.

According to the narrative of fear developed by the EU’s cultural and political elites, Europe’s way of life is threatened by the rise of a coalition of angry protest groups, hardened Eurosceptics and, worst of all, a powerful far-right, xenophobic, fascist-like movement. EU officials make frequent allusions to the economic instability of the 1930s that provided a fertile terrain for the emergence of fascism.

Many commentators now warn that the current climate of economic insecurity is likely to foster the kind of bitterness that will allow right-wing racist organisations to flourish. In such circumstances, apparently, it doesn’t matter whether or not you are happy with the mainstream parties; instead, voting for the mainstream parties is presented as a public duty to help keep extremists at bay. From the standpoint of such a negative morality, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, just so long as they accept the EU consensus.

One symptom of the profound moral malaise afflicting the EU is that even religious leaders have been recruited to front this negative scare campaign. Christian church leaders in Austria, Poland and Britain have spoken out against the parties of the far right. In Britain, the Archbishops of York and Canterbury have used their pulpits to denounce parties whose ‘core ideology is about sowing divisions in our communities’. British Muslim scholars echo this sentiment, warning that a low turnout could lead to ‘openly anti-Muslim’ parties gaining influence in Europe’s political institutions.

This campaign to panic people into voting relies on inflating the threat of marginal groups like the far-right British National Party and, even more ominously, on expanding the meaning of extremism. The term extremism tends to be used promiscuously today, to include anyone who does not share the cultural and political attitudes of the so-called EU mainstream. So the ‘extremists’ can include all eurosceptics, including those who, although they reject the EU, still regard themselves as pro-European. Indeed, EU bureaucrats often use the words ‘extremist’ and ‘eurosceptic’ interchangeably, as similar swear words designed to demonise their critics and opponents.

In this vein, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, warned that ‘the risk of abstention is that it allows eurosceptics and extremists to take over our debate and our future’. It’s unclear what debate Barroso is referring to, since his Commission is a no-go zone for public deliberation and serious discussion – but his intolerance for anyone holding sceptical views about the EU or the EC is clear for everyone to see.

The EU’s politics of fear seeks to brand opponents of the EU as the twenty-first-century equivalents of the militant anti-democratic forces that were responsible for the tragedies that befell Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. So it relies on the rhetorical strategy of guilt by association. The frequent conceptual leap from eurosceptic to extremist helps to expand the idea that we face a terrible threat from odious parties and individuals.

There was an imaginative example of this rhetorical fearmongering in an article in the UK Guardian this week, titled: ‘Anti-gay, climate change deniers: meet Cameron’s new friends.’ (1) The purpose of the article was to crucify UK Tory leader David Cameron for attempting to forge a league of conservative eurosceptics across Europe. By running through the political outlooks of various East European nationalists, the article established a casual link between anti-gay prejudice, racism, fundamentalist Catholicism and, of course, David Cameron. And just in case you missed the subtle point about how wicked these people are, the Guardian also threw in the contemporary heresy of climate change denial for good measure.

The message is that scepticism about the EU and climate change is akin to anti-gay prejudice and racism. All of these views are mixed together to create a nightmare vision of right-wing extremists threatening the European fabric. And, of course, the underlying message is that we should all get out and vote for those mainstream candidates who do win approval in the EU’s campaign of fear.

In the EU, the absence of political purpose and clarity about the future continually encourages the promotion of the politics of fear. Although the politics of fear reflects a wider cultural mood today, it did not emerge spontaneously: rather, fear has been consciously politicised. Throughout history, fear has been deployed as a political weapon by ruling elites. Machiavelli’s advice to rulers – that they will find ‘greater security in being feared than in being loved’ – has been heeded by generations of authoritarian governments.

Fear can be employed to coerce and terrorise and to maintain public order. Through provoking a common reaction to a perceived threat, it can also provide a focus for winning consensus and unity. Today, the objective of the politics of fear is to forge a measure of unity around an otherwise disconnected EU elite. Yet whatever its intentions, its main effect is to enforce the idea that there is no alternative. This message is clearly articulated by EU bureaucrats, who frequently argue that the alternative to the EU is chaos and disintegration.

It is probable that the EU oligarchy’s promotion of the politics of fear will endow the pro-EU campaign with some measure of coherence. It has certainly helped to divert debate away from the EU’s own record and vision. However, the EU’s reliance on negative morality will do little to contain public cynicism. Indeed, it will help to intensify the disconnection of the EU elites from the rest of society. And unfortunately, the scare tactics are likely to confirm people’s cynicism towards political life more broadly.

In such circumstances, movements that are able to politicise people’s anger and dissatisfaction are able to make significant headway. So it is not surprising that right-wing nationalist parties have gained momentum in countries like Holland, Austria, France and Poland. Unlike the mainstream parties, these protest parties have no inhibitions about exposing the democratic deficit that afflicts the EU. However, the support won by these movements should not be seen as a positive endorsement of a revitalised radical right, but as a result of the mood of political cynicism provoked by the behaviour of the EU oligarchy itself.

(1) Anti-gay, climate change deniers: meet Cameron’s new friends, Guardian, 3 June 2009

First published by spiked, 4 June 2009

EU oligarchs help far right prosper
The leaders of the European Union hate elections to the European Parliament. Why? Because these caricatures of democratic decision-making expose the contempt with which the European public regards the oligarchy that runs the EU.

A survey of 27,000 EU citizens commissioned by the European Parliament indicates that on average only 34per cent of them planned to vote in the elections. In Britain, 30 per cent of the respondents indicated they would definitely not vote.

Voter apathy tells only part of the story. There is considerable evidence that lack of interest in the EU elections is fuelled by a powerful sense of distrust, dissatisfaction and frustration. One German survey of 12,000 Europeans shows 60 per cent of the respondents assumed that one reason why so many of them are not inclined to vote is because they are “being lied to in election promises”. Almost half said they “cannot improve anything by voting”. In Poland and Finland, about two-thirds of the respondents expressed this fatalistic attitude.

Typically the EU political elite presents voter apathy as the unfortunate consequence of public misperception. They suggest that their good works are not appreciated by a public that simply does not get what they do. Public disengagement is rarely presented as an indictment of EU institutions. “It’s not that people are staying away from these elections because they are critical of the European Union and its political process,” claims Hermann Schmitt of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. From this perspective the public’s lack of interest is interpreted as simply a problem of presentation. That is why the European Commission sought to woo young voters with cool election ads on MTV networks.

However, there is considerable evidence that public disengagement is not the unintended consequence of poor public relations but the outcome of a project that explicitly attempts to distance political decision-making from the gaze of European citizens.

The distinct feature of the EU’s political process is that it is self-consciously founded on the principle of insulated decision-making. From the standpoint of the European political elites, one of the virtues of EU institutions is that they insulate them from the kind of public pressure and forms of accountability that they experience in their national parliaments. Consequently the EU is able to adopt policies that would often prove contentious and difficult to justify in a more open national parliamentary setting.

In effect, politicians can continually hide behind the EU’s invisible decision-making process and claim “it wasn’t my idea” before adding that “unfortunately we have no choice but to go along with this Europe-wide directive”.

Insulated decision-making relies on institutions that are in effect outside the realm of public scrutiny. As Bruno Waterfield writes in an important study for the Manifesto Club, “a unique form of 21st-century statecraft has emerged” that allows “expanding areas of public authority to retreat into a closed, private world of bureaucrats and diplomats”. In effect most EU legislation is formulated by the hundreds of secret working groups set up by the Council of the EU.

Most of the sessions of the Council of Ministers are held behind closed doors and the unelected European Commission has the sole right to put forward legislation. Yet most of the decisions taken by the European Council are concerned with subjects that were previously discussed in national legislatures. These are public-free institutions that are designed to bypass conventional forms of democratic accountability.

The inevitable consequence of the institutionalisation of insulated decision-making is that it diminishes the capacity of European politicians to motivate and inspire their electorate. What appears as a problem of presentation is actually an expression of a style of communication that is suitable for behind-the-scenes manoeuvring but not for public engagement. Invariably they come across as what they really are, bureaucrats, rather than as political leaders. Their ineptness has been exposed time and again as they proved unequal to the task of gaining support for the proposed EU constitution in national referendums.

Is it any surprise that they have decided that referendums are not needed for implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon?

When all else fails, the EU oligarchy attempts to panic the electorate into voting. “If people don’t vote, the danger is that there will be more extremist parties or (parties) from outside the mainstream” in the European Parliament, warns Hans-Gert Poettering, the president of this body. Appeals to keep out extremist parties rather than asking for a positive endorsement has been the main message of the EU oligarchy for this week’s election. The term extremism tends to be used promiscuously to include all Euro-sceptics, including those who reject the EU but regard themselves as pro-European.

The paradox is that the culture of insulated decision-making has created an environment that is hospitable to the growth of political frustration and bitterness.

The manipulative and dishonest style of rule-making confirms people’s cynicism towards conventional political life.

Worse still, the insulation of decision-making directly contributes to the hollowing out of public life, which far too many people see as pointless and irrelevant. In such circumstances movements that are able to politicise people’s anger and dissatisfaction are able to make significant headway.

So it is not surprising that right-wing nationalist parties have succeeded in gaining momentum in countries such as the Netherlands, Austria, France and Poland.

Unlike the mainstream parties, these protest movements have no inhibitions about exposing the democratic deficit that afflicts the EU. However, the support enjoyed by these movements should be seen not as a positive endorsement of a revitalised European radical Right but as a result of the political cynicism provoked by the behaviour of the EU oligarchy. 

First published by The Australian, 4 June 2009

Book of the week: Our Nation Unhinged
Why did they do it? Frank Furedi on the erosion of civil rights in the post-9/11 US.

Our Nation Unhinged provides a compelling account of the human costs of the erosion of civil rights in the post-9/11 US. The rule of law became a negotiable commodity leading to the institutionalisation of injustice and, as Peter Jan Honigsberg shows, quite unnecessary human suffering. Compared with previous instances of American judicial repression - the 1919 Palmer Raids, the internment of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War - the post-9/11 attacks on civil rights do not stand out as a unique response to a national emergency. What does stand out is the unprincipled manipulation of legal norms and the powerful sense of bad faith with which the Bush Administration attempted to provide a legitimate facade for its policy of pre-emptive detention of both US and foreign nationals.

The most important driver of officialdom’s bad faith was the motive of evading existing forms of accountability through the fabrication of new quasi-legal concepts and categories. The term “enemy combatant” is a paradigmatic example of a quasi-legal category invented for such a purpose. Until its invention, it had no meaning in international law. The Geneva Convention recognises lawful combatants, who are entitled to prisoner of war (PoW) status, and unlawful combatants, who are not. Unlawful combatants, such as spies, do not enjoy the legal rights afforded by PoW status but nevertheless benefit from some protection under international conventions and are expected to be treated humanely. With sleight of hand the Bush Administration redefined unlawful combatants as enemy combatants to describe the prisoners it held at Guantanamo Bay.

There were two important motives for this rebranding exercise. The first was the objective of getting around the Geneva Convention and thus being able to treat detainees outside the framework of international law. The second was the concern of government officials to avoid responsibility for acts that might open them to prosecution for war crimes and illegal activities in the future. Honigsberg notes that “officials figured that if there was no law to protect detainees, mistreating them would not be a violation of the law”.

The Bush Administration made up the law as it went along to ensure that it could not be prosecuted for “unlawful practices”. To this end, it asked the Department of Justice to identify legal interrogation techniques that would license the harsh treatment of detainees. The so-called torture memorandums written by the lawyers working for the department met that aim by defining torture so narrowly that only when it was pursued for its own sake was it deemed torture.

It is paradoxical that a Government that took such a cavalier attitude towards due process and the rule of law nevertheless took the law very, very seriously. This ambiguous orientation towards the law did not prevent the Government from trampling on civil liberties. But it did encourage the Bush Administration to confine many of its most morally questionable activities to jurisdictions that lay outside the US. It selected Guantanamo Naval Base as the site for holding foreign captives for the very simple reason that the prisoners “would not have the constitutional right to the habeas corpus petitions” in American federal courts. The expansion of the practice of extraordinary rendition, which allowed US authorities to arrest, detain and transport suspects to interrogation sites in different parts of the world, was also fuelled by the desire to evade the norms of due process operating within the jurisdiction of US courts.

Honigsberg’s book is not simply a story about the abuse of power and its consequences for thousands of detainees. It also offers important insights into the workings of the official mind of the US Administration. One of the questions that the author comes back to time and again is why they did it when there was no need for such extraordinary repressive measures to pursue the so-called War on Terror. “It did not have to be this way,” he writes, and adds that “we could have applied the rule of law to the people we have held since 9/11 and still protected ourselves and our nation from terrorists”. He adds that the “horrors of Guantanamo” could have been avoided and “still kept the detainees incarcerated if we had adhered to the rule of law”. Indeed, some of the detainees held as enemy combatants could have been prosecuted in American criminal courts. So why did they do it?

It appears that the Bush Administration was reluctant to pursue its prosecutions through open legal channels because it felt both insecure and exposed. There is considerable evidence that it had little idea of what it was up against and adopted desperate measures to gain information about its opponents. Back in 2005, Admiral Bobby R. Imman, former deputy director of the CIA, described 9/11 not only as an “intelligence failure” but “one grounded in a failure of imagination”, a situation where “you don’t know what you are looking for; you don’t know where to look”.

The Bush Administration certainly had no idea where to look. Nor did it have much of an idea about the people it had captured. For a start very few of the prisoners held in Guantanamo were captured by US forces. Almost 90 per cent of the detainees were captured in Pakistan or by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Many of these prisoners were arbitrarily seized by mercenaries and sold for the rewards offered by the US. One US officer involved in the processing of prosecution proceedings in Guantanamo reported that “in many cases, we had simply gotten the slowest guys on the battlefield”. Very few serious players were caught in the fishing raids and whatever its objectives, the Bush Administration’s illiberal detention and interrogation policies yielded very meagre results.

What is most disturbing about this violation of the rule of law is that it was perpetrated by people who on some level knew that what they were doing was wrong and that their actions violated the fundamental legal principles of their society. They clearly mistrusted their own public and opted for secret and quasi-legal measures. Although often caricatured as hard-line ideological neoconservatives, most of the leading officials were driven by a sense of unease and insecurity about the very meaning of the conflict rather than by adherence to a doctrine. Indeed, the attempt to construct an infrastructure for gaining uninhibited access to prisoners can be seen as part of an attempt to find an explanation of the threat it confronted and put a face on the enemy. What’s truly terrifying about this episode is how officialdom’s banal search for meaning mutated into a pointless crusade against an enemy that could not be named. Yet this futile exercise succeeded in exposing the frailty of the rule of law.

In the end, officials acting in bad faith could not promote their cause with conviction. Guantanamo Bay turned into a public relations disaster for Bush and, as a result, significant sections of public opinion have become sensitive to the threat posed by attempts to undermine due process and liberty. Unfortunately, once civil liberties are lost, it is difficult to regain them. Honigsberg’s story reminds us that our most precious rights are only as strong as the public that is prepared to defend them.

THE AUTHOR

Peter Jan Honigsberg is a professor of law at the University of San Francisco School of Law. The day after the attacks of September 11, 2001, he spoke to his dean and offered to teach a class on the legal issues that would arise from this event. He began the class in 2002 and has taught it every year since.

He is now preparing his project “Witness to Guantanamo”. He hopes to document the abuses by recording interviews with former detainees around the world.

Honigsberg studied law in New York and spent his vacations in the South working in the civil rights movement, mostly in Bogalusa, Louisiana, with Deacons for Defense and Justice, the first modern-day black organisation to respond with force against the Ku Klux Klan.

In his free time these days, Honigsberg writes children’s stories, three of which have been published.

Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of The War on Terror, by Peter Jan Honigsberg. University of California Press 334pp, £16.95.

First published by Times Higher Education, 28 May 2009

Taking refuge in the rhetoric of reform
By proposing electoral reforms in response to the expenses scandal, politicians are futilely seeking an organisational solution to a political problem.

These days, calls to reform this or that institution have a predictable and perfunctory character. And nowhere is this clearer than in the responses to the expenses scandal that is rocking the UK.

Demands for ‘institutional reform’ reflect a singular lack of imagination. So it isn’t surprising to discover that, in response to the expenses scandal, Alan Johnson, the UK health secretary, has called on prime minister Gordon Brown to hold a national referendum on electoral reform. Apparently, nothing less than a ‘genuinely radical alternative’ to the present desultory state of parliament will revitalise public life.

The rhetoric of reform has got some people excited. The Electoral Reform Society described Johnson’s demand as a ‘breath of fresh air’. And Johnson is not alone. Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, believes that tinkering with the system of MPs’ expenses is not enough; rather the whole political system needs to be reformed. David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, also has a lengthy shopping list of institutions and practices that must be reformed: this morning he has promised that, if he becomes PM, he will cut the number of MPs by 10 per cent, reduce prime ministerial power, and generally ‘shake up’ the system. Politicians from other parties are also calling for a fresh start, a political renewal, or for wholesale reform.

History tells us that the rhetoric of reform usually serves as a substitute for political thought. This is how it has panned out: parliament got bogged down by its unusually incompetent handling of how MPs expenses are managed; it then became excessively defensive about the situation and even more deferential to the media than is normal, and finally turned in on itself. It is as if 646 emperors have been caught out by the little boy, and now they must quickly find some clothes and get dressed in order to win back the people’s trust.

The question is: how? The default response is to take an imaginative leap to that fairyland of institutional reform. In recent decades, in lieu of political vision or thought, there has been an endless cycle of reforms in Britain. Poor old education, health, the police and local government have been some of the casualties of the imperative to reform.

Of course there is also an honourable tradition of progressive political reform. But in order for reform to mean something positive, it needs to have a clearly worked out analysis of what problem it is trying to solve, as well as clarity about the objective it is trying to achieve. Today, by contrast, reform has become another way of saying ‘reorganisation’. Typically, it represents an attempt to find an organisational solution to a political problem. That, at least, is the charitable interpretation… most likely in recent years the call for reform has been driven by an imperative of impression management. Promoting reforms gives the appearance of doing something. Just as incompetent business managers are wedded to the idea of ‘change management’, so politicians running on empty wave the flag of reform.

British public life has taken on a tawdry theatrical quality. For some time now, public life has been dominated by the need to be seen to be Doing Something. Historians will look back on the Blair-Brown years as an endless cycle of pointless initiatives. When a cabinet minister states ‘This morning I am announcing…’, you know that it will be the same old spectacle that you have witnessed a dozen times before.

What is so sad about this performance is its lack of purpose. There was a time when politicians carefully manipulated situations in order to promote their agenda. Today there is no agenda, and instead public figures seem preoccupied with justifying their very existence. And it is no surprise that politicians who are so preoccupied by their own image inevitably invite scrutiny and the politics of scandal-mongering. What is truly shocking about the expenses scandal is that British society is prepared to tolerate a situation where political disputes cease to have any real significance. The only issue at stake in this scandal is how politicians spend their parliamentary allowances or how they cook the books. Yet the problem with many of our MPs is not that they are playing the system, but rather that they appear more concerned with how they come across than with acting on their convictions.

Whatever one thinks about the moral standing of our political class, electoral reform is not going to improve matters. The problem is not how we vote, or even the integrity of contemporary politicians; the real problem is that parliamentary politics is simply lost for words. There are no big issues or ideas that stimulate genuine political debate. The only time that politics seems to come alive is when there is a whiff of sleaze or scandal. And with so little at stake, is it any surprise that a receipt for a Kit Kat can provoke the outrage of a nation?

New forms of impression management, through the promotion of electoral reform, are unlikely to alter the perception that something is wrong. We don’t need electoral reforms so much as leaders who are more devoted to their ideas than to their images. The issue is not electoral reform, but getting some parties that are worth electing. 

First published by spiked, 26 May 2009

What swine flu reveals about the culture of fear
A guide to today’s various species of scaremonger.

When Margaret Chan, head of the World Heath Organisation, raised the pandemic threat alert from four to five in response to the swine flu outbreak, she had no qualms about using the language of fear. ‘All of humanity is under threat’, she declared.

When, in the future, historians look back on this performance of fear, and on the swine flu panic more broadly, they will surely ask themselves: was Chan speaking as a public health official or as a moral entrepreneur? It is striking that Chan, like most fear entrepreneurs, does not perceive her behaviour as being in any way illegitimate or unduly alarmist. Indeed, she, like other fearmongers, qualified her warning with a reassuring statement: ‘Don’t panic.’

This combination of fear-promotion with the rhetoric of reassurance is a key aspect of the modern-day narrative of fear. Consider Chan’s warning that WHO is likely to raise its flu alert to the top of its six-point scale and declare a pandemic. This time she did not talk about the threat to ‘all of humanity’ and the danger of human extinction. ‘Level six does not mean, in any way, that we are facing the end of the world’, she said, before noting that ‘it is important to make this clear because [otherwise], when we announce level six, it will cause unnecessary panic’.

So Chan raised the spectre of human extinction with the elevation of the threat level from four to five, but when it came to the possibility of raising it to level six she appeared to take a more relaxed attitude towards the potential for global catastrophe. Of course, her very attempt to sound reassuring was framed in the sort of rhetoric that is likely to have the opposite effect. Informing the public that ‘we are not facing the end of the world’ implies that we might face it some time soon, and indicates that apocalyptic thinking is no longer confined to the world of religion. Chan’s secular version of apocalyptic thinking is powered by a contemporary cultural script that both exaggerates health threats and also links these threats with human malevolence more broadly. From this perspective, every virus, every disease, every new outbreak of flu, is potentially a weapon in the armoury of Evil.

The protagonists in today’s market of fear have forcefully sought to demonise flu as a threat to the world, as something that might even be turned into a weapon of mass destruction. The prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology now advertises a course on ‘Pandemics and Bioterrorism’. It claims that ‘swine flu is only the most recent of the challenges posed by threats of bioterrorism and global pandemics’. The casual manner in which the threat of bioterrorism is introduced into the discussion of swine flu, by one of the most respected scientific institutions in the world, provides disturbing evidence that fearmongering has become a respectable pastime and pursuit.

Today, fear entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. Some are moral crusaders who genuinely believe that the very fabric of society is threatened by evil forces. At the other end of the spectrum are the salespeople and hustlers of the market of fear. It is useful to distinguish between the different species of scaremonger, so here is your ‘Guide To Spotting The Different Actors In The Dramatisation Of Fear’.

Religious moral entrepreneurs

Historically, religion has often warned about the dangers of moral transgression. Although the influence of religion has waned in recent years, prophets of doom who foresee an apocalypse still play an important role in society. Religious moral entrepreneurs have been in the forefront of promoting scares about satanic ritual abuse and other wicked behaviour that challenges the sanctity of family life. However, although religious moral entrepreneurs exercise significant influence on specific issues, they are no longer a dominant force in society. They are merely one group of moral entrepreneurs that is in constant competition with various other fear marketeers.

Religious moral entrepreneurs are convinced that human misfortune ultimately springs from the activities of Satan. In the age of the internet, they often appear as digital, wired-up Jeremiahs warning that God will punish sinners for their errant ways. Some have argued that AIDS is God’s way of punishing immoral sexual behaviour. Big catastrophes such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina have been portrayed as retribution for degenerate, sinful behaviour. One Christian columnist described Katrina as ‘the fist of God’.

Unlike other types of scaremongers, religious moral entrepreneurs explicitly talk up the moral corruption of society. They have also willingly embraced current anxieties about the future of our planet. They have quite effortlessly reworked the language of environmentalism to make it fit with their views on apocalypse, Armageddon and ‘End Times’. Only in their vision, the triad of sin, evil and Satan replaces economic growth and carbon emissions as the main cause of the environmental problem.

Their favourite word: Sin.

Secular moral entrepreneurs

For some time, concern about moral corruption has taken an increasingly secular form, sometimes leaving the religious moral entrepreneurs behind. Many high-profile advocacy organisations have devoted themselves to warning the public about a variety of perilous events. In some areas – for example, child protection – advocacy groups have successfully, and fundamentally, changed the way that generations interact and the way children conduct their lives. Organisations such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) continually use alarmist messages about the scale of child abuse in order to raise funds and influence public opinion.

Unlike religious moral entrepreneurs, advocacy groups use ‘surveys’ and ‘research’, rather than the language of good and evil, to claim that a particular problem is getting worse and that, unless Something Is Done, it will engulf the whole of society. Secular moral entrepreneurs embrace their causes with the dogmatic fervour of the old-time religious crusaders – only theirs is a crusade that has no end. Advocacy groups promoting the cause of children or animals or the homeless can never bring themselves to concede that the situation of these groups is improving; on the contrary, they invariably claim that the problem is getting worse and worse, because that is what guarantees their hold on the public imagination.

Secular moral entrepreneurs continually seek out new opportunities to promote their cause, in a process described by sociologists as ‘domain expansion’: that is, expanding a widely recognised problem to encompass new issues. For example, widespread public concern about child abuse has encouraged secular moral entrepreneurs to use the language of abuse in relation to other issues, too: some now campaign to prevent ‘elder abuse’, ‘animal abuse’ and what they call ‘peer-to-peer abuse’. It is now even argued that people who are cruel to animals are likely to be cruel to their family members as well – in other words, one form of abuse begets another. With relentless repetition, and the support of the media, this imaginative linking together of disparate problems can become a kind of conventional wisdom. Secular moral entrepreneurs frequently flag up the gravity of a certain threat by using metaphors of invisibility: problems are hidden, concealed, unacknowledged.

Their favourite phrase: ‘This is only the tip of the iceberg.’

Experts

Experts, particularly scientific experts, play a uniquely important role in today’s culture of fear. Many of our anxieties are provoked by the statements and predictions of experts. Experts warn about the potential devastating impact of global warming, impending food and energy shortages, or of an asteroid striking Earth. They warn us of dangers far (or near) in the future that cannot be seen by ordinary human beings. And their dire predictions about an impending flu epidemic and various other ‘super bugs’ frequently capture the public’s imagination.

Expert warnings usually begin with the statement ‘research shows…’, and conclude with a demand for resources to be devoted to the task of preventing some future dreadful scenario from becoming a reality. Expert warnings are taken seriously because they are underpinned by the most influential form of twenty-first century authority: the authority of science. Consequently, the support of experts is continually sought out by other scaremongers – both religious and secular – who want to add some moral authority to their campaigns.

In recent decades, the status of experts has increased exponentially. Experts claim to have insights that ordinary people could never possess. Their views are looked upon as far more important and profound than the public’s. Expert opinion is more than just an opinion: the statement ‘an expert warns…’ now gives great force and influence to a campaigner’s claims. Expert witnesses are, in many ways, the new demonologists: numerous children have been taken away from their parents after expert witnesses claimed to have detected physical signs of abuse. Fortunately, in some cases children have been returned to parents once the courts realised that the expert’s opinion was just that: the opinion of yet another scaremonger. Yet although experts often contradict one another, society finds it difficult to ignore what they have to say.

Their favourite phrase: ‘Research shows…’

Health activists

Health activists often claim to be experts. Under the cover of the authority of science, they continually raise concerns about the public’s physical and emotional wellbeing. They constitute a distinct group of fear entrepreneurs, whose focus is people’s health. They promote messages that prey on people’s existential fears. In recent decades, they have combined their fearmongering with the demand that people adopt a ‘healthy lifestyle’. Indeed, health activists self-consciously use scare tactics – what they call ‘fear appeals’ – to achieve their objectives.

They preach the message that people’s lives are becoming more and more unhealthy, and thus we need to be ever more vigilant in order to avoid becoming diseased. Health activists target every area of our lives – the food we eat, our emotional lives and sex lives, our relationships – with scare stories. Probably of all the scaremongers, health activists have the most direct and immediate impact on how people think and behave.

And they have been extraordinarily successful in ‘diseasing’ everyday life. Bit by bit, they have expanded the meaning of health; they frequently use the term ‘wellness’: we now have ‘well men’s clinics’ and ‘well women’s clinics’. The premise is that being well is not a natural or normal state – instead it is something people need to work on, something to aspire to and achieve with the help of experts and gurus. Health activists insist that, unless you follow their prescribed patterns of behaviour, your risk of becoming ill will increase.

Their favourite expression: ‘A risk to your health.’

Environmentalists

Environmentalism is accorded an enormous amount of respect and authority today; the predictions and warnings of green groups are taken very seriously indeed. Environmentalists are in the forefront of contemporary doom-mongering. Environmentalists influence and shape the language of twenty-first-century fear more than any other group in this list.

Their message is straightforward and devastatingly simple: unless we alter the way we live, the planet will be destroyed. If anything, environmentalists have an apocalyptic vision of the future that is even more alarming than that possessed by religious moral entrepreneurs. Unlike the religious model of the Day of Reckoning, where at least some will be saved, environmentalists offer an apocalypse without redemption.

Their pessimistic visions exercise a fundamentally important influence on Western culture and behaviour today. Environmentalism provides a motif for moral regulation. It not only resembles religion in its proclivity for talking up the coming apocalypse – it also shares religion’s intolerance of heresy. Those who fail to accept its wisdom are denounced as ‘climate change deniers’ and accused of being driven by a malevolent hidden agenda. Anyone who refuses to accept the need to alter their behaviour and ‘go green’ is depicted as greedy and irresponsible. The growth of survivalism and green lifestyles in general is testament to the influence of this group of alarmists.

Environmentalists have made a major contribution to the general language of fearmongering. They don’t just have one or two favourite words to incite fear amongst the public; they have a virtual dictionary of scaremongering. ‘Extinction’, ‘ecological catastrophe’, ‘pollution’, ‘depletion’: these are just some of the terms that are now familiar even to pre-school children.

Their favourite words: There are too many to mention, but they particularly enjoy using the word ‘toxic’ to describe anything they don’t like.

Relationship professionals

The arena of human relationships has become an important site for promoting fear and anxiety. Our relationships have been transformed into a territory that is fraught with danger, and a veritable army of relationship professionals – therapists, counsellors, life coaches, parenting gurus – continually warn us about the perils we face in our private lives.

Relationship professionals tend to frighten people about their connection with members of their community, their neighbours, their lovers or their family members. It is striking that in the twenty-first century, many of the most high-profile, dreaded crimes are associated with inter-personal relationships. Rape, date rape, child abuse, elder abuse, bullying and stalking (both online and offline): these crimes remind us to beware those who are closest to us.

Privacy was once looked upon as a haven in a heartless world. These days, intimacy and family life are often presented as sites of violence, danger and emotional trauma. Warnings about ‘toxic relationships’ and ‘toxic families’ (the T-word is borrowed from environmentalists) promote a sense of fear that is as intense as the fear of terrorism or planetary destruction. Their effect is to distance us from other people. Health warnings about relationships can have a devastating impact on the quality of our personal lives.

Relationship professionals continually remind us not to trust ourselves or those closest to us. They have even tried to turn the desire for affection and love into a form of addiction, coining the term ‘love sickness’ and warning that the intensity of love can be damaging to people’s wellbeing. Books with titles such as Women Who Love Too Much seek to distance people from one another. The idea is that relationships are far too dangerous to be left to amateurs – they need to be negotiated with the help of professionals.

Their favourite diagnosis: ‘You have self-esteem issues.’

Law-and-order moral entrepreneurs

Anxieties about crime and terrorism are widespread in Western societies. Alarmist warnings about personal and community security are regularly made by the media and figures of authority. There are also various advocacy groups that are devoted to raising concern about threats to law and order, such as illegal immigration, paedophilia, rape or gun crime.

Historically, governments and officials have been in the forefront of this kind of scaremongering. Many governments sought to gain the public’s acquiescence by claiming to provide security from various threats, practising what is today called the ‘politics of fear’. Now, raising concerns about law and order is no longer confined to politicians. There are numerous campaigning groups that raise the alarm about issues such as school violence, gun crime, terrorism, immigration, ‘epidemics’ of homophobia, hate crimes. Indeed, law-and-order scaremongers constantly compete with each other, trying to out-scare other fearmongering camps in their attempt to win public support.

Like others in this list, law-and-order scaremongers are always looking for new opportunities, even inventing new crimes. For example, they have systematically recycled offline crimes into online crimes: the construction of ‘cyber-crime’ – such as internet bullying, internet paedophilia, identity theft, fraud, and general internet abuse – is testimony to this group’s success in criminalising the virtual world as well as the real one.

Their favourite incantation: ‘There is an epidemic of crime.’

Fear-market entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs regularly harness the prevailing culture of fear in order to promote their businesses and sell their products. They habitually warn that we face all sorts of dangers to our health, security and wellbeing. In some cases, hazards are fabricated – for example, the idea that tap water is unsafe – leading to a transformation in how people live and behave.

The health and pharmaceutical industry – one of the most profitable sectors of the economy – has been well-served by today’s neverending panics. Food scares have significantly influenced our eating habits. Concerns about global warming have given rise to a new cadre of green entrepreneurs who argue that, unless the entire economy is reorganised around green issues, we will all be doomed. One of the consequences of this flourishing fear market is the growth of competitive claims about what we should be most scared about today.

Fear entrepreneurs are very inventive when it comes to turning minor problems into threats, for which they can helpfully provide a treatment or a product. For example, they can turn a normal personal problem like shyness into a disease, relabelling it ‘social phobia’, warning about its dangerous consequences, and then selling you a drug that can treat it. Worried parents are one of the favourite targets of fear entrepreneurs: they frequently warn parents that unless they purchase one of their safety products, they will bear some of the responsibility for harms that afflict their children.

Their favourite claim: ‘Your safety is our main concern.’

We should note that, although these eight groups are conceptually distinct from one another, their activities and interests often overlap. Health activists are sometimes associated with fear entrepreneurs who sell various products on the market; religious moral entrepreneurs have formed alliances with both environmentalists or therapists working as ‘relationship professionals’. Indeed, despite their diverse interests, the work of these different groups tends to reinforce scaremongering as a whole, as they all contribute to the construction of a climate where promoting fear and anxiety comes to be seen as a legitimate pursuit. And as the performance of fear around the current drama titled ‘Swine Flu Pandemic’ shows, all of these groups are competing for a role in today’s dramatisation of doom.

(1) WHO head indicates full flu pandemic to be declared, Reuters, 4 May 2009

(2) WHO head indicates full flu pandemic to be declared, Reuters, 4 May 2009

(3) Find more information on this course here. 

First published by spiked, 5 May 2009

Be afraid …
Essay of the week: Pig flu, bird flu, global warming, crime ... Why professional panic-mongers are making us terrified.

We could have a grown-up discussion about the outbreak of flu in Mexico which has led to between 150 and 180 deaths and spread to numerous countries across the globe. And we could take comfort from the fact that in almost all cases outside Mexico those infected have been mildly ill and appear to be making a recovery.

But, unfortunately, that is not the discussion we are having. “All of humanity is under threat,” the World Health Organisation warns. “Killer flu arrives in Britain,” a newspaper informs us. We live in a world where just about any outbreak of flu is transformed into a health scare and treated as a precursor of a global pandemic. Typically, a health warning soon turns into a threat alert and once again we are reminded that we live in unusually dangerous times.

It is not hope but fear that excites and shapes the cultural imagination of the early 21st century. Indeed, fear is fast becoming a caricature of itself. It is no longer simply an emotion or a response to the perception of threat. It has become a cultural idiom through which we signal a sense of growing unease about our place in the world. Popular culture continually encourages an expansive alarmist imagination by providing the public with a steady diet of fearful programmes about impending calamities - man-made and natural. Alarmist television programmes about old and impending disasters and films such as The Day After Tomorrow, which transmit the idea that a sudden change in climatic conditions threatens the destruction of the planet, self-consciously erode the line between fact and fiction.

Some experts and health professionals are quite happy to deploy alarmist fiction to promote their cause. Raising awareness through the promotion of fear is frequently justified by zealous crusaders. One climatologist, David Viner, acknowledged that the film The Day After Tomorrow “got a lot of details wrong”. But hey, so what! He argued that anything that “raises awareness about climate change must be a good thing”.

The open advocacy of fear indicates that it has become a cultural metaphor for interpreting and representing the world around us. Indeed, in some circles fear is used as a form of affectation to signify a sensitivity to the many hidden perils facing people. “I am really worried about my child surfing the net,” parents tell one another, as a way of displaying their parental responsibility. To acknowledge fear is to demonstrate awareness. This self-conscious affectation does not mean that people are necessarily more scared than previously. It merely signals the idea that they ought to be.

It is not necessary for our imagination of fear to correspond to our experience of life. Compared with the past, people living in Western societies have less familiarity with pain, debilitating disease and death than ever before. We are far better placed to deal with the outbreak of new disease than was the case in the past. Recent outbreaks of Ebola, Sars and West Nilus virus have been contained with relatively small loss of lives. In 2006, Thailand and Vietnam were able to report that bird flu had been contained, even though they had been at the epicentre of the epidemic a year previously. Yet despite our growing capacity to deal with the problems facing humanity, we are led to believe that we are likely to be overwhelmed by the disasters that loom ahead.

Fear can be a sensible response to the circumstances we face. As individuals, fear often helps us to concentrate the mind when we engage with unexpected and unpredictable circumstances. There are many experiences that we should rightly fear. These are threats that are based on our personal experience. It is reasonable to fear a gang of drunken louts who cross our path or the behaviour of a vindictive employer. However, today, many of the threats that we are instructed to fear are not based on direct experience. They are often shaped by alarmist media accounts of swine flu in Mexico, paedophiles preying on our children or desperate Middle Eastern terrorists plotting our downfall. These are threats that do not emerge out of our immediate personal experience. We can neither fight them nor flee from them. They are about dangers that we can not directly confront but simply experience passively.

The growing divergence of our sensibility of fear from our daily routine indicates that we are not talking about simply an emotional response to our experience. What is at issue is a more general cultural perspective on how we make sense of our lives. One of the principal features of our culture of fear is the belief that humanity is confronted by powerful destructive forces that threaten our existence. With so much at stake, how can responsible people fail to raise the alarm? That is why it has become so easy for television producers to blur the line that used to divide reality from science fiction. That is also why officialdom appears to be in the business of transmitting scare stories to the public. Politicians and officials take the view that if they warn us to be afraid about some impending catastrophe they will protect themselves from the accusation of irresponsibility.

Recently, the White House announced that “there is no need to panic about the outbreak of swine flu”. But when is there ever a need to panic? The very attempt to reassure conveys the assumption that fear is the default state of mind. This sentiment was implicit in a recent report of the Mental Health Foundation, which claimed that more than three-quarters of the UK population believe that the world is more frightening today than 10 years ago. The aim of this well-meaning report was to warn us about the destructive consequence of the promotion of fear (It claims that 15% of us are suffering from so-called anxiety disorders). Unfortunately, its focus on the fearful consequences of fearing reinforces the very outlook the report seeks to tackle.

So why is a relatively prosperous, secure and healthy society afflicted by the myth that it is living through an unprecedented dangerous era? The principal reason for the flourishing of fear-mongering is the relative weakness of a moral code through which society can confidently give meaning to what is right and what is wrong. A moral code helps give meaning to the many compensates for its moral disorientation through embracing health warnings, threat alerts and the rituals of risk management. We no longer tell young teenagers that pre-marital sex is immoral or bad but that it is bad for their health and their emotional wellbeing. Instead of denouncing moral transgressions, fear entrepreneurs are more likely to castigate “risky behaviour”, “unhealthy choices” or “green sins”. And the swine flu outbreak? According to one moral tale, it is a punishment for the evil of factory farming - nature biting back at industrial animal production.

Fear entrepreneurs rarely attempt to spread alarm for its own sake. As in the case of the boy who cried wolf, fear-mongering represents a call for attention. Through raising the alarm, individuals and groups draw attention to their cause and claims in order to influence the public’s behaviour. So public campaigns against obesity often justify their alarmist message on the grounds that it puts pressure on people to change their behaviour. As a result, a public health professional such as Ian Roberts can boast that “the social stigma attached to obesity is one of the few forces slowing the epidemic”. The message is: change the way you live, get on your bike or walk, eat less, cut out meat and you will save yourself and the planet. One environmental researcher claims that “given the crushing burden of obesity on individuals and society, all potential sources of motivation need to be stressed”.

Entrepreneurs regularly harness the prevailing culture of fear to promote their businesses and sell their products. They can sell us digital devices to track the movement of our children, vitamin supplements to prevent them becoming ill, and health insurance to try and ensure that we, and even our pets, are in a position to obtain the relevant help should catastrophe strike. They continually warn that the public faces all kinds of dangers that threaten health, security or wellbeing. In some cases, hazards - such as the supposed unsafety of tap water - are fabricated, leading to a significant transformation in lifestyle and behaviour. The health and pharmaceutical industry - one of the most profitable sectors of the economy - has been well served by the constant outbreaks of health panics. Shares in Roche, which makes anti-flu drug Tamiflu, and GlaxoSmithKline, which makes anti-flu drug Relenza, have seen significant growth over the past few days.

Meanwhile, food scares have significantly influenced our eating habits, and concern with global warming has led to the emergence of a new cadre of green entrepreneurs who argue that unless the entire economy is reorganised, we are doomed. But it is important to note that fear-mongers are principally moral entrepreneurs. Their warnings often convey a message about how people ought to behave in order to avoid consequences that are not only dangerous but also evil. Frequently, through raising concern about problems, they turn physical threats into moral hazards. Through their crusades, physical threats also come to constitute evils. So warnings about climate change quickly metamorphose into calls for a responsible low-carbon lifestyle. Going green, ethical living, vegetarianism or carbon rationing are promoted because they alleviate the threat of a catastrophe and because they represent morally sanctioned forms of behaviour. They also constitute an alternative to “green sins”. This term, initially used tongue-in-cheek, refers to new forms of moral transgressions.

Eating and food has also become a morally charged activity. Consequently, scaremongering about the “epidemic” of child obesity continually shifts from its alarmist propaganda about health consequences to a moral condemnation of slothful behaviour. The traditional sin of sloth has been recycled into a health warning that demands that people alter their behaviour. Obesity serves as an exemplar of 21st-century moral hazard. The main protagonist of this scare is the flabby indolent child whose parents are indifferent to his diet and feed him on a regular diet of junk food.

The massive growth of fear-mongering campaigns and crusades during the past quarter-century is unprecedented. The dramatisation of fear acquires its most extravagant form in relation to the very big catastrophic hazards that apparently threaten the survival of the planet. International terrorism, climate change, influenza type pandemic, the Aids epidemic, over-population and potential for disastrous technological accidents are only a few of the many mega-hazards confronting society.

Health scares targeting children and women have become a flourishing enterprise, and are often linked to anxieties about food or the alleged side-effects of drugs, pollution and new technologies. Personal security constitutes another important subject for fear-mongering. Anxieties about crime, immigration and anti-social behaviour are regularly promoted by law and order advocacy organisations.

Fear promotion even attaches itself to the domain of personal relationships. Parenting has turned into a minefield and children are continually depicted as “at risk”. Powerful warnings about child abuse, peer abuse, bullying, harassment, rape, domestic violence and elder abuse communicate a health warning about the perils of personal relations. Finally, many scares convey a warning about the danger of moral corruption. Possibly the most potent symbol of the threat of moral degradation is the paedophile: a threat which is further amplified through sensationalist accounts about paedophile rings, internet pornography, and other forms of immoral sexual behaviour.

Most of us are far too busy trying to tackle the challenges of day-to-day existence to live our lives, according to the dictates of fear entrepreneurs. Research indicates that what concerns people are the problems of everyday life - jobs, money, the wellbeing and future security of their children. Of the high-profile public panics, crime and perceived threats to children have the gravest impact on our imagination. Most research suggests that there is a discrepancy between how fear is represented, discussed and reported in public and the way it is experienced by individuals.

Our private fears are often about our status - not being taken seriously or respected - and about knowing our place in the world. Nevertheless the dramatisation of fear influences behaviour by encouraging anxiety about the future, along with cynicism and confusion.

Worse still, it incites us to regard ourselves as victims of circumstances beyond our control instead of authors of our destiny. That is why it is so important to rebel against the power of the fear entrepreneurs. Most of the time - as in the case of the current swine flu scare - that means getting on with life. Instead of relying on the experts, we need to cultivate the informal ties that bind us to friends and family, who are the best guarantors of our security.

First published by Sunday Herald, 3 May 2009

Dramatisering van een ziekte
De recente gebeurtenissen rond de Mexicaanse griep tonen dat onze maatschappij wel over de wetenschappelijke kennis beschikt om griepuitbarstingen het hoofd te bieden, maar ziekte nog altijd als een voorbode van de Apocalyps beschouwt.

De wereldwijde angstgolf na de uitbarsting van een dodelijk griepvirus in Mexico is meer een reactie op de dramatisering van de griep dan op de reële dreiging die ze vormt. Een uitbarsting van griep is heel gewoon. Elk jaar overlijden er duizenden mensen aan en in normale omstandigheden is onze maatschappij opgewassen tegen de dreiging. Af en toe breidt een griepuitbarsting zich uit tot een wereldwijde pandemie die vele doden eist. Maar niets bewijst dat de zogenaamde varkensgriep, die tot nu toe vrij weinig levens heeft geëist, een pandemie zal worden. Dit lijkt meer op een medische crisis die in een moreel drama is veranderd.

Hoewel varkensgriep een relatief courant risico van de varkensteelt is, moeten we onthouden dat gezondheidsinspecteurs tot op heden in heel Mexico geen enkel besmet varken hebben gevonden. Waarom spreken we dan van ‘varkensgriep’? Dat komt vooral omdat de vorige griepvariant, die genetisch op de huidige leek, bij varkens werd aangetroffen. Maar het hoeft niet noodzakelijk ‘varkensgriep’ te zijn. De Israëlische onderminister van Volksgezondheid, Yakov Litzman, zegt dat zijn land weigert de ziekte zo te noemen, omdat godsdienstige Joden geen varkensvlees eten. ‘Wij noemen ze Mexicaanse griep’, verklaart hij. Het commentaar toont aan dat de naam en het imago dat wij aan een ziekte geven meer door cultuur dan door wetenschap worden beïnvloed.

De geschiedenis leert ons dat de manier waarop mensen op een crisis reageren bepalend is voor haar impact en betekenis. Mensen ‘ondergaan’ een ramp niet zomaar. Ze reageren op de vreselijke of bedreigende gebeurtenis. Soms passen ze zich aan, leren ze ervan en vinden ze er een betekenis in. Andere keren doet een crisis hen het noorden verliezen en brengt ze hen in verwarring, maar leren ze ermee te leven, soms op een creatieve manier.

In principe beschikken wij over alle vereiste middelen en technische ingrediënten om de Mexicaanse griep te trotseren. Vergeleken met andere tijdperken hebben wij een relatief effectief waarschuwings- en opsporingssysteem dat de overheid in staat stelt om de nodige voorzorgen te nemen. Hoewel er voorlopig geen vaccin tegen deze virusstam bestaat, zijn er antivirale geneesmiddelen die na een besmetting helpen. Maar terwijl onze maatschappij de wetenschap en de technologie bezit om deze jongste griepuitbarsting aan te pakken, lijken haar culturele en morele verweermiddelen zwak en kwetsbaar.

Toen de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie op 27 april 2009 het alarmniveau voor de Mexicaanse griep van niveau 3 naar 4 verhoogde (de schaal gaat tot 6), volgde ze een scenario dat in de eerste jaren van de 21ste eeuw werd opgesteld. Sinds het begin van het millennium heeft de term ‘pandemie’ algemeen ingang gevonden en wordt hij almaar vaker gebruikt voor wereldwijde angsten. ‘Gezondheidsalarmen’ zijn rituelen geworden waarmee handelaren in angst ons er op een bijna religieuze manier aan herinneren dat het uitsterven van de menselijke soort een heel reële mogelijkheid is. Termen als ‘epidemie’ en ‘pandemie’ halen steeds vaker de kranten en worden nu ook in gewone conversaties gebruikt.

Deze neiging om de gevaren op te blazen, leidt tot een situatie waarin paniekzaaiers speculeren over honderdduizenden, miljoenen of zelfs miljarden slachtoffers van de ene of andere crisis of ramp. Zelfs heel prestigieuze tijdschriften en mediakanalen lijken niet bestand tegen de verleiding om alarmistische scenario’s met grote aantallen slachtoffers te verspreiden. Op 5 februari 2004 waarschuwde een hoofdartikel in The New Scientist dat een uitbarsting van vogelgriep, waarvan het virus tussen mensen werd overgebracht, 1,5 miljard levens zou kunnen eisen. De dramatisering van de vogelgriep kreeg pas echt de wind in de zeilen met de waarschuwing van de WGO, in december 2004, dat alle landen hun strategie voor pandemieën moesten herzien.

Zoals een van de studies over de angstcampagnes rond pandemieën opmerkt: ‘Het bewustzijn van pandemieën werd versterkt door het strategische gebruik van wat men ‘paniekcitaten’ zou kunnen noemen in toonaangevende wetenschappelijke tijdschriften en persberichten, verontrustende cijfers, zoals de Hongkong-griep die in 1968 in Groot-Brittannië 30.000 en op wereldschaal meer dan een miljoen mensen doodde, [en] angstaanjagende historische verwijzingen naar bijvoorbeeld de grieppandemieën van 1918 en 1997.’ De auteurs van deze belangrijke studie, Avian Flu: The Creation of Expectations in the Interplay Between Science and the Media, wijzen op de strategie die huidige griepuitbarstingen aan historische rampen koppelt, wat op zijn beurt een paniekklimaat in de hand werkt. In verband met de recente paniek over de dreiging van vogelgriep schrijven ze: ‘De nadruk op pandemieën uit het verleden draagt bij tot de retoriek van de angst, door een voorlopig onbelangrijke uitbarsting een historisch gewicht te geven - zodat iedereen vergeet dat het virus van de vogelgriep slechts een relatief klein aantal mensen heeft gedood, mensen die bovendien direct contact met kippen hadden.’

Gezondheidsverantwoordelijken klinken steeds vaker alsof ze aan het repeteren zijn voor een rol in een rampenfilm. Ze beweren vaak dat we onvermijdelijk heel binnenkort een dodelijke grieppandemie zullen meemaken, aangezien die er in het verleden ook geweest zijn. ‘Elke eeuw krijgt een grote pandemie de wereld in haar greep. Het is onvermijdelijk dat er zich in de toekomst minstens een zal voordoen’, zegt professor Maria Zambon, een virologe die het grieplaboratorium van het Britse Health Protection Agency leidt. Voor alle zekerheid voegt ze eraan toe dat ‘wij nooit volledig voorbereid kunnen zijn op wat de natuur zal doen: de natuur is de ultieme bioterrorist’. De fatalistische visie van een onontkoombare wereldwijde griepramp wordt nog dreigender wanneer men ze aan onze angsten voor het terrorisme koppelt. Hugh Pennington, een vooraanstaande Britse wetenschapper, deed dat toen hij in 2005 de vogelgriep ‘de grootste dreiging voor de menselijke soort’ noemde, een dreiging ‘die veel ernstiger is dan bioterrorisme: dit is natuurterrorisme’.

De dramatisering van de griep heeft onvermijdelijk aanleiding gegeven tot allerlei apocalyptische verhalen over virussen die men als wapens kan gebruiken en die de mensheid in gevaar brengen. Dergelijke verhalen waarschuwen het publiek dat terroristen zouden kunnen proberen ons met vogelgriep te besmetten. Kijk naar de Commission of National Security for the Twenty-First Century van het Institute of Public Policy Research, die in een van haar rapporten speculeerde dat de dreiging van pandemische ziekten, zoals Sars en vogelgriep, voortdurend toeneemt. En dat als gevolg van een gebrekkige voorbereiding ‘een ernstige uitbarsting van een bioterroristisch incident in de volgende 18 maanden de wereldeconomie van een ernstige recessie in een mondiale depressie zou kunnen doen omslaan’. In echte Hollywood-stijl vroeg het rapport ons om ons de mogelijkheid voor te stellen dat een terrorist ‘genen zou kopen om een bestaande, gevaarlijke ziekteverwekker in een meer virulente variant om te zetten’.

Het blijft niet bij angsten over het gebruik van virussen als wapens. Het internet wordt overspoeld door geruchten over de samenzwering die verantwoordelijk zou zijn voor de huidige uitbarsting van varkensgriep. ‘Ik vind het vreemd dat de ziekte in Mexico voor het eerst opdook toen president Obama daar op bezoek was’, schrijft een blogger. En hij vraagt: ‘Zijn er nog mensen die dat verdacht vinden?’ En veel te veel mensen antwoorden: ‘Ja.’ Uiterst-rechtse complotdenkers noemen de varkensgriep ‘de nieuwste bioterroristische aanslag door de Nieuwe Wereldorde’. Linkse kruisvaarders met oog voor complotten geven de Republikeinen in het Amerikaanse Congres de schuld, omdat zij fondsen ‘voor de voorbereiding op pandemieën’ uit het economische stimulusplan van Obama hebben geschrapt. Milieuactivisten stellen de industriële varkensteelt aansprakelijk. Iedereen lijkt zijn eigen versie te hebben van een rampenfilm uit Hollywood, zijn eigen manier om de griep zin te geven.

Het lijkt wel of de uitbarsting van varkensgriep onze verbeelding heeft besmet en onze dagelijkse angsten vorm geeft en concreet maakt. We zouden de varkens beter laten rusten en verder gaan met ons leven.

First published by De Standaard, 2 May 2009

Swine flu and the dramatisation of disease
Recent events show that, while society has the scientific know-how to cope with outbreaks of flu, it still sees disease as a harbinger of apocalypse.

The explosion of global fear about the outbreak of a deathly flu virus in Mexico is more a response to the dramatisation of influenza than to the actual threat it poses.

There is nothing unusual about the outbreak of flu. Every year, thousands of people die from the flu, and, in normal conditions, society has learned to cope with the flu threat. From time to time, an outbreak of flu turns into a global pandemic, leading to a catastrophic loss of life. However, there is no evidence that the so-called swine flu, which has so far claimed a relatively small number of lives, will turn into a pandemic. Rather, what we are faced with is a health crisis that has been transformed into a moral drama.

Although swine flu is a relatively common hazard of pig-farming, it is worth noting that, so far, health inspectors have not found infected pigs anywhere in Mexico. So why call it ‘swine flu’? The main reason is that the last strain of flu that genetically resembled this one was found among swine. But it does not have to be called ‘swine flu’. The Israeli deputy health minister, Yakov Litzman, says his country will refuse to call the disease by that name because religious Jews do not eat pork. ‘We will call it Mexico flu’, he said. What Litzman’s comments demonstrate is that the name, and image, we give to a disease is principally influenced by culture rather than science.

History shows that how people respond to a crisis determines the impact and the meaning of that crisis. People do not simply ‘suffer a disaster’. They engage with the terrible or threatening event, sometimes adapting to it and sometimes drawing lessons and meaning from it; at other times they can be disoriented and confused by a crisis, but they often learn to reorganise their lives around it, sometimes in a creative way.

In principle, we have all the resources and technical ingredients we need to deal with swine flu. Compared with previous eras, we have a relatively effective warning and tracking system that allows the authorities to take the necessary precautions. Although at present there is no vaccine available to prevent this strain of flu, there are anti-flu drugs that have been shown to work once the virus has been contracted. However, although society has the science and technology to cope with this latest outbreak of flu, its cultural and moral coping mechanisms appear feeble and exposed.

When, on 27 April 2009, the World Health Organisation’s emergency committee raised the pandemic threat level for swine flu from level three to level four (out of a possible six), it was acting on a script that was cobbled together in the early years of the twenty-first century. Since the turn of the new millennium, the term ‘pandemic’ has become normalised and is increasingly used to frame global anxieties and fears. ‘Health alerts’ have been transformed into rituals, through which fear entrepreneurs remind us, in a quasi-religious fashion, that human extinction is a very real possibility. Terms like ‘epidemic’ and ‘pandemic’ appear with increasing frequency in newspapers, and are now used in everyday conversation, too.

This tendency to inflate the dangers that we face leads to a situation where fearmongers now speculate about hundreds of thousands, millions or even billions of casualties occurring as a result of some crisis or disaster. Even highly prestigious journals and media outlets seem incapable of resisting the temptation to spread alarmist high-casualty scenarios. On 5 February 2004, an editorial in the New Scientist warned that a bird flu outbreak, in which the virus was transmitted between people, could kill 1.5billion people. The dramatisation of bird flu really took off with the WHO announcement in December 2004, which exhorted all nations to overhaul their pandemic strategies.

As one study of the campaign of fear around pandemics noted: ‘The heightening of pandemic awareness was achieved through the strategic use of what one can call “scare quotes” in leading scientific journals and press releases, scare statistics, such as the 1968 Hong Kong pandemic which killed 30,000 Britons and over one million people worldwide, [and] scare historical references, such as the flu pandemics of 1918 and 1997.’ (1) In this important study, titled ‘Avian Flu: The Creation of Expectations in the Interplay Between Science and the Media’, the authors drew attention to the strategy of linking current outbreaks of the flu to historic catastrophes, which in turn fostered a climate of panic. In relation to the recent panic about the threat of avian flu, they noted that ‘the shift of emphasis to past pandemics contributes to the rhetoric of fear by imbuing the as-yet minor flu outbreak with historical significance, which obscures the fact that the current strain of avian flu has, as yet, killed only a relatively small number of people who had direct contact with poultry’ (2).

Increasingly, public health officials sound as if they are rehearsing their roles for a disaster movie. They frequently argue that, since we had deathly flu pandemics in the past, it is inevitable that we will face another one very soon. ‘Major pandemics sweep the world every century, and it is inevitable that at least one will occur in the future’, said Professor Maria Zambon, a virologist and head of Britain’s Health Protection Agency’s influenza laboratory. For good measure, she added that ‘we can never be completely prepared for what nature will do: nature is the ultimate bioterrorist’ (3). The fatalistic view of an inevitable global flu catastrophe is made more ominous still by linking it with our anxieties about terrorism. Leading British scientist Hugh Pennington also made this link, when he stated in 2005 that avian flu ‘is the biggest threat to the human race’ and it ‘far outweighs bioterrorism; this is natural terrorism’ (4).

Inevitably, the dramatisation of the flu has spawned various apocalyptic stories about how viruses can be ‘weaponised’ and used to threaten human survival. Such stories warn the public that terrorists might try to infect our nations with bird flu. Consider the Institute of Public Policy Research’s Commission of National Security for the Twenty-First Century: one of its reports speculated that the threat from pandemic diseases such as SARS and avian flu is growing all the time, and because of inadequate preparation ‘a serious disease outbreak or bio-terrorism incident in the next 18 months could tip the global economy from serious recession into global depression’. In line with Hollywood fantasy plotlines, the report invited us to imagine the possibility of a terrorist purchasing ‘genes for use in the engineering of an existing and dangerous pathogen into a more virulent strain’ (5).

Alongside fears about the ‘weaponisation’ of viruses, the internet is awash with rumours about the conspiracy responsible for the current outbreak of swine flu. ‘I find it odd that this recent outbreak of swine flu first appeared in Mexico about the time President Obama was visiting there’, writes one blogger, before asking: ‘Does anyone else find that suspicious?’ And far too many people are replying: ‘Yes.’ Far-right conspiracy theorists describe swine flu as the ‘latest bioterrorism attack by the New World Order’. Left-wing conspiratorial-minded crusaders, meanwhile, blame the Republicans in US Congress for cutting ‘pandemic preparedness’ funds out of Obama’s economic stimulus package. Environmental campaigners point the finger of blame at the big corporations that factory-farm pigs. Everyone seems to have their own version of a Hollywood disaster film, through which they can make sense of the outbreak of flu.

It seems the swine flu outbreak has infected our imaginations, giving shape and tangibility to our anxieties about everyday life. We should give the pigs a rest, and get on with living.

(1) Nerlich, B. and Halliday, C. (2007) ‘Avian Flu: the creation of expectations in the interplay between science and the media’, Sociology of Health and Illness, vol.29, no.1, p.54.

(2) Nerlich, B. and Halliday, C. (2007) ‘Avian Flu: the creation of expectations in the interplay between science and the media’, Sociology of Health and Illness, vol.29, no.1, p.561

(3) Cited in What a way to go, Guardian, 14 April 2005.

(4) Daily Express, 4 March 2005

(5) Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, IPPR (accessed 1 December 2008)

First published by spiked, 28 April 2009

Alistair Darling’s make-believe Budget
Even by New Labour standards, yesterday’s Budget was an unusually disturbing attempt by our leaders to evade economic responsibility.

The only resemblance that yesterday’s annual UK Budget had to previous Budgets was the tattered red briefcase that Chancellor Alistair Darling held up for his photo-shoot.

Since the first red case was made for Gladstone in the 1860s, Budget Day has been an important fixture in the British political calendar. Yes, it always had something of a ritualistic quality about it, but in most cases it was a ritual that really mattered. That was then.

With one fell swoop, Darling has succeeded in turning this annual ritual inside out. He denuded Budget Day of any meaning as he went through the motions of make-believe Budget-making. Some commentators have described it as a ‘fantasy Budget’. In the sense that fantasy involves a flight of fancy unrestrained by reality, they are right. But in the sense of fantasy involving some imaginative thinking, describing Darling’s Budget in this way gives the term fantasy a bad name.

Even by the low standards of contemporary public life, the Budget was an unusually disturbing example of responsibility evasion. It is based on calculations and projections that were cobbled together to avoid facing reality. Darling’s prediction of a recovery in economic growth of 1.25 per cent next year, along with his assessment of the scale of Britain’s economic decline, lacked plausibility.

He wasn’t so much making predictions as making a plea – a plea to avoid having to face up to the difficult challenges that lie ahead. Like the flustered child caught red-handed, Darling’s message to the public is: ‘It wasn’t me!’

Up to a point, Darling has successfully got sections of the political class and the media to buy into his fantasy document. For example, many have interpreted the new 50 per cent upper tax rate – for those who earn over £150,000 – as a significant political development. According to the Guardian, it represents a ‘return to class politics’. The Daily Telegraph described it as ‘class war’.

In truth, this populist gesture of ‘taxing the rich’ is simply a feeble attempt to hold on to Labour’s disintegrating core vote. As everyone knows, or at least should know, the 50 per cent upper tax rate has only a symbolic significance. It will make little difference to the public purse. Nor will it have a significant material impact on the wealthy, who already are quite formidably skilled in the art of tax avoidance. All that this new tax shows is that, in Darling’s Budget, the desire to score a good Public Relations hit overrides any commitment to sound economic thinking.

The debate around the Budget indicates that Britain is not yet in a position to have a serious discussion about the current economic crisis. Why don’t we admit that there will be no real recovery next year, or that unemployment might rise higher than three million? The Budget discussion also shows that the current generation of political leaders have little experience of policymaking during times of economic crisis. Sadly, far too much of the discussion has been focused on the question of when the economy is likely to recover and by how much. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that many policymakers are fatalistically searching for those elusive green shoots and waiting for the recovery to put everything right.

This sentiment is based on the hope that economic recovery will spare the government from having to make some very difficult and potentially unpopular decisions in the here and now. It is this sentiment – this policy-lite, responsibility-evading desire to put off the serious discussion and the serious decision-making – that encouraged Darling to come up with a Budget-in-waiting rather than the real thing. 

First published by spiked, 23 April 2009

A caricature of a riot
Yesterday’s protest of poseurs against bankers confirmed that anti-capitalism itself has become an empty brand, like KFC or FCUK.

Yesterday’s anti-capitalist protest in London was a half-hearted ritual of pretend-rage and pseudo-concern. ‘Concerned of Tunbridge Wells’ was elbowed aside by ‘Angry of Brighton’ in a shallow display of second-hand militancy.

What was really striking about the G20-related demonstrations against ‘capitalism and climate chaos’ – which took place outside the Bank of England and elsewhere in London – was the extent to which the opportunistic coalition of protesting moral crusaders represented a going-through-the-motions activism; they weren’t so much representing a cause as searching for one.

Predictably, the authorities faithfully played their part in this melodrama. Exuding a profound sense of insecurity, they responded to the challenge posed by a relatively small number of demonstrators as if the protests called into question the integrity of the British state. As for the media, they were committed to providing a photo opportunity for the gritty demonstrators, who were keen to pose for the cameras as a way of advertising their sense of injustice about all the unjust stuff going on the world.

This was the kind of event that gives protest a bad name; it was a testimony to the aimless sensibilities that dominate the so-called anti-capitalist movement. True radicalism still awaits some twenty-first century content.

I am continually surprised by how often I am asked about the impending rioting and unrest that is likely to sweep across Europe. Such questions are motivated by a powerful sense of unease about the potential for social disintegration and collapse in the post-recession world.

A noisy demonstration or riot in Athens or Paris is often interpreted as the precursor to more ominous dangers to come. Officials and their expert advisers have, it seems, become wedded to worst-case scenario thinking. And officialdom feels little inhibition in displaying its crisis of nerves in public, and thus inadvertently normalising the idea that violence is the natural response of people to uncertain times.

That is why the big news story in the run-up to the G20 summit in London, which starts properly today, was the palpable sense of official insecurity surrounding it. Police and politicians continually insisted that they would not ‘take any chances’; their press releases and off-the-record communications looked like a new species of top-down rumour-mongering about the threat of mass rioting on the streets of England.

As one might expect, elite anxieties were swiftly recycled into sensationalist newspaper headlines warning people about impending riots. ‘Anarchist fears over Put People First march’ screamed one broadsheet in relation to last Saturday’s protest in London. In the event, predictions of a monster demonstration of hardened protesters were misplaced: Saturday’s demo was quite modestly sized, with head-counts ranging from 10,000 to 35,000.

Yes, one man was arrested for being drunk and disorderly – but that get-together, a precursor to yesterday’s protests, was an otherwise unremarkable, low-energy, confused event.

Yet the scare stories continued to circulate, and bankers were advised yesterday to dress down and wear ordinary street clothes, or better still to work from home, lest they became victims of the predicted ‘anarchist mob’. No such thing occurred. Even officialdom’s obsessive talking-up of a likely siege of London could not motivate many recruits for a reality TV-style protest against capitalism – a ‘reality riot’, perhaps.

One day, what is effectively a top-down invitation to riot – the advertisement of officialdom’s fears and the treatment of violence as a normal reaction to recession – is likely to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not yet.

For the time being, anti-capitalist protest looks very much like a lifestyle affectation. It has an inherently unstable character, which can one day target a rich, high-profile banker and a week later take strong exception to the building of a power station. In many respects, this form of lifestyle protest represents the mirror image of the consumerism that it so despises. Anti-capitalism has become a brand with about as much content as KFC or FCUK. This is about playing at protest.

The demonstrators were not simply demonstrating; they were posing for the cameras, and often for their own cameras. Seeing all those activists taking pictures of themselves with their mobile phones indicated to me that the line between voyeurism and protest has become ambiguous. ‘Been there, done that, smashed a window and got the picture’ – that is the attitude of the voyeur-protester. After yesterday’s protests, you can understand why, these days, instead of offering assistance some people respond to a physical fight outside a bar by compulsively recording it on their mobile phones.

Of course, there is a great deal to protest about today. But before the honourable tradition of direct action can be rehabilitated, we need some clarity about the nature of the current global crisis. That requires reflection and debate, rather than the rituals of ignorance that go under the name of ‘protest’.

First published by spiked, 2 April 2009

Stop this banker bashing
Since the credit crunch, the greedy banker has been transformed into a personification of evil.

The big news surrounding preparations for the G20 summit in London is the palpable sense of insecurity that surrounds it. Officials insist they are not taking any chances. Their press releases and off-the-record communications come across as a new species of top-down rumour mongering about the threat of mass rioting on the streets of England.

As expected, elite anxieties have been swiftly recycled into sensationalist headlines that warn people about impending riots. “Anarchist fears over Put People First march” was one broadsheet’s headline about last Saturday’s protest march in London. In the event, despite predictions of a monster demonstration by hardened protesters, it turned out to be a relatively modest march of up to 35,000 people. One man was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, but this was an otherwise unremarkably low-energy and confused event.

Yet the scare stories continue to circulate, and bankers have been advised they should dress down and wear ordinary street clothes or, better still, work from home. The obsessive talking-up of a likely siege of London may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But such an occurrence is more likely to be a response to a top-down invitation to riot than to a widespread public appetite for violent protest.

The issuing of a semi-conscious invitation to riot follows a now well-rehearsed script of inciting anger at a coterie of guilty bankers and financiers. Since the credit crunch, the greedy banker has been transformed into a personification of evil. In his Christmas sermon the Archbishop of York laid into the exploitative moneylenders who pursued “ruthless gain” and warned banks not to “enrich themselves at their poor neighbours’ expense”. Government ministers have been quick to jump on the anti-moneylender bandwagon.

Last year, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said banks that offered high financial incentives to executives would be targeted as part of a broader campaign against “extreme capitalism”. In February, Spain’s Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian said “the Government is losing its patience with the banks”. Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was more specific: he attacked “white, blue-eyed” bankers. When pressed on his racial categorisation, he said: “I am not acquainted with a single black banker.” Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown also let it be known that he is no friend of the bankers. He told a group of Wall Street financiers that bankers had operated outside normal human values and principle, and suggested that values such as “honesty, integrity and working hard” may have been absent from the world of finance.

The moral condemnation of bankers often serves as a prelude for demanding some form of punishment.

The normally staid British Liberal Democrat Vincent Cable commented that bankers are “lucky the British have no guillotines in stock” as he compared the behaviour of “Britain’s financial aristocracy” with Marie Antoinette’s haughty attitude towards the people of Paris.

The cumulative effect of such irresponsible remarks is to foster a climate of populist rage against bankers.

After the home of former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Fred Goodwin was vandalised, some of his neighbours appeared to be indifferent to his plight. “He got what he deserved” was a widely repeated sentiment. The recent call by a publicity-seeking academic to hang effigies of people such as Goodwin from lampposts captures the dissolute mood of moral disorientation that drives this witch-hunt. The venomous bile directed at Sue Morphet after the announcement that jobs in her company would be relocated from Australia to China is not fuelled only by frustration at the grassroots. These are sentiments influenced by the pronouncements of an elite desperate to avoid the criticism of the public.

Not so long ago, name-and-shame campaigns preyed on the public’s exaggerated fears of pedophiles. In many instances such campaigns succeeded in provoking groups of anxious parents into organising vigilante groups. We do not yet have mobs witch-hunting money lenders, but the idea that it is OK to hate and despise them has gained widespread currency.

Unfortunately this new crusade is potentially more destabilising than the previous one targeting child molesters. The target today may be the banker, but tomorrow it will be the successful business executive with an unusually high bonus. A week later it will be the sports superstar. And before too long, anyone enjoying public success will become the object of envy.

Implicitly, the stigmatising of the moneylender or the high-earning executive represents the condemnation of success. The official sanctioning of such attitudes represents not only an invitation to riot but to channel people’s understandable anxieties about their future against the 21st century’s new folk devils. Who needs professional agitators when those on top encourages a simplistic blame-seeking culture among the public? 

First published by The Australian, 1 April 2009

Tegenlicht - Hoogvliegen in laagland
Rob Wijnberg in gesprek met Frank Furedi, Brits socioloog en auteur van o.a. het spraakmakende boek Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?.

In deze laatste uitzending rond het thema “Excellence” gaan wij met een aantal experts op zoek naar antwoorden op de meest prangende vragen met betrekking tot onderwijs. Wat is er nodig voor een betere talentontwikkeling in Nederland en hoe kan dat samen gaan met meer diversiteit?

Met Frank Furedi analyseren we in bredere zin zijn maatschappijkritiek dat streven naar waarheid, het stellen van intellectuele en morele normen en het uitdagen van mensen (versus ‘gewoon gelukkig zijn zoals het is’) uit de gratie is geraakt. Vervolgens spitst zijn analyse zich toe op het onderwijs en wat daar volgens hem mee mis is. Maar Furedi is vooral interessant omdat zijn kritiek vooral ook een totale kritiek op de postmoderniteit is: slachtoffercultuur, anti-intellectualisme, kinderen niet durven uitdagen.

Robbert Dijkgraaf wijt een belangrijk deel van de problemen van het Nederlandse onderwijs aan het conservatisme van de academische en bestuurlijke elite in Nederland. Hoe bereiken we dat het Nederlandse hoger onderwijs een afspiegeling wordt van de samenleving en niet langer een witte aangelegenheid is? In Nederland lijkt het vocabulaire en de wil om hierin verandering te brengen te ontbreken. De algemene opvatting is dat, als je niet doordringt tot het hoger onderwijs, je gewoon niet goed genoeg bent. Wat zijn de gevolgen? Het Amsterdam University College mag geen prestigieus “white college” worden in een halfzwarte stad. Wat moet er dan volgens Dijkgraaf anders?

Met John Moravec gooien we alles over een andere boeg. Furedi en Dijkgraaf zijn namelijk, zo zou je kunnen zeggen, hopeloos ouderwets in hun systeemdenken: het onderwijs gaat al lang niet meer om het vergaren van kennis of het verwerven van macht. Macht is immers steeds meer gefragmenteerd: ieder zijn eigen waarheid/Google/Wikipedia. Is een elite dan nog wel nodig? Waarom excelleren als je alles al hebt? Waarom kennis vergaren als alles open source is? De postmoderne mens - en dus ook de jongere - heeft talloze identiteiten; waarom zou het onderwijs ze in een keurslijf moeten duwen?

De interviews worden gedaan door Rob Wijnberg, schrijver, gespreksleider en journalist bij NRC Next. De hoofdvraag die aan de interviews ten grondslag ligt is steeds de volgende: Waar is onderwijs eigenlijk voor bedoeld?
Om kinderen:
- zo hoog mogelijk te laten presteren (economisch)
- zo gelukkig mogelijk te laten worden (persoonlijk)
- zoveel mogelijk aan de samenleving te laten bijdragen (burgerschap).

First published by VPRO, 27 March 2009

After Jade, whose death will we watch next?
The salacious reports of Jade Goody’s physical demise confirm that death is the new sex: a form of voyeuristic entertainment.

This was never about Jade Goody, this spectacle of death we have witnessed over the past few weeks. This was about a society that takes a morbid pleasure – even meaning – from watching the slow unfolding of human fragility and demise.

Some have seen the macabre rituals of Goody’s death, which were transmitted into people’s living rooms through their TVs and newspapers, as the continuation of the mourning sickness that assumed such a dramatic and feverish intensity at the time of Princess Diana’s death in 1997. The actor Stephen Fry characterised Jade, a reality TV star who succumbed to cervical cancer on Sunday, as ‘a kind of Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks’.

It is true that, outwardly, some of the themes of Diana’s life and death have made a comeback. The mawkish moralisation of victimhood, for example. As with Diana, we are continually told in relation to Jade Goody that suffering made her a ‘better person’. In the cases of both Diana and Jade, it is not what they did but what has been done to them that makes up their moral claims for sympathy and public attention.

Also today, as before, sections of the public respond to a celebrity’s death with a rather sad enthusiasm to be part of the drama. Both in 1997 and today, politicians, church leaders and commentators have informed us that, through our common grief, society might rediscover its soul. ‘Remarkably, in mourning a reality TV star, Britain may find itself reflecting on ideas of life and love’, speculated one Guardian commentator (1).

However, as a social phenomenon, the response to Jade Goody’s death has not simply been a rerun of earlier displays of public mourning. What marked out the public response to Diana’s death was the rise of an intensely public and emotional form of mourning. In the case of Goody, there has been a kind of premature ritual of pseudo-mourning. More importantly, however, the decisive thing today is the compulsive watching of a person’s physical demise.

For some time now, it has been clear that the imperative driving the rise of reality TV is a desire to transform the most intimate and painful aspects of human experience into a form of entertainment. For a while, sex and displays of pseudo-intimacy provided a steady diet of entertainment. Personal troubles – illness, dysfunctional relationships, addictions, parenting problems – have also become compelling viewing in a society confused about the distinction between public and private. It was only a matter of time before death became the new sex.

In the brave new world of reality TV, nothing can be left unviewed. The cultivation of a voyeuristic media culture has unleashed a race for exposing intimate moments, including that rarest form of intimacy today: acts that are still private. The death of Jade Goody is really the last instalment of a reality drama that started with her appearance on Big Brother in 2002.

It is tempting, but futile, to blame reality TV and the tabloids for the transformation of a personal tragedy into a public spectacle. I for one was stunned when, four days before Goody’s death, I saw an advert for a ‘tribute’ issue of OK! magazine marking Goody’s death and containing her ‘final words’ and ‘final pictures’. It seemed as if some sections of the media could not wait for Jade to die. This morbid phenomenon of a pre-death obituary reveals just how much the media was going through the motions of faux-grief. However, there is little point in simply blaming the media, when there were so many public figures that were all too willing to be part of this seedy drama.

The great and the good were also keen to play a part in the national reality show. However, when you analyse what they actually had to say, the contrived and disoriented character of this episode of public mourning became all too clear. There was no Tony Blair to describe Jade as ‘the people’s princess’. The tributes to Jade come across as singularly formulaic, even incoherent. Probably the most revealing comment came from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who noted that he was ‘very interested’ in the public’s response to Goody’s death. According to Williams, the publicity surrounding her demise ‘was used not to aggrandise her but to tell people what mattered to her and say something about the values she tried to live with at the end of her life’. But what were these values? The very posing of this question highlights the futility of endowing the final episode of a reality TV drama with moral meaning.

Inevitably, there have been attempts to frame the media’s addiction to Goody’s story as a service to the public. In recent weeks, we’ve been told that in making her demise public, the media is helping you and I gain insight into the meaning of death. Such self-serving claims echo past attempts to justify the publication of pornographic material on the ground that it helps voyeurs understand the secrets of the human body. Others have argued that the publicity surrounding Goody’s fatal illness will encourage thousands of women to seek advice on how to prevent cervical cancer. In fact, inciting young women to contact health professionals about their risk of contracting this disease will only put an unnecessary burden on the screening service.

In a fundamental sense, the response to Jade Goody’s death raises uncomfortable questions about how contemporary culture encourages those who suffer to gain meaning from their experiences. The media continually depicts personal tragedies as morality plays, where a victim’s loss is endowed with special significance. Thus whenever a tragedy strikes, a member of one of the families affected will invariably tell the TV cameras that they hope their loved ones have not died in vain. A tragic death is swiftly transformed into a cause; a charity might be set up to make sure that others learn the ‘lessons’ of the tragedy. In this way, death – which has no intrinsic meaning to those who have no direct link with the person who has passed – is given moral significance by being turned into a ‘lesson to others’. There is something desperate in this project of endowing the public’s response to Goody’s death with moral purpose. The collective act of watching someone die does not create the foundations for new forms of moral solidarity; it may simply whet the appetite for a repeat performance.

1) The curious legacy of Jade, Libby Brooks, Guardian, 23 March 2009

First published by spiked, 23 March 2009

Energising the debate about climate change
Energise! eschews the misanthropic green ideology of restraint and explains how human action can solve a human-made problem.

I must admit that I find the debate on climate change confused and confusing. This is partly due to the complexity of the science, and the problems associated with making stringent and confident claims about likely outcomes in the future, as environmentalists frequently do.

However, what really concerns me is the politicisation of the science of climate change, and the way in which the alleged problems facing the planet are discussed in the language of ideological diktat. I am particularly concerned at the way in which the threats posed by climate change are re-framed as moral punishments for our sinful behaviour. Increasingly, proposals for tackling the problem of climate change are underpinned by a tendency towards behaviour management. The idea that the planet ‘demands’ that we change the way we live, the idea that we must alter our behaviour in order to ‘save the world’, is now put forward with dogmatic fervour and moral force.

I have no problem with rejecting the numerous rituals that have sprung up in our era of environmental correctness. It is clear to me that, from the point of view of the environment, recycling is a pointless exercise; but then, its real aim, in the language of green-leaning moral entrepreneurs, is ‘to send a message’. By taking up the act of recycling, even though it is worthless, people become more conscious, apparently, of their wasteful habits and the fragility of the planet.

Other ways of ‘sending messages’ to the public include pressuring them to stop using disposable nappies on their children, discouraging the use of plastic bottles and bags, telling people they should turn vegetarian, and getting us all to turn off the lights, stop using our cars and stop having so many children. You don’t need a PhD in climate science to know that these gestures and strictures have only a symbolic significance. They provide proof of moral rectitude, proof of conformity; they are the normal forms of behaviour expected of ‘aware’ individuals at a time of environmental crisis.

However, while it is easy to reject the moralising imperative of climate change campaigning, it is not so easy to know what to make of the scientific claims that go alongside it, or ‘The Science’ as many refer to it. I have abstained from taking sides on the scientific issues, hoping that one day I would come across a convincing account that I could understand and accept. That is why I am so delighted about the publication of Energise! by James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky.

Woudhuysen and Kaplinsky, a researcher and scientist respectively, provide an authoritative overview of the scientific and political discussion that is accessible both to the specialist and the layman. They argue that human activity has had a significant impact on climate. However, while they believe that climate changes are related to human action, they are fervently opposed to the demand that we restrain people’s consumption or modify people’s behaviour. One reason why they are opposed to the anti-consumerist rhetoric of green ideologues is because people’s personal consumption habits account for only a small amount of total CO2 emissions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, how people behave and consume has a relatively insignificant impact on the situation.

In contrast to the prevailing pessimistic stories about humanity’s dirty and destructive impact on the environment, Energise! argues against turning a problem into a crisis. It takes the sensible view that problems created by humans are also susceptible to human solutions. Woudhuysen and Kaplinsky argue that ‘human activity has unintentionally had an enormous effect on climate’, and then say: ‘Now it’s time to uphold what intentional action can do.’ In other words, the effects of unintentional acts of impact can be contained; indeed, the world can be made a better place through self-consciously tackling the problems we are faced with.

At a time when people are continually told to reorganise their lives around the narrow-minded principles of environmental correctness, we need to be reminded every now and then that the human species is, on balance, a creative, innovative and adaptable force. Woudhuysen and Kaplinsky write that ‘the human origin of climate change’ should give rise to optimism, not breast-beating. From their viewpoint, mistakes made in the past provide us with an opportunity – an opportunity both to deal with the unintentional consequences, and to progress further in terms of economic and cultural development.

The proper way to deal with unintentional harm caused by humans is to devote resources to scientific experimentation, in order to develop new energy sources, and to innovate more efficient and productive technologies. The authors are much more worried about how we might expand the world’s energy supplies than they are with the phenomenon of climate change. They take the view that, through technological innovation, humanity might gain access to a vast reservoir of energy. Through harnessing old and new sources of energy, it will be possible for us to cut down on CO2 emissions and thus minimise the destructive potential of climate change.

The most exciting sections of the book contain proposals for innovation and investment strategies that could help deal with the problem of climate change. Instead of advocating the reduction of carbon-use, the authors argue that CO2 can be controlled through a ‘variety of industrial recycling techniques’ that might help to establish a New Carbon Infrastructure. They argue that through managing CO2 carefully, there is no reason why our society should deny itself the remaining benefits of fossil fuels. However, the long-term solution to humans’ unintentional impact on climate lies in making serious investments in the development of renewable energy, argue Woudhuysen and Kaplinsky. They believe that in the next two decades there will be significant developments in the area of wind energy, solar energy, geothermal energy, and in the harnessing of hydroelectricity and wave and tidal power. Their book is really a plea for an economic and technological programme that is not merely a survival strategy. Rather, the development of energy needs to be integrated into other innovations that allow for more efficient forms of production. Such innovation is necessary, not only to deal with climate change, but also to produce a great deal more inexpensive energy in order that more people can enjoy the fruits of modern society.

Most anti-crisis measures tend to be reactive and focused on a specific problem. Yet even in the most uncertain circumstances, there are always opportunities for economic and cultural development, too. Every problem contains within it the seed of its own cure, and Energise! represents a call for an opportunity-led, rather than vulnerability-led, response to our current predicament. Unlike green ideology, which preaches the dogma of restraint, Energise! focuses on the potential for developing the power of humanity to, as the authors put it, ‘humanise the planet’. This book is packed with useful information about the state of the world’s energy sources and supply. It provides useful insights into some likely trends of the future. It is an excellent manual for the humanist futurologist, and will no doubt contribute to raising the level of debate on humanity’s relationship with the planet.

Energise!, by James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky is published by Beautiful Books Limited. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

This article is republished from the February 2009 issue of the spiked review of books.

First published by spiked, 20 March 2009

A quack’s way to build the recovery
The government plan to offer recession therapy just makes victims of us.

The global economic crisis represents a challenge. Unfortunately, governments often appear to be prisoners of their own insecurity: instead of inspiring or reassuring, they end up exacerbating a climate of fear and uncertainty. So it is with the recession.

The government’s announcement that it will offer psychological support to people concerned about their economic future is a textbook example of how to make a drama out of a crisis. New Labour clearly looks upon people’s existential anxieties – about unemployment, poverty and family fallout – as a potential mental health emergency. It plans to train 3,600 therapists and hundreds of specialist staff and set up psychotherapy centres to deal with what it sees as a growing army of mentally ill people. This institutionalisation of “recession therapy” is based on the assumption that the economic crisis will lead to an epidemic of depression and stress.

The principal effect of all this will be to normalise the idea that people facing hard times can become mentally ill. Consider a recent example: over the past decade, experts and therapists have tended to represent the transition from primary school to secondary school as a traumatic event for children. Instead of discussing children’s arrival at “big school” as an exciting experience, experts now offer transitional counselling for what was, for decades, regarded as a normal and banal aspect of young people’s lives.

Transitional counselling, like many forms of therapy, has a habit of turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once children pick up on the idea that going to secondary school is a traumatic experience, many of them start to interpret their normal anxieties and insecurities through the idiom of psychology. One symptom of this malaise is a rising number of referrals for a recently invented condition: “school phobia”. There is little doubt that policies seeking to “psychologise” people’s response to the economic crisis will have a similar outcome.

The capacity of people, and the community they live in, to deal with a crisis depends on their ability to comprehend and make sense of it. Sadly, 21st-century western societies have fallen into the habit of discussing the global economy in highly individualised and psychological terms. We are told the credit crunch was precipitated by a crisis of “confidence” or caused by individual greed. According to the prevailing fatalistic viewpoint, most of us are “victims”. As in a Hollywood disaster flick, people are assigned the role of powerless, passive individuals, whose state of mind is defined by their sense of vulnerability.

We have come a long way since the early 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s government launched a programme of counselling for those who were about to lose their jobs. Then, many commentators identified these therapy schemes as a cynical attempt to contain and defuse the reactions of the unemployed: critics accused the government of being more devoted to helping the jobless to “cope” with their predicament than with creating new jobs and pointed out that the unemployed were not interested in their help.

That was then. Today, therapeutic intervention is endorsed by everyone from the powers-that-be to the trade union movement and anti-capitalist protesters. The institutionalisation of counselling is underpinned by an intensely pessimistic view of how people behave during times of adversity. They are assumed to lack resilience and the capacity to cope and therefore need professional support.

In recent times, critics of capitalism have condemned the free market on the basis of its alleged mental health impact. This therapeutic critique of capitalism has been implicitly accepted by policy makers, who assume there is a causal relationship between an economic depression and a crisis of mental health.

The government’s therapeutic intervention redefines a crisis of society as a crisis of personal deficits and powerlessness. Instead of offering clarity and a sense of meaning with which we might approach the crisis, the government provides individuals with dubious therapeutic techniques.

What we need is a totally different approach, one that regards people as problem solvers rather than as potential mental health patients. Experience shows that communities can deal with economic insecurity and hardship if they are provided with a sense of purpose about what should be done. People don’t need counselling but, rather, opportunities for rebuilding their lives. Instead of encouraging the public to look to therapists for help, our political leaders should foster a climate that supports individuals and communities who are committed to helping themselves.

First published by Sunday Times, 15 March 2009

Diseasing the recession
The UK government’s offer of free therapy to victims of the slump turns a socioeconomic crisis into a mental health issue.

The global economic crisis represents a major challenge to society. It is a test of political and economic leadership, and it provides an opportunity for society to demonstrate its capacity to adapt and to innovate.

Unfortunately, however, governments often appear to be prisoners of their own insecurity. And instead of inspiring or reassuring their publics, they often end up exacerbating the contemporary climate of fear and uncertainty. So it is with the recession.

The British government’s announcement that it will offer psychological support to millions of citizens concerned about their economic futures is a textbook example of how to make a drama out of a crisis. New Labour clearly looks upon people’s existential anxieties – about unemployment, poverty and family fallout – as a potential mental health crisis. It plans to train 3,600 therapists and hundreds of specialist staff, and set up new psychotherapy centres around Britain to deal with what it sees as a growing army of mentally ill people.

The institutionalisation of ‘recession therapy’ is based on the assumption that the economic crisis will lead to an epidemic of depression and stress, which could cause long-term mental health problems for millions of people. I can predict, with utmost certainty, that the principal achievement of this plan will be to disease people’s natural responses to economic insecurity, and to normalise the idea that people facing hard times can become mentally ill. This will potentially transform people’s experience of economic and social insecurity into a massive public health problem.

Whenever our feelings of insecurity are treated as a mental health issue, it is likely that people will feel encouraged to see themselves as powerless and ill and to interpret their problems in the language of mental health. Consider a recent example. Over the past decade, experts and therapists have tended to re-present the transition from primary school to secondary school as a major traumatic event for children. Instead of discussing children’s arrival at ‘big school’ as an exciting experience, experts now offer transitional counselling for what was, for decades, regarded as a normal and banal aspect of young people’s lives.

Transitional counselling, like many forms of therapy, has a habit of turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once children pick up on the idea that going to secondary school is a traumatic experience, many of them start to interpret their normal anxieties and insecurities through the idiom of psychology. The end result is that a growing number of children understand their life experiences in pathological terms and become disoriented. One symptom of this malaise is a rising number of referrals for a recently invented condition: ‘school phobia’ (1).

Every crisis – whether natural, manmade, economic or social – represents a crisis of meaning. The capacity of people, and the community they live in, to deal with a crisis depends on their ability to comprehend and make sense of it. Sadly, twenty-first century Western societies have fallen into the habit of discussing the structural crisis of the global economy in highly individuated and psychological terms. The public is told that the credit crunch was precipitated by a crisis of ‘confidence’ or caused by individual greed. According to the prevailing fatalistic viewpoint, most of us are ‘victims’ who need to suffer through this crisis and change our ‘attitudes’ towards consumption. As in a Hollywood disaster flick, people are assigned the role of powerless, passive individuals, whose state of mind is defined by their sense of vulnerability. And when meaning is communicated through the language of psychology, it is only a matter of time before social policy becomes focused on behaviour management.

It seems that the British government is far more comfortable dealing with the global recession as a mental health problem rather than as a socioeconomic one. This approach is underwritten by a contemporary cultural outlook which continually promotes the idea that adversity is a major source of mental health issues. We have come a long way since the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s government launched a programme of counselling for those who were about to be thrown out of work. Then, many commentators identified these therapy schemes as a cynical attempt by the authorities to contain and defuse the reactions of the unemployed, through encouraging them to accommodate to their precarious lives. Critics accused the government of being more devoted to helping the jobless to ‘cope’ with their predicament than with creating new jobs. Many counsellors pointed out that the unemployed were not interested in their help.

That was then. Today, therapeutic intervention is endorsed by everyone from the powers-that-be to the trade union movement and anti-capitalist protesters. The institutionalisation and normalisation of counselling is underpinned by an intensely pessimistic view of how people behave during times of adversity. They are pathologised as lacking resilience and the capacity to cope, and therefore they need professional support.

Both supporters and opponents of capitalism have embraced a psychological interpretation of the global crisis. Indeed, in recent times the critics of capitalism have condemned the free market on the basis of its alleged mental health impact. This therapeutic critique of capitalism has been implicitly accepted by policymakers, who assume there is a causal relationship between an economic depression and a crisis of mental health. Today, the destructive consequences of a global recession are given meaning through the idea of psychologically damaged victims.

The government’s therapeutic intervention redefines a crisis of society as a crisis of personal deficits and powerlessness. Instead of offering clarity and a sense of meaning with which we might approach the crisis, the government provides individuals with dubious therapeutic techniques. What we need is a totally different approach, one that regards people as problem-solvers rather than as potential mental-health patients. Experience shows that communities can deal with economic insecurity and hardship if they are provided with a sense of purpose about what should be done. People don’t need counselling, but rather opportunities for rebuilding their lives. Instead of encouraging the public to look to therapists for help, our political leaders should foster a climate that supports individuals and communities who are committed to helping themselves.

(1) Tears for fears, Guardian, 3 March 2009

First published by spiked, 9 March 2009

Eco-priests, repent of your green folly
Just when you think that sin has gone out of fashion, you discover it has made an unexpected comeback.

Britain’s Energy Minister Ed Miliband has joined forces with two Church of England bishops to call for a “carbon fast” this Lent.

Speaking as a true penitent, Miliband acknowledges that the carbon sin he’ll miss most is “driving short distances into town”. But he hopes his sacrifice will “easily become part of everyday life and help tackle dangerous climate change”.

Miliband takes his sin lite, which is why he sees no contradiction between something that can easily become part of everyday life and the idea of a sacrifice. His ecclesiastical mates also possess an unusual idea of what constitutes a sacrifice. James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool and a fervent advocate of waging a struggle against carbon sin, has indicated he plans to install a solar hot water system in his house and has sworn that his electrical appliances will be turned off, rather than left on standby, during the night.

It’s good to know that serious sacrifice and penitence is making a comeback in the 21st century.

The carbon fast represents a semi-conscious attempt to transform environmentalism into a caricature of a religion. This campaign, led by an advocacy group called Tearfund, is based on the simplistic idea that if people in the West give up their carbon sins, poor people in the developing world will be better off.

From this standpoint the idea of original sin has been reinvented as an act of carbon emission. There are several ways that the sinner can gain absolution. Those with serious financial resources can gain redemption through carbon offsets. The rest of us need to go through the appropriate rituals - recycling garbage, avoiding disposable nappies or using re-usable bags - that provide proof of sacrifice.

Those of true faith will go a step further and stop eating meat and having babies. Those who refuse to embrace these rituals are stigmatised for their moral depravity and denounced for their crime against the planet. But the main purpose of the invention of the carbon fast is to make people feel guilty that they have a life.

There was a time when a sin really meant something. They used to be called deadly sins because they led to spiritual death and thus to damnation. These days some theologians, including the advocates of a carbon fast, wouldn’t recognise a mortal sin if they bumped into one.

So while environmentalists are looking to turn routine forms of human behaviour into eco-sins, some religious leaders are searching for activities that they can brand as a form of moral transgression. In such a climate, is it any surprise that moral entrepreneurs in the Church of England want to rebrand sin and have decided to cobble together a shopping list of new no-nos for the 21st-century consumer?

They are frequently joined by modernisers in the Catholic Church, who believe it is easier to make people feel guilty about their impact on the environment than about committing one of the seven deadly sins. They think religious institutions might recover some of their credibility if they reinvent themselves as the promoters of ecological virtue, keeping a close check on the eco-sins of polluters. That is why the environment features prominently in a new list of modern sins drawn up by the Vatican in 2007.

In the name of protecting the environment a moral crusade has been launched to consume less, have less babies, even to stay married. Steve Fielding, at a Senate environment hearing, praised marriage as superior to the resource-inefficient lifestyle represented by a divorce. Once upon a time warring parents were advised to stay together for the sake of the children; today for the environment.

In previous times ancient myths about the terrible consequences of people’s aspiration served as a warning against the exercise of human powers: Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans had his eyes gouged out; Daedalus, who presumed to fly, lost his son, Icarus. Moral entrepreneurs recycled these warnings with sermons about the danger of man playing god.

In modern times the moral indictment of ambition and its celebration of restraint has been undermined by the ideals of the Enlightenment. But atavistic ideals directed at human progress are making a comeback.

We live in era where belief in human development and progress is often condemned as irresponsible. Every unexpected environmental incident or misfortune is represented as a signal of an imminent planetary catastrophe. Numerous moral entrepreneurs have embraced the cause of global warming in order to offer moral lessons about the conduct of human behaviour.

However, the moral lessons transmitted through initiatives such as carbon fasting are essentially misanthrophic. Instead of celebrating the human imagination and its capacity to transform nature, they use the term “human impact” to argue that our species is essentially a destructive force. Terms such as carbon footprint masquerade as scientific concepts but, as James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky argue in their new book, Energise!: A Future For Energy Innovation, they are essentially moral categories oriented towards curbing human behaviour.

At a time when government ministers and leaders of the church opt to embrace gimmicks such as a carbon fast, it is important to remind ourselves that any problems that people have inflicted on the environment are technical ones that are susceptible to technical solutions and not moral policing.

When people are continually told to reorganise their lives around the principles of environmental correctness, we need to be reminded now and again that the human species is, on balance, a creative, innovative and adaptable force. Yes, we face some very serious problems, many of which are man-made. But instead of adopting the role of second rate penitents, we should be investing in human ingenuity and enterprise.

First published by The Australian, 26 February 2009

Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen
Book review: Peter Meyers' search for the answer to the question of when the war against terrorism began represents a noble attempt to engage with the confusing state of contemporary international relations.

As Meyers suggests, by accounting for the beginning of the conflict we can gain clarity about its causes and meaning.

Almost everything about the war appears to be mystifying. We don’t even know what to call it. Many officials never liked the term “War on Terror” and were pleased when US policymakers recently changed it to the “Long War”.

But how long has the Long War been going on? Meyers states that it has been around for decades and claims that Washington’s post-9/11 orientation needs to “be understood as a continuation of the Cold War”.

Meyers’ exploration of the “beginning” is developed through a discussion of the relationship between politics and war. This provides interesting insights into the way domestic politics internalises the imperatives of emergencies.

According to his model of what he terms “civic war”, the civilian population of the US has been continually implicated in war through its acceptance of the official version of events. The book focuses on the way in which domestic consensus is wedded to the rhetoric of war.

He claims that the “blurring of the boundaries between war and not-war may be a feature of modernity” and posits the Long War as an extension of the way the Cold War shaped “political life through the management of citizens’ emotions”.

Civic War’s main flaw is its obsessive tendency to rediscover the present in the past. In an ahistorical fashion, Meyers continually points to the resemblances between the pre- and post-9/11 eras. He argues that the terrorist has become the “functional equivalent” of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

“Then and now, we faced unlimited war based on the possibility that the enemy could strike anywhere and anytime,” he writes. Or then and now, “fear came to occupy the foreground of our imagination”.

Unfortunately, Meyers’ quest for the “beginning” leads him to a same-old, same-old story about the relationship between politics and war. He has adopted this schema by projecting the contemporary discussion of the politics of fear backwards.

Apparently, the post-9/11 wars follow the “cultural logic” of the Cold War, which is the US President’s “aspiration to an omnipotence”. Meyers believes that the Bush Administration was driven by an “impulse to claim absolute certainty”.

According to this model, the fanaticism of Bush and Co represents a continuation of the Reaganite project of reigniting the Cold War and winning support through the politics of fear.

Meyers’ model of a president who is fanatical and opportunistic is conceptually inconsistent if not incoherent. It is also an intensely psychological theory of international relations, where the acts of fanatical leaders provide explanations for far too much.

His search for the cause overlooks the possibility that there isn’t one. It is confusion and disorientation, rather than the aspiration for omnipotence, that helps make sense of a war with no clear name.

Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen, by Peter Alexander Meyers. University of Chicago Press 376pp, £17.00. ISBN 9780226522081. Published 12 December 2008

First published by Times Higher Education, 12 February 2009

An apology to George Galloway MP
by Frank Furedi

In an article in The Australian newspaper, 15th January 2009, ‘Critics of Israel giving voice to anti-Semitism’, I stated that George Galloway, British MP for the Respect party, had called for a boycott of ‘Israel’s shops’ and that this meant that he was calling in practice for a boycott of Jewish shops. This was incorrect and I now understand that he was calling for a boycott of ‘Israel’ shops which is a mobile retailer operating in shopping malls and who sell Israeli goods and was not referring to ‘Israel’s shops’. I apologise to Mr Galloway for the mistake, and I withdraw the suggestion made in my article that he was showing or encouraging anti-Semitism in calling for this boycott.
Frank Furedi, 9 February 2009

First published by Frank Furedi.com, 9 February 2009

Muslim alienation in the UK? Blame the Israelis!
Is it true that the war in Gaza has heightened community tensions here in Britain?

British government officials claim that Israel’s recent actions in Gaza are likely to encourage a ‘process of radicalisation’ amongst British Muslims. The security and counter-terrorism minister, Lord West of Spithead, says the New Labour government’s attempts to contain the radicalisation of British Muslims will have been undermined by Israel’s military venture.

So in Lord West’s view, there is a direct, causal relationship between Israel’s foreign policy and an increased risk of terrorism or anger in Britain. He clarified his outlook on the matter by slamming Tony Blair’s dismissal of any such causal relationship. ‘Well, that was clearly bollocks’, said Lord West (1). West’s linking of the tragic events in Gaza with the growth of radicalisation in the UK echoes warnings made by Jonathan Evans, head of MI5, last month; he, too, is of the opinion that Israel’s actions might help to boost the ideological appeal of radical Islamic sentiments in Britain.

Just as it is wrong to dismiss the idea that foreign policy can, indeed, lead to domestic conflict, so it is overly simplistic to claim that wars and other troubling events abroad cause sudden shifts in people’s outlook. History shows us that, sometimes, brutal colonial wars – Algeria, Malaya and Kenya, for example – had little impact on domestic public opinion. On other occasions, however – Vietnam, Iraq in 2003, and now Gaza – wars abroad have become the focus for mobilisation and protest.

Many associate the radicalisation of the 1960s generation with the impact of the Vietnam War on public opinion. But radical protest in the Sixties was the outcome of various, complex political and social influences, of which the Vietnam War was only one. Usually, the emergence of protest movements is underpinned by changing attitudes and dispositions, as influenced by people’s everyday experience of society. And so it is today.

Many young people have, over the past month, adopted Gaza as the focus of their protest. Yet the alienation and anger of young Muslims predates this war, and even the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Even before the start of the war on terrorism in October 2001, there had been expressions of community anger in the riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in summer 2001. And if there was one defining foreign event that boosted the politicisation of British Muslims, it was Western governments’ campaign against the Serbs in Bosnia and later Kosovo.

The fact is that what security officials characterise as ‘radicalisation’ is better described as ‘alienation’ and ‘estrangement’. It has been evident for some time that significant sections of young British Muslims feel estranged from British society, and even reject it. Sometimes, this estrangement is expressed in the form of politicised protest. Most of the time, however, it works as a variant of the contemporary politics of identity.

Much of the language that Muslims use to express their frustration with how they are treated is shaped by Western identity politics. The term ‘Islamophobia’, for example, was not invented by activists in the Middle East. In some, fortunately rare situations, the politicisation of Islamic identity can foster a disposition towards violence. However, such a response should not be described as ‘radical’. Traditionally, the term ‘radical’ referred to more than simply a rejection of society. It conveyed the idea of ‘uprooting’, transforming, putting forward alternative ideas and arguments. Recent protests against Israel, however, have been conventional rather than radical.

The protestors were angry – very angry, sometimes – but their protest was similar to the well-tried humanitarian campaigning of organisations such as Make Poverty History and Oxfam. The protesters’ propaganda drew attention to the plight of ‘the victims’, and particularly children. Even Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an otherwise articulate Islamist group, carried placards with the message: ‘Who will defend the children of Gaza?’ So, paradoxically, even a movement which is deeply hostile to the society that it inhabits embraces the cult of the victim and the language of mainstream British protest.

The response of British Muslims to Gaza points, not to the rise of a powerful new radical ideology, but to an interesting process in which protesters selectively reject the British ‘way of life’ while pragmatically utilising some of its cultural resources. So while many young Muslims resent the moral authority that the Holocaust endows on the suffering of Jewish people, they are more than happy to manipulate the symbolic significance of the Holocaust for their own purposes; they describe events in Gaza as the ‘Palestinian Holocaust’ and compare the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto.

Officialdom’s misdiagnosis of ‘radicalisation’ amongst British Muslims, when in fact it is more accurately described as alienation, is symptomatic of the nervousness of security officials like Lord West today. Blaming the war in Gaza for the politicisation of British Muslims is a way to avoid asking some very difficult questions about the problem of youthful Muslim alienation. No doubt, it is tempting for British officials to point the finger of blame at Israel for their own inability to win the hearts and minds of young Muslims – but at the end of the day, they cannot avoid the fact that the problem is rooted at home.

Insofar as there is any hint of a strategy in relation to tackling radicalisation, it always has a fantasy-like character. Often, the official discourse on radicalisation has much in common with attitudes that underpin the child protection industry. It warns that ‘vulnerable’ and ‘impressionable’ young people may be targeted on websites, campuses and at social venues, and ‘groomed’ by cynical operators. In November 2007, it was reported that the UK government’s Research, Information and Communication Unit would draw up ‘counter-narratives’ to the anti-Western messages on websites ‘designed to influence vulnerable and impressionable audiences here [in the UK]’ (2). In November 2006, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, said ‘it is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow UK citizens’ (3).

Unfortunately, this dramatic framing of the threat as ‘sudden radicalisation’ means that extremism is seen as a kind of psychological virus afflicting the vulnerable and those suffering from a psychological deficit. This depiction of radicalisation as a symptom of vulnerability overlooks the fact that, frequently, ‘Muslim anger’ expresses confidence and self-belief. Indeed, as numerous studies have pointed out, what is quite striking is the activism and idealism of these so-called brainwashed individuals. Moreover, the people who are actively hostile to Britain are rarely brainwashed by manipulative operatives – often they have sought out jihadist websites and online networks. In other words, they may have made a self-conscious and active choice (4).

Instead of psychologising about vulnerable young people, or blaming events in Gaza for what is happening in Britain, officials should ask themselves why have they lost touch with a significant minority of their own citizens. A precondition for answering this question is to recognise, openly and publicly, the very real cultural divisions that afflict British communities today.

(1) Minister for terror: Gaza will fuel UK extremism, Guardian, 28 January 2009

(2) Counter-terrorism officials rethink stance on Muslims, Guardian, 20 November 2007

(3) MI5: 30 terror plots being planned in UK, Guardian, 10 November 2006

(4) This point is confirmed by research into the motivation and character of suicide bombers. See for example The Moral Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Scott Atran, The Washington Quarterly, Spring 2006

First published by spiked, 9 February 2009

New King Herods target babies as potential polluters
The totalitarian impulse to control people's reproductive lives has received the blessing of sections of the political elite.

It is reported that the British government-sponsored Sustainable Development Commission believes that curbing peoples’ right to reproduce should be central to the fight against global warming. Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the commission and is also a patron of the Malthusian campaigning group the Optimum Population Trust, wants to turn population control into the key objective of environmental campaigning.

Porritt’s estrangement from the newborn puts him in the company of a growing band of dreary misanthropists. King Herod’s fear of the newborn was confined to one baby. Today’s misanthropic fear-merchants have a wider target. Barry Walters, associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia, believes the very survival of the planet demands stringent controls on the number of children parents can have. This is what he has to say: “Anthropogenic greenhouse gases constitute the largest source of pollution, with by far the greatest contribution from humans in the developed world. Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing, but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society. What then should we do as environmentally responsible medical practitioners? We should point out the consequences to all who fail to see them, including, if necessary, the ministers for health. Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a Baby Levy in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the polluter pays principle.”

Throughout history, different cultures have celebrated birth as a unique moment signifying the joy of life. The reinterpretation of birth as a form of greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour speaks to today’s degraded imagination, where carbon-reduction becomes the supreme moral imperative. Once every newborn baby is dehumanised in this way, represented as a professional polluter who is a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel anything other than apprehension about the growth of the human race.

Robbing babies of what we perceive to be their endearing innocence makes it easier to scare people off having them. In recent centuries, babies were described as a blessing; now some argue that not having a baby is a blessing, at least for the environment.

Such a reversal in the way we regard human life can be seen in the writings of environmentalists such as Kelpie Wilson. She agues that, today, abortion is not so much a necessary option that allows women some control over their lives, but a sacrifice everyone should be encouraged to make in the interests of the environment. To understand that a tiny embryo must sometimes be sacrificed for the greater good of the family or the human species as a whole is the moral high ground that we stand on today, says Wilson. Why? Because we have to consider how we will live tomorrow on a resource-depleted and climate-compromised planet. Scare stories about the physical limits of the planet are presented as moral arguments about abortion.

Since the beginning of time, one of the clearest markers of an enlightened civilised society has been the moral status it attaches to human life. And outwardly, 21st century Western society expresses an unprecedented degree of affirmation for human life. The principle of human rights is widely celebrated. The phenomenal growth in health expenditure shows that prosperous societies care very much for human well-being and life. In some cases, Western societies go to extraordinary lengths to keep alive a premature baby or to prolong the life of elderly people or people who are chronically ill.

Yet these things exist in an ambiguous relationship with contemporary society’s estrangement from its own humanity. To put it bluntly: it is difficult to celebrate human life if people, or at least the growth of the number of people, are looked upon as the source of the world’s problems. Today, the humanist impulse that drove the development of the modern world has been displaced by an outlook that regards humanity with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Indeed, one of the main themes of contemporary scaremongering is that people should fear themselves and their fellow human beings. Over-eating is only one way that people are said to become complicit in acts of planetary destruction. It seems our very existence, our very need for sustenance, is a curse for Mother Earth. In recent times, scaremongers have become very inventive in recasting human behaviour as essentially destructive. In previous times, religious leaders would rebuke sinners and threaten them with a fate worse than death. Often people were burdened with the charge of Original Sin. Yet despite such a harsh regime of theological authority, religious leaders also recognised people’s capacity for virtuous behaviour. Human life was affirmed as unique and special, and people who behaved according to “The Book” were assured salvation and the blessing of the Almighty. Many of today’s Malthusians take a very different approach. They find it difficult to see any redeeming qualities in the human condition, and appear to be driven by a passionate desire to make us scared of ourselves.

Popular, cultural representations frequently imply that the development of civilisation, particularly the advance of science and technology, is the source of today’s problems of environmental destruction and social disintegration. Some environmentalist writers even view the shift from a nomadic existence to the advent of agriculture as historically problematic. Wilson argues that suddenly there was a massive population growth in the human species. This led to friction and war and environmental destruction. From this perspective, the lifestyles of hunter-gatherers are the most harmonious with the environment; they got things right, apparently, while civilisation simply cocked everything up.

The idea that civilisation is responsible for the perils we face today assigns an undistinguished status to the human species. The most striking manifestation of the loathing for everything human can be seen in the idea that we need a significant reduction in the number of human beings. As Theodore Roszak wrote in the New Scientist in August 2002: “There isn’t a single ecological problem that won’t be ameliorated by a smaller population.” Now we have Porritt demanding smaller families in order to save the planet. So maybe the solution is the extinction of the human race? The argument for limiting family sizes in Britain is the first hesitant step in that direction.

First published by The Australian, 3 February 2009

Why the British elite is so scared of babies
In arguing that it’s wrong to have too many kids, Jonathon Porritt has joined the eco-misanthropes who want to reduce human numbers.

Most normal adults regard a new baby as an object of love and affection. Traditionally, a new life has been seen as a blessing, as a symbol of humanity’s hopes for a better future. Thankfully, many of us still think this way. Yet Western culture has also become prey to a powerful mood of misanthropy, which looks upon newborns as a threat to the planet.

Now it is reported that the UK government-sponsored Sustainable Development Commission believes that curbing people’s right to reproduce should be central to the fight against global warming (1).  Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the commission and is also a patron of the Malthusian campaigning group the Optimum Population Trust, wants to turn population control into the key objective of environmental campaigning. So the totalitarian impulse towards controlling people’s reproductive lives has now received the blessing of sections of the British political elite.

Porritt’s estrangement from the newborn puts him in the company of a growing band of dreary misanthropists. King Herod’s fear of the newborn was confined to one baby. Today’s misanthropic fear-merchants have a wider target. One Australian professor of obstetric medicine, Barry Walters, believes that the very survival of the planet demands stringent controls on the number of children parents can have. This is what he has to say:

‘Anthropogenic greenhouse gases constitute the largest source of pollution, with by far the greatest contribution from humans in the developed world. Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing, but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society. What then should we do as environmentally responsible medical practitioners? We should point out the consequences to all who fail to see them, including, if necessary, the ministers for health. Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a “Baby Levy” in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the “polluter pays” principle.’ (2)

Throughout history, different cultures have celebrated birth as a unique moment signifying the joy of life. The reinterpretation of birth as a form of ‘greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour’ speaks to today’s degraded imagination, where carbon-reduction becomes the supreme moral imperative. Once every newborn baby is dehumanised in this way, represented as a professional polluter who is a ‘potent source of greenhouse gas emissions’, then it becomes increasingly difficult to feel anything other than apprehension about the growth of the human race.

The Optimum Population Trust stamps every newborn with a metaphorical health warning. It argues that each baby born in Britain will cost two-and-a-half acres of woodland in terms of how much CO2 they will burn. If the birth of a baby is seen as an unnecessary and unacceptable burden on the carrying capacity of the planet, then it is only a matter of time before human beings, by their very existence, are regarded as a threat. One of the most distinct features of contemporary scaremongering is its intense suspicion of the human species. Sooner or later, scaremongering always comes to be directed at ourselves. The systematic promotion of suspicion and fear leads, inevitably, to mistrust of people themselves, and of their motives. When experts demand a ‘carbon tax’ on fertility, then the defining identity of a new baby is that of ‘Polluter’. Subjecting the act of birth to the ‘polluter pays’ principle exposes the dark side of today’s misanthropic imagination, which so often fuels scaremongering.

As potential polluters, babies cease to be those lovely cuddly things that bring joy to our lives. Robbing babies of what we perceive to be their endearing innocence makes it easier to scare people off having them in the first place. In recent centuries, babies were described as a blessing; now some argue that not having a baby is a blessing, at least for the environment.

Such a reversal in the way we regard human life can be seen in the writings of environmentalists such as Kelpie Wilson. She agues that, today, abortion is not so much a necessary option that allows women some control over their lives, but a sacrifice that everyone should be encouraged to make in the interests of the environment. ‘To understand that a tiny embryo must sometimes be sacrificed for the greater good of the family or the human species as a whole is the moral high ground that we stand on today’, says Wilson. Why? Because ‘we have to consider how we will live tomorrow on a resource-depleted and climate-compromised planet’. From Wilson’s perspective, abortion is morally justified as a resource-saving strategy. She believes that ‘most women who seek abortions do so in order to conserve resources for children they already have’. Scare stories about the ‘physical limits of the planet’ are presented as ‘moral arguments about abortion’ (3).  If even newborn, innocent little things are depicted as lifelong addicts to carbon and pollution, what hope is there for the rest of the human race?

When life loses meaning

Since the beginning of time, one of the clearest markers of an enlightened civilised society has been the moral status it attaches to human life. And outwardly, twenty-first-century Western society expresses an unprecedented degree of affirmation for human life. The principle of human rights is widely celebrated. The phenomenal growth in health expenditure shows that prosperous societies care very much for human wellbeing and life. In some cases, Western societies go to extraordinary lengths to keep alive a premature baby or to prolong the life of elderly people or people who are chronically ill.

And yet these things exist in an ambiguous relationship with contemporary society’s estrangement from its own humanity. To put it bluntly: it is difficult to celebrate human life if people, or at least the growth of the number of people, are looked upon as the source of the world’s problems. Today, the humanist impulse that drove the development of the modern world has been displaced by an outlook that regards humanity with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Indeed, one of the main themes of contemporary scaremongering is that people should fear themselves and their fellow human beings. Over-eating is only one way that people are said to become complicit in acts of ‘planetary destruction’. It seems that our very existence, our very need for sustenance, is a curse for Mother Earth.

The language used by aspiring fertility controllers such as Jonathon Porritt continually reduces human behaviour to acts of planetary vandalism. Terms like ‘human impact on the environment’, ‘ecological footprint’ and ‘carbon consumption’ invoke a sense of dread towards human actions. It appears that there are too many of us doing too much living and too much breathing. In a world where humanity is portrayed as a threat to the environment, the pursuit of new human life is seen as a mixed blessing. Consequently our concern with preserving and improving the quality of life of some individuals sits uneasily with ever-shriller demands to prevent people from being born in the first place.

In recent times, scaremongers have become very inventive in recasting human behaviour as essentially destructive. In previous times, religious leaders would rebuke sinners and threaten them with a fate worse than death. Often people were burdened with the charge of ‘original sin’. Yet despite such a harsh regime of theological authority, religious leaders also recognised people’s capacity for virtuous behaviour. Human life was affirmed as unique and special, and people who behaved according to The Book were assured salvation and the blessing of the Almighty. Many of today’s Malthusians take a very different approach. They find it difficult to see any redeeming qualities in the human condition, and appear to be driven by a passionate desire to make us scared of ourselves.

There was a time when scare stories warned people about venturing into the unknown – today people are warned against even venturing into the known… This call to stay put is captured in the recently invented term ‘ecological footprint’. The use of this term in everyday debate shows that the association of normal human activity with destructive behaviour resonates widely today. Such an outlook, which conveys the idea that having an impact on the environment is necessarily a bad thing, is rarely criticised for its misanthropic assumptions.

On television, in cinema and in popular, cultural representations of the past frequently imply that the development of civilisation, particularly the advance of science and technology, is the source of today’s problems of environmental destruction and social disintegration. Some environmentalist writers even view the shift from a nomadic existence to the advent of agriculture as historically problematic. Kelpie Wilson argues that ‘suddenly there was a massive population growth in the human species’. This led to friction and war and environmental destruction. From this perspective, the lifestyles of hunter-gatherers are the most harmonious with the environment; they got things right, apparently, while civilisation simply cocked everything up. And since ‘hunter-gatherers’ rarely had many children, ‘large families are really completely unnatural for human beings’, argues Wilson. Such a depiction of civilisation as an ‘unnatural’ tale of horror and destruction is frequently put forward by the apocalyptic British philosopher John Gray, too. He laments the advent of agricultural society 10,000 years ago for helping to create the conditions for human development and civilisation.

The idea that civilisation is responsible for the perils we face today assigns an undistinguished status to the human species. And the most striking manifestation of the loathing for everything human can be seen in the idea that we need a significant reduction in the number of human beings. As Theodore Roszak wrote in the New Scientist in August 2002: ‘There isn’t a single ecological problem that won’t be ameliorated by a smaller population.’ And now we have Jonathon Porritt demanding smaller families in order to save the planet. So maybe the solution is the extinction of the human race? The argument for limiting family sizes in Britain is the first hesitant step in that direction.

(1) See Two children should be limit says green guru, The Sunday Times, 1 February 2009

(2) MJA, Volume 187, Number 11/12, 3-17 December 2007

(3) Abortion and the Earth, Kelpie Wilson, Truthout, 29 January 2008

First published by spiked, 2 February 2009

After Gaza: what’s behind 21st-century anti-Semitism?
Anti-Israel sentiment is morphing into anti-Jewish sentiment, as more and more people project their disdain for the modern world on to ‘the Jew’.

First, a health warning. For some time now it has been difficult to have a grown-up discussion about anti-Semitism. In post-Second World War Europe, this issue, perhaps more than any other, has provoked powerful memories and emotions. The debate about what constitutes anti-Semitism, and where it is being expressed, can be a moral minefield, and it can impact both positively and negatively on European attitudes towards Jewish people. As a result, there are frequently controversies about whether or not a certain statement or act is anti-Semitic.

For example, in early January an appeals court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that Henryk Broder, a German-Jewish journalist, could describe the statements made by a fellow Jew, Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, as anti-Semitic. ‘Even German courts are beginning to understand that it is not enough to be Jewish in order not to be anti-Semitic’, boasted Broder (1). This court case highlighted another difficulty in understanding the nature of anti-Semitism today. In recent times, how Jews are perceived has become closely bound up with the issue of Israel. So Broder had denounced the Jewess Hecht-Galinski as anti-Semitic because she had equated Israel’s policies with those of Nazi Germany. As far as Hecht-Galinski was concerned, Broder’s claim that her criticism of Israel in such a fashion was ‘anti-Semitic’ represented defamation against her character.

Disputes such as this one should remind us that there is a powerful subjective and interpretative element to how we characterise another individual’s words and behaviour – and these acts of interpretation can be influenced by unstated cultural and political assumptions. Today, there are at least four important trends that complicate our understanding of how anti-Semitism works.

First of all, contemporary Western culture continually encourages groups that perceive themselves as victims to inflate the wrongs perpetuated against them. As a result, we are always being told that racism is more prevalent than ever before, or that homophobia and Islamophobia are rising, or that sexual discrimination is more powerful than in the past. It is unthinkable today for advocacy groups to concede that prejudice and discrimination against their members have decreased, and that the status of their community or people has improved. Such groups are acutely sensitive to how they are represented in the media, and to the language in which they are discussed and described. And this identity-based sensitivity is shared by Jewish organisations, too, which in recent decades have often been all-too-willing to interpret what are in fact confused and ambiguous references to their people as expressions of anti-Semitism.

Consequently, the charge that a certain statement is ‘anti-Semitic’ should not be accepted at face value. Statements and acts need to be analysed and interpreted in the context in which they were made or carried out. It is particularly important to resist the temptation to characterise speech or behaviour as anti-Semitic by second-guessing its real meaning. An objective assessment demands analysis of what was actually said, rather than speculation about its ‘true’ or ‘hidden’ meaning. Just as we already have the irrational concept of ‘unwitting racism’ in the UK, we may soon end up with charges of ‘unwitting anti-Semitism’ being made against those individuals judged by other people’s interpretive wits to be anti-Semitic.

The second complication is that, in recent decades, the defenders of Zionism have developed the unfortunate habit of labelling criticisms of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism. The aim of these rhetorical attacks is to devalue the moral standing of Israel’s critics, and thus avoid having to deal with their often difficult, persuasive arguments. The cumulative impact of this very defensive response to criticism of Israel is to undermine the moral weight of charges of anti-Semitism. Those who are anti-Zionist are often able to accuse Israeli politicians and their supporters of ‘hiding behind’ the charge of anti-Semitism. Worse still, the pro-Israel movement’s propagandistic association of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has encouraged others to erode the conceptual distinction between Zionism and Jews.

The third complication comes with the sanctification of the Holocaust. In Europe, the Holocaust has in recent years been institutionalised as a moral absolute. In education, culture and public life, the Holocaust has been turned into a marker of evil. Many countries in the European Union have instituted laws against Holocaust denial. Sanctifying the Holocaust in this way has allowed European officialdom to claim moral authority on matters of good and evil, right and wrong, in relation to the present and the past.

Regrettably, the elevation of the Holocaust in this way does little to help people make sense of that terrible event. Instead, many Europeans experience the politicisation of the Holocaust as a bureaucratic project, something that is distant from their lives. One disturbing outcome of the politicisation of the Holocaust is that it can become more difficult to know what people genuinely think about Jews; after all, in circumstances where the official version of the Holocaust cannot be questioned, and where you can even be punished for doing so, people are unlikely to state baldly ‘I don’t like Jews’ or to express other overt anti-Semitic sentiments. Nevertheless, officialdom’s manipulation of the memory of the Holocaust as a way of gaining moral authority has had the predictable effect of breeding cynicism towards this terrible event. Some Europeans feel that ‘too much’ is made of the Holocaust these days, but they rarely state such opinions openly.

The fourth complication poses the greatest problem. Because in contemporary Europe there are many and various obstacles to the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments in their traditional form, prejudice towards Jews is now likely to be expressed indirectly, through other issues. Although criticism of Israel can and should be conceptually distinguished from prejudice towards Jewish people, in recent years there has been a significant erosion of the distinction between these two phenomena. As a result, some people have embraced the anti-Israeli cause as a way of making a statement about their attitude towards Jews. As a sociologist, I am well aware of the danger of attributing a sentiment to a statement that is not explicitly stated – which is why this discussion needs to be handled with care, and why such interpretative statements about today’s anti-Israeli/anti-Semitic outlook need to be clearly justified.

New expressions of anti-Semitism

There is considerable evidence that in recent years anti-Semitism has acquired greater visibility and force in Europe. Over the past decade, and especially since the eruption of the conflict in Gaza, anti-Israeli sentiments have often mutated into anti-Jewish ones. Recent events indicate that in Europe the traditional distinction between anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment has become confusing and blurred.

So recently, during a demonstration against Israel’s actions in Gaza, the Dutch Socialist Party MP Harry Van Bommel called for a new intifada against Israel. Of course he has every right to express this political viewpoint. However, he became an accomplice of anti-Semites when he chose to do nothing upon hearing chants of ‘Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas’ and similar anti-Jewish slogans. Many people who should know better now keep quiet when they hear slogans like ‘Kill the Jews’ or ‘Jews to the oven’ on anti-Israel demonstrations. At a recent protest in London, such chants provoked little reaction from individuals who otherwise regard themselves as progressive anti-racists – and nor did they appear to be embarrassed by the sight of a man dressed as a racist Jewish caricature, wearing a ‘Jew mask’ with a crooked nose while pretending to eat bloodied babies.

Increasingly, protesters are targeting Jews for being Jews. They have agitated for the boycott and even harassment of ‘Israeli shops’, but in practice this means boycotting and harassing Jewish-owned shops, such as Marks & Spencer (some of whose stores have been barricaded by anti-Israel protesters) and Starbucks (a number of whose coffee shops have been attacked in London and elsewhere). Some protesters in Italy don’t share the linguistic subtlety of those ostensibly calling for a boycott of ‘Israeli shops’. Giancarlo Desiderati, spokesman for the trade union Flaica-Cub, has called for a boycott of Jewish businesses in Rome. A leaflet issued by his union informed Romans that anything they purchase in Jewish-owned shops will be ‘tainted by blood’.

Here, there is an almost effortless conceptual leap from criticising Israel to targeting Jews. Desiderati pointed out that his organisation had already called for a boycott of Israeli goods before taking the logical next step of demanding a boycott of Jewish shops. He said that his union was drawing up a list of Jewish shops, ‘though it might be better to publish a list of streets in which a majority of the shops are Jewish and ask people to avoid those streets when shopping’ (2).

Anti-Semitism in Europe is not simply a rhetorical pastime of Islamists or pro-Palestinian protesters. In Britain, Jewish schoolchildren have been castigated for belonging to a people with ‘blood on their hands’. Their elders sometimes face intimidation and regularly report being subjected to verbal abuse. What is most disturbing about these developments is the reluctance of European society to acknowledge and confront acts of anti-Semitism. Take the riots that broke out in Paris on 3 January. If you relied upon mainstream media reports, you would never have known that groups of youngsters were shouting ‘death to the Jews’ while throwing stones at the police. In this instance, expressions of anti-Semitism were not even properly reported, much less confronted and challenged in public debate.

Probably the saddest example of this accommodation to anti-Semitism comes from Denmark. Historically, Denmark has been one of the most enlightened societies in Europe. During the Second World War, it stood out as a country were the Nazis could find virtually nobody willing to collaborate with their anti-Jewish policies. It is sad, therefore, to read reports today about Danish school administrators who recommend that Jewish children should not enrol in their schools. It began last week, when Olav Nielsen, headmaster of Humlehave School in Odense, publicly stated that he would ‘refuse to accept the wishes of Jewish parents’ who wanted to place children at his school, because it might create tension amongst the Muslim children. Other headmasters echoed his refusal to school the children of Jews, claiming that they were putting children’s safety first. Whatever their intentions, these pedagogues were sending the powerful message that, in the interests of ‘health and safety’, the ghettoisation of Jewish children can be an acceptable and even sensible idea.

Anti-Semitism on the left

One reason why anti-Semitism has become more visible and forceful is because Muslim youth who protest against Israel are relatively uninfluenced by European cosmopolitan ethics that criminalise overt expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment. They are therefore less inhibited than other protesters from explicitly attacking – verbally and sometimes physically – Jews for being Jews. In their outlook, Israel is Jewish and therefore all Jews are legitimate targets for their anger. Their reluctance to make a distinction between Jewish people and Israel has been a source of consternation for some liberal-minded Muslims. A recent letter signed by a group of prominent British Muslims condemned the Gaza-related spate of attacks on Jews and synagogues, arguing that ‘British Jews should not be held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government’ (3). Such statements, however, which publicly acknowledge the problem of conflating Jews with Israeli government action, are rare these days.

One consequence of the rise of overt anti-Semitism amongst some Muslim youth is that it has given permission to others to express more traditional forms of European anti-Semitism. Old anti-Semitic themes about Jews having too much power and influence have become widespread in recent years. However, the most striking development has been the absorption of anti-Semitic sentiments by Europeans who politically identify themselves as left wing.

To be sure, the distinction between left and right has become less and less clear in recent years (4). But it is worth noting that, historically, anti-Semitism in Europe was predominantly linked with right-wing, nationalist movements. And a significant section of the European left played a key role in trying to counter prejudice towards Jews.

Although anti-Semitism continues to exist within sections of the right and far right, over the past decade it has also gained support amongst the left. A study titled Unfavourable Views of Jews And Muslims on the Increase in Europe, published in September 2007, found that 34 per cent of respondents who identified themselves as being on the political right and 28 per cent of those who said they were on the left had a generally unfavourable view of Jews. Those who were least likely to harbour such prejudices – 26 per cent – identified themselves as being in the ‘political centre’ (5). The survey, carried out in the spring of 2007, some time before the recent outburst of conflict in Gaza, suggests that negative attitudes towards Jews predate Israel’s latest military venture.

Those who are active in left-wing politics are unlikely to hold coherent anti-Jewish prejudices. Nonetheless, one disturbing development in recent years has been the reluctance of left-wing anti-Israel protesters to challenge explicit manifestations of anti-Semitism. This accommodation to prejudice is often motivated by moral cowardice. Others try to justify their failure to challenge anti-Semitism by arguing that criticising the prejudices held by some Muslim youth will only let Israel off the hook. Some suggest that Israel’s behaviour relieves Europeans of any moral obligation to empathise with Jews or Jewish sensibilities. Such an outlook was unambiguously expressed by the Italian trade unionist Desiderati, who said that ‘for 50 years we have been concerned for the Jews because of what they suffered in the Holocaust, but now it is time be concerned for the Palestinians, who are the Jews of today’ (6).

The most worrying dynamic in Europe today is not the explicit vitriol directed against Jews by radical Muslim groups or far-right parties, but the new culture of accommodation to anti-Semitism. We can see the emergence of a slightly embarrassed ‘see nothing, hear nothing’ attitude that shows far too much ‘understanding’ towards expressions of anti-Semitism. Typically, the response to anti-Jewish prejudice is to argue that it is not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israeli. Sometimes even politically correct adherents to the creeds of diversity and anti-racism manage to switch off when it comes to confronting anti-Jewish comments.

As a sociologist, I am a member of the online European-Sociologist discussion group. Recently, an anti-Israeli sociologist of Muslim extraction advised us to read an article by the Jewish radical author Naomi Klein. Another Muslim colleague responded by warning him against reading ‘clever Jewish authors’. He advised his co-religionist that ‘true believers should not trust these snakes’. To her credit, an American anti-Zionist sociologist objected to the depiction of Jewish authors as ‘snakes’. But European sociologists were far too busy poring over their latest training manual on diversity to express any objection to this prejudice expressed in a public academic forum. This sums up the accommodation of some so-called progressives to loathsome contemporary sentiments.

Does new anti-Semitism have anything to do with Jews?

The most interesting example of the rise of European anti-Semitism is Spain. Spain is the only European country where negative views of Jews (held by 46 per cent of respondents to a survey) appear to outweigh positive ones (37 per cent) (7). According to a recent study, there has been a dramatic increase in anti-Semitism in Spain over the past three years. Unfavourable views of Jews have more than doubled from 21 per cent in 2005 to 46 per cent in 2008 (8).

It is difficult to analyse fully this dramatic rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in Spain. It is possible, of course, that the survey failed to capture the real feelings and beliefs of its respondents, and thus might have overstated the prevalence of negative emotions. Moreover, someone who expresses a negative attitude towards Jews is not necessarily an anti-Semite: there is an important distinction to be made between negative stereotypes of a people and a feeling of hatred towards them. It is also likely that Spaniards, like young Muslims, are less inhibited from acknowledging their attitudes than respondents to surveys in other, perhaps more PC countries – and therefore the gap between Spaniards and other Europeans on the issue of Jews may be narrower than these recent figures suggest. However, other studies seem to have found a similar pattern of rising anti-Semitic feeling in Spain.

One survey, carried out by the Anti-Defamation League, found that 47 per cent of Spanish respondents stated ‘probably true’ to at least three out of four anti-Semitic stereotypes presented to them. More interesting still is a recent poll commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Education: it found that more than 50 per cent of secondary school pupils would rather not sit next to a Jewish classmate (9).

Since Spain has a tiny Jewish population – fewer than 20,000 – it is unlikely that attitudes towards this minority are based on any experience of interacting with them. Rather, it appears that, in Spain, negative attitudes towards Jews are influenced by ideas that these people have no real loyalty to the countries they live in – in this instance, Spain – and also that they play a sometimes destructive international role. In Spain, anti-Semitism is linked to the prevailing mood of anti-Americanism. Many public figures blame Spain’s economic crisis on America’s influence over the global financial system. This outlook appears to be underpinned by a diffuse sense of frustration about our uncertain world, where invisible forces can come to be personified in the image of the caricatured Jew. This sentiment is inadvertently fostered by the Spanish Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which is profoundly hostile to Israel, and by the Spanish media’s frequent reluctance to distinguish between Israel and Jewish people. Cartoons that are critical of Israel in Spanish newspapers and magazines sometimes depict medieval anti-Semitic caricatures. At a dinner party in late 2005, Zapatero let rip against Israel. He was overheard saying: ‘Es que a veces hasta se entiende que haya gente que puede justificar el holocausto.’ In English: ‘At times one can even understand that there might be people who could justify the Holocaust.’ (10)

Negative Spanish attitudes towards Jewish people have little to do with Jews themselves, or with any widespread support for the Palestinian people. Indeed, surveys indicate that negative attitudes towards Jews rarely translate into positive attitudes towards Muslims: 52 per cent of Spanish respondents indicated that they rate Muslims unfavourably, too (11). So although Zapatero and some of his Socialist colleagues sometimes walk around wearing Palestinian scarves, the public does not share their enthusiasm for this political cause. Rather, it is a sense of diffuse frustration, a feeling that we live in an uncertain and unpredictable world, which underpins people’s incoherent hostility towards those apparent beneficiaries of the global economy: caricatured Americans and Jews.

As in Spain, so elsewhere in Europe there is considerable evidence that anti-Jewish sentiment has been on the rise for some time, and that it is fuelled by cultural factors that have little to do with events in Gaza. Over the past two decades, and particularly since 2001, anti-Western feeling amongst European Muslims has often been expressed through the language of anti-Semitism. Denunciations of America are frequently accompanied by attacks on the alleged influence of the Jewish Lobby. Such attitudes are gaining momentum in our new century. For example, one survey carried out in 2002 suggested that 25 per cent of German respondents took the view that ‘Jewish influence’ on American politics was one important reason why the Bush administration invaded Iraq. The association of Jews with business, finance and the media has encouraged contemporary anti-consumerist and anti-modernist movements to regard the influence of ‘these people’ with grave concern. Is it any surprise, then, that last year there was an explosion of conspiracy theories on the internet that blamed Jewish bankers for the current financial crisis?

Competing for the authority of the Holocaust

The metamorphosis of anti-Israel feeling into anti-Jewish feeling has been paralleled by a growing tendency to detach the Holocaust from its historical context. Increasingly, the Holocaust is discussed not as a specific historic incident in which Jews were the victims, but as a recurring phenomenon – we now have many ‘holocausts’ – which crops up again and again in human history, from Auschwitz to Bosnia to Darfur. This not only disassociates the Holocaust from its Jewish victims; it also means that the Holocaust can be recycled as a moral condemnation of Israel itself, and of the people associated with Israel.

For some time, many critics of Israel have argued that its treatment of Palestinians is comparable to the behaviour of the Nazis towards the Jews. For example, a survey of Germans carried out in 2004 found that 68 per cent of respondents believed that Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians, and 51 per cent said that what Israel has done to the Palestinians is not, in principle, that different to what the Nazis did to the Jews (12).

Over the past five years, the rhetorical strategy of associating Israel with Hitler’s Final Solution has become more widespread. It is through Holocaust comparisons and imagery that the critics of Zionism increasingly make sense of the conflict in the Middle East. As a result, protesters against the current invasion of Gaza frequently portray Israel as a twenty-first century Nazi war machine. From this standpoint, the people of Gaza are facing a predicament similar to that experienced by the inhabitants of the Jewish Ghettos of 1930s and 1940s Europe. This point was forcefully made by the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who said the Israelis ‘will continue to create a Warsaw Ghetto in the Middle East’.

Critics of Israel, some unconsciously, others consciously, try to turn the symbolic authority of the Holocaust against Israel. They frequently accuse the Israeli government of acting like Nazis. Respectable media outlets in the West now regularly claim that Israel is engaged in ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘genocide’, ‘crimes against humanity’; some critics liken Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, to Adolf Hitler. Israeli or Jewish complicity with the Israeli government’s war crimes is said by some to be even more comprehensive than the complicity of the German people with the crimes of the Nazis. Some talk of the ‘Nazification’ of Israeli society, suggesting a role reversal, whereby Jews become the twenty-first century equivalent of their former oppressors.

The cumulative impact of decoupling the Holocaust from its association with the Jewish experience is to encourage a cynical, questioning attitude towards Jewish victimhood; it inflames an interrogation of the status of Jews as the victims of the Nazi experience. There is evidence that the association of Jewishness with war crimes today is used to read history backwards, so that this people comes to bear responsibility for what happened during the Holocaust. According to one interesting study of anti-Semitism in Europe, prejudices are ‘projected backwards to justify behaviour towards Jews in past conflicts’. The study says that ‘in this context, anti-Semitic arguments today frequently serve the purpose of rejecting guilt and responsibility for the persecutions of the Jews [in the past]’ (13). This approach is most notable in societies that were deeply implicated in the persecution of Jews during the Second World War; according to various surveys, the idea that Jews were responsible for their own persecution was supported by 30 per cent of respondents in Russia, 27 per cent in the Ukraine, 35 per cent in Belarus, 31 per cent in Lithuania, and 17 per cent in Germany in 2004 (14).

Contemporary attitudes towards Jewish people are influenced by a continuous interaction between the present and the past. The attempt by the enemies of Israel to appropriate the symbolism of the Holocaust is underpinned by a realisation that this tragedy can be wielded to win significant moral authority. At the same time, the project of reinventing Israel as a latter-day Nazi war machine implicitly incites the rewriting of the past. Allegations of contemporary misdeeds carried out by Jews encourage scepticism about their past moral status as victims of the Nazi experience. So, paradoxically, while contemporary anti-Semitic attitudes have little to do with people’s interactions with real-life Jews, it rebounds on Jews, and fosters a culture of scepticism towards their role as the historic victims of Europe’s darkest hour.

(1) Jewish Israel critic labelled anti-Semite, Jerusalem Post, 6 January 2009

(2) Outrage over proposals to boycott Jewish shops, The Times, London, 8 January 2009

(3) Muslims urge end to anti-Semitism, BBC News, 16 January 2009

(4) On this point see chapter 3 of Frank Furedi’s The Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, Continuum Press (London), 2006

(5) See The Pew Global Attitudes Project,’Unfavourable views of Jews and Muslims on the increase in Europe’, The Pew Research Center, 17 September 2008

(6) Outrage over proposals to boycott Jewish shops, The Times, London, 8 January 2009

(7) See The Pew Global Attitudes Project,’Unfavourable views of Jews and Muslims on the increase in Europe’, The Pew Research Center, 17 September 2008

(8) See The Pew Global Attitudes Project,’Unfavourable views of Jews and Muslims on the increase in Europe’, The Pew Research Center, 17 September 2008

(9) Exclusive: Antisemitism. Old or New?, European Forum on Antisemitism, 4 January 2009

(10) Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism: The Link, History News Network, 21 June 2006

(11) See The Pew Global Attitudes Project,’Unfavourable views of Jews and Muslims on the increase in Europe’, The Pew Research Center, 17 September 2008

(12) Xenophobia on the Continent, The National Interest, 30 0ctober 2008

(13) See ‘Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Europe: A Comparative Perspective’, by Werner Bergman, Journal of Social Issues, Vol.64, no.2, p.378, 2008.

(14) See ‘Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Europe: A Comparative Perspective’, by Werner Bergman, Journal of Social Issues, Vol.64, no.2, p.378, 2008.

First published by spiked, 19 January 2009

Europe’s Estrangement from Israel
By distancing itself from the Jewish state, Europe seeks to deflect the anger of its Muslim population.

I am standing in a queue waiting to buy a train ticket from London to Canterbury. A well-dressed lady standing behind me informs her friend that she “can’t wait till Israel disappears off the face of the earth.” What struck me was not her intense hostility to Israel but the mild-mannered, matter-of-fact tone with which she announced her wish for the annihilation of a nation. It seems that it is okay to condemn and demonize Israel. All of a sudden Israel has become an all-purpose target for a variety of disparate and confused causes. When I ask a group of Pakistani waiters sitting around a table in their restaurant why they “hate” Israel, they casually tell me that it is because Jews are their “religion’s enemy.” Those who are highly educated have their own pet prejudice. One of my young colleagues who teaches media studies in a London-based university was taken aback during a seminar discussion when some of her students insisted that since all the banks are owned by Jews, Israel was responsible for the current global financial crisis.

Increasingly expressions of aversion towards Israel have assumed the status of a taken-for-granted sentiment in many sections of polite European society. Such attitudes are underwritten by powerful cultural forces that communicate the idea that Israel is a malevolent society sui generis. It alone faces regular demands for academic and commercial boycotts. In the media and popular culture it is often portrayed as an intensely racist and barbaric society. Once upon a time its opponents depicted Israel as a guard dog of the West; these days they are more likely to castigate it as the biggest threat to world peace and stability. For a variety of reasons, Israel has come to bear the cross of all of the West’s sins. In Europe in particular, there is a powerful sense of weariness towards Israel. “If only it would go away, then we would have a chance for peace in the Middle East” is the fantasy view of some European officials and writers. Europe’s population agrees. Islamic terrorism is often portrayed as the inevitable consequence of Israel’s policies.

In reality, many Western European officials are worried not just about peace in the Middle East, but also about managing the radicalization of their own Muslim population. Distancing Europe from Israel is seen as necessary for appeasing the anger of Europe’s Muslim population. From this perspective, the problem is not simply Israel but also Europe’s Jewish population. So in order to accommodate what are taken to be Muslim sensibilities, Jewish interests often become a negotiable commodity. For example, in England some teachers are reluctant to discuss the experience of the Holocaust in the classroom in case it alienates children from a Muslim background. An illustration of a similar dynamic at work is shown by the example of Denmark.

It is worth noting that historically Denmark is one of the most enlightened societies in Europe. During the Second World War it stood out as the one country where Nazis could find virtually no one who would collaborate with their anti-Jewish policies. That is why it is so sad to find out that a number of Danish school administrators have recently recommended that Jewish children should not enroll in their schools. It all began last week when Olav Nielsen, headmaster of Humlehave School in Odense, publicly stated that he will “refuse to accept the wishes of Jewish parents” to place their children at his school because it would create tension with the Muslim children. Other headmasters echoed this sentiment, claiming that they were putting children’s safety first. Apparently they are worried that the enrollment of Jewish pupils would upset those of Arab descent and that such tensions could provoke violence. Whatever their intention, these pedagogues were signaling the idea that in the interest of “health and safety” the ghettoization of Jewish children was a sensible idea.

Thankfully many Danes were horrified by this episode, as are many Italians who were shocked when they discovered that a group of trade unionists demanded the “boycott of all Jewish shops in central Rome linked to the Israelite community” on the grounds that these businesses “are tainted by blood.” And many decent people have felt more than a tinge of unease when confronted with the disturbing tendency for anti-Israeli protests to mutate into anti-Semitic ones. But European societies appear disoriented by events in the Middle East and unable to deal with their own problems, so they look for demons elsewhere.

First published by Pajamas Media, 17 January 2009

Schools Unleash ‘Eco-Kids’ to Badger Their Parents
Environmental educators want children to "nag, pester, bug, and torment" their elders into a green lifestyle.

Educators sometimes give the impression that they are in the business of protecting their pupils from the negative influence of their parents. Schools are sometimes devoted to the project of correcting the “outdated values” that parents have taught their children. That’s bad enough! However, in recent times policymakers and educators have also embraced the idea that through influencing children they can reeducate parents. Instead of parents socializing their children they advocate a reversal in roles.

It is in the domain of environmental education that the project of socialization in reverse is most systematically pursued. Many environmental educators advocate pester power as a contribution to changing the behavior of adults. David Uzell, a professor of environmental psychology at the University of Surrey, recalls attending an educational conference a few years ago where “everyone was absolutely convinced” that pester power was “the answer” to the problem of climate change. Uzell’s own research has focused on what he calls “inter-generational learning through the transference of personal experience typically from the child to the parent / other adults / home.”

This casual reference to the transference of experience of child to parent illustrates the normalization of the practice of socialization in reverse. In the U.S., socializing children through the promotion of environmental education has been practiced in schools for over a decade. The New York Times reports that a new cohort of “eco-kids” devoted to green values “try to hold their parents accountable at home” and adds how adults become defensive under the “watchful eye of the pint-size eco-police.” School districts across the U.S. have sought to capitalize on the idealism of “eco-kids” to integrate environmental values into whatever subjects they can.

Politicians and governments have embraced environmental education as a potentially effective instrument for influencing and managing the behavior of the public. In England one Labor MP, Malcolm Wicks, argues that environmental values “can act as vivid teaching aids in science lessons, civics lessons, geography lessons,” and through absorbing these lessons “children will then begin to educate the parents.” He adds that “in this way we can start to shift behavior.”

A similar aspiration was expressed by leading cabinet minister David Miliband, who argued that “children are the key to changing society’s long-term attitudes to the environment.” Miliband is convinced that “not only are they passionate about saving the planet but children also have a big influence over their families’ lifestyles and behavior.” Former Education Secretary Alan Johnson wrote that “children have a dual role as consumers and influences” and therefore “educating them about the impact of getting an extra pair of trainers for fashion’s sake is as important as the pressure they put on their parents not to buy a gas-guzzling car.”

A report entitled The Role of Schools in Shaping Energy-Related Consumer Behavior is devoted to elaborating a policy framework as to how this objective of promoting educational initiatives can impact parental behavior. One such initiative which involves 5,500 schools is called the Eco-Schools Scheme. Andrew Sutter, who runs Eco-Schools, believes that it provides an opportunity for children “to be the teachers and tell their parents what to do for a change.”

This point is underlined in a government report on energy. It states that the “installation of renewable technologies in schools can bring the curriculum to life in ways that textbooks cannot.” Moreover, it observes, “with schools often being the focal point of communities, the installation of renewables could help to shape attitudes in the wider community.” Not infrequently the mobilization of pester power to alter the behavior of adults acquires the character of a frenetic crusade. The book How to Turn Your Parents Green by James Russell incites children to “nag, pester, bug, torment, and punish people who are merrily wrecking our world.” Russell calls on children to “channel their pester power and issue fines against their parents and other transgressors.”

In previous times the practice of mobilizing children to police their parents’ behavior was confined to totalitarian societies. Authorities who attempted to harness youngsters’ simplistic views of good and evil are reminiscent of Orwell’s Big Brother. But who needs Big Brother when the then-prime minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, can assert that “on climate change, it is parents who should listen to their children”?

First published by Pajamas Media, 18 December 2008

The Crisis With No Name
Society's inability to make sense of the downturn is hampering what we really need: a major public debate about the economy.

What happens to political and public life in the aftermath of a destructive global economic crisis? The answer to that question depends on how the crisis is interpreted, who is blamed for it, and what system of meaning exists through which communities might make sense of misfortune and disasters. Whether crisis-ridden events provoke a mood of demoralisation and passivity, a search for radical solutions, a blind outburst of extremism, or simply a sense of fatalistic acceptance, depends on the meaning that society attaches to the experience.

One of the curious features of the current predicament is that we lack a commonly comprehensible language for making sense of the economic crisis. In line with the twenty-first century obsession with nature and the environment, and with personal health, the global crisis is often presented as ‘payback time’ for human greed. Many describe the collapse of the financial system as a kind of ‘natural correction’, as if a cycle of nature had gone awry.

Others use the metaphor of environmentalism to make sense of the destabilisation of the world economy: ‘financial tsunami’, ‘economic meltdown’, the ‘contagion of toxic debt’. From this perspective, a harsh regime of austerity comes to be recycled as a positive thing for our personal and environmental health. Some economists have suggested that, thanks to recessions, people have been able to live longer, because they eat fewer rich foods, exercise more, and live in a less polluted environment. These fantasies about recessions as ‘healthy’ have a lot of force in public debate today. The UK shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, recently informed the British public that the recession might be ‘good for us’ in many ways, because ‘people tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol… and spend time at home with their families’.

It is important not to confuse these attempts to endow the recession with positive connotations with the kind of displays of bloody-minded fortitude normally associated with the British ‘Blitz spirit’. Historically, the Blitz spirit was an affirmation of a commitment to fight, whereas those who brand the economic crisis as ‘good for us’ express a mood of low expectations in their demand that we should all embrace austerity. Of course, this celebration of the virtues of a ‘good recession’ is an affectation of those who know, and can take for granted the fact, that they will have a financially secure life in the coming years. It remains to be seen how much resonance their ‘good recession’ arguments will have over the next few months; but the very fact that such a fantasy has been so widely indulged by serious public figures exposes their psychic distance from the realities of economic hardship.

It is worth noting that, until relatively recently, leading politicians and public figures had some direct experience of a severe economic recession or even of depression. In the twentieth century, the devastating impact of economic crises was part of the folk knowledge of most people. Memories of post-Second World War austerity, the economic upheavals of the 1970s, deindustrialisation in the 1980s, and the recession of the early 1990s had a direct bearing on most people’s sense of security in the late twentieth century. It is only in recent decades that we have gained sufficient distance from the Great Depression of the 1930s to treat it as an object of nostalgia.

Today, the treatment of an economic crisis as something unusual, or potentially ‘positive’, is underwritten by the naive belief that economic problems could be managed through making relatively minor technical adjustments. Prosperity and growth meant that many policymakers drew the conclusion that major crises were a phenomenon of the past. Indeed, numerous influential commentators argued in recent years that the problem was not too little but too much growth.

Disconnection between politics and normal life

One of the most interesting features of contemporary public life is the palpable sense of disconnection between politics and normal life. The fact that some leading politicians can celebrate the health benefits of a recession is symptomatic of their aloofness from the issues that concern everyday people. While politicians go on about global warming, child obesity, healthy eating and terrorism, most people are concerned about mundane day-to-day problems to do with maintaining or improving the quality of their lives and ensuring that they and their family have a secure future.

Even before the arrival of the ‘credit crunch’, surveys showed that people’s anxieties about their family circumstances far outweighed their concern about terrorism and other global fears. However, people’s worries about their social status and economic security are rarely voiced, and have had only a minimal impact on public debate.

From time to time, political leaders sense that they are out of touch with popular opinion. New Labour’s refusal to hold a referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty is motivated by its sense of isolation from public opinion on this issue. Most of the time, the political class simply doesn’t know what is going on in the minds of the electorate. This became clear during the Glenrothes by-election in Scotland in November 2008. All the way up to the counting of the ballot papers, Labour believed that it had lost this relatively safe seat to the Scottish National Party. Even in this historically solid Fife constituency in Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s backyard, New Labour had little idea what the people were thinking. In fact, Labour won the seat comfortably.

During the 2005 General Election, the Conservative Party’s slogan ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ had a disconcerting effect on some of its opponents. In truth, this was a Tory bluff because, as we now know, they had no more idea than anyone else about what ‘you are thinking’. Yet many of their political opponents became worried that the Tories had managed to connect with something important, that they really did know what ‘you were thinking’, and worse, that you and the Tories agreed with one another. Commentators hinted darkly that the Tories’ campaign had gained resonance with sections of the electorate. It was suggested that some of the public were not disclosing their real thoughts about the big issues of the day to pollsters, and that beneath the surface they were silently responding to the Tory message.

This concern about public attitudes towards the Tories’ half-baked subliminal message shows just how far removed from society the British political class has become. In truth, none of them knows what you are thinking. Politicians engage with the public as if they were a different race, and look at us as being driven by narrow self-interest and motivated by unspeakable passions and depraved prejudices. They tend to believe, for example, that white English people are easily manipulated by racist and xenophobic propaganda, and that in response to casual prejudice young Muslims might join the ranks of Islamic terrorists. This was the view expressed in a recently leaked Home Office memorandum titled Responding to Economic Challenges. The memo said that one of the consequences of the recession might be rising crime rates and more anti-social behaviour. It warned that there ‘could also be a rise in people turning to extremist groups and racism’, and speculated that those who experienced racism might turn to terrorism.

Interestingly, in the subsequent public debate, there was little criticism of the contents of the memo, only of the ability of the Home Office to deal with the challenges thrown up in recession-hit Britain. Yet, from a sociological point of view, what was interesting about the memo was its speculative, fantasy character. It is clear that the Home Office, like its political masters in Downing Street, has little idea about how people feel about the current economic situation, and even less about how the public might respond to it in the future. The memorandum is based on models from the recession of 1991-1992 rather than any assessment of social attitudes today. Relying on such abstract schema saves the Home Office, and others, the trouble of engaging in the kind of public dialogue that might genuinely aid them in finding out what people are really thinking.

Recessionary politics

Until now, the political response to the economic crisis has been relatively muted. One reason for this is because most people have been caught unawares by the speed and scale of recent developments. The absence of serious public debate is also an outcome of the dearth of alternatives. For well over a generation, officials and experts have become addicted to the idea that ‘There Is No Alternative’. Individual observers may have had reservations about just how far de-regulation and credit expansion should go, but they generally accepted the idea that the economy was working. Many had even drawn the conclusion that the economy was working too well, and that the real problem was the ever-expanding system of production and consumption. Consequently, in many societies, economic issues became depoliticised.

The depoliticisation of economics has coincided with the politicisation of quality-of-life issues. In recent years, issues relating to wellbeing, consumption, health and the environment have emerged as a major focus of public debate. Often, the quality of life was counterposed to a concern with the quantities of life. At least rhetorically, wellbeing has been placed at the top of the UK government’s agenda, and numerous advocacy organisations claimed that the realisation of the objective of wellbeing for all required the restraint of economic growth.

With economic stagnation, deflation and rising unemployment, there is likely to be a shift in focus from quality-of-life issues to more basic bread-and-butter issues. There is little doubt that society will re-evaluate its priorities as it is forced to recognise the fact that the quality of our existence depends on achieving a level of economic security. It is unlikely that concern with quantity (of income, of consumption, and so on) will completely displace the values-oriented quality-of-life agenda. What’s more likely is that there will be a convergence between the more old-fashioned preoccupation with economics and the emphasis on quality-of-life matters. How such a convergence emerges, and what shape it will take, depends on the counter-crisis policies worked out by governments.

In the absence of any political clarity about the scale and impact of the economic crisis, the predominant official response is to treat it as a problem that is above or outside of politics. There have already been suggestions that the recession is not a party political matter. Labour MP Frank Field has argued for a coalition of parties supporting a National Government to deal with this ‘threat to the nation’. One downside of this approach is that it would likely inflame officialdom’s already-existing aversion to taking proper responsibility and elaborating meaningful policies for managing the crisis.

There is a danger that if the economic recession continues to be treated as a technical problem, the public will become even more detached from political life. The real problem is not, as the Home Office memorandum fears, a rise in anti-social behaviour, but rather the consolidation of a mood of helplessness and passivity. A society that turns in on itself will find it much harder to deal with the difficult challenges that lie ahead. Thankfully, the difficult predicament we face also provides an opportunity to revitalise public life. But that requires a more systematic attempt to put forward policies that can help society contain the worst effects of the crisis and outline the kind of economy fit for our needs and desires. A grown-up discussion of all the available options is the precondition for ensuring that we find a language through which we can politically engage with the crisis.

Confronting the crisis of thinking

One reason why we are faced with a crisis in thinking about the economic crisis is the existence of a culture of low expectations. This culture exerts an enormous influence on public debate in Western societies. In retrospect, it is evident that the focus on quality-of-life issues in recent years was inspired by a mood of suspicion towards economic growth and ambition. Recently, various anti-growth arguments – such as the idea that prosperity does not make people happy and, on the contrary, a preoccupation with work and material possessions has made many of us mentally ill – acquired the status of an incontrovertible truth. Sustainability was turned into a cultural ideal, and restraint became a new virtue of our times.

At the same time, the belief that society faced limits (natural ones) that could not be transgressed gained significant influence. With so much emotion invested in the idea that growth represents a threat to the planet, it is not surprising that the grave consequences of the economic downturn are not always appreciated.

Another reason why the response to the current crisis is so diffuse is because the crisis is often wrongly interpreted as a consequence of failures in the financial and credit system. Many commentators naively believed that the crisis was confined to the system of banking and finance, and that therefore the so-called ‘real economy’ would be only marginally affected by the recession. For a period of time, it was possible to maintain the illusion that this crisis would be confined to the financial sector, and that the ‘real economy’ would continue to carry on as before. However, the finance sector does not exist in a different universe to the rest of the economy. In recent times, the finance sector has come to exercise a significant, if not dominant, influence over economic life. It is intimately interwoven into all dimensions of economic life, and accounts for a growing share of total profit.

The expansion of credit is held responsible for the recession – yet it was the massive expansion of credit that made possible the global expansion of capital in the first place. Without the securitisation and financialisation of the economy, the accumulation of capital and a sense of prosperity could not have been maintained in Britain and the US. Outwardly it appeared that economies such as Britain’s and America’s were doing well during the past decade. The remarkable increase in paper value of property and financial instruments created the impression that economic life was going from strength to strength. But what the growth statistics obscured was that there was relatively little wealth creation in the West. During this period, capital investment and growth of productivity remained sluggish. It is worth noting that countries like Britain and America imported capital faster than they were exporting anything in return for it. These countries became addicted not only to capital imports from abroad, but also to relying on an unprecedented expansion of credit to maintain economic activity. One important consequence of the expansion of credit was the growth of the finance sector as an important component of the service sector.  By the time of the credit crunch, the financial sector accounted for around 30 per cent of the British economy. On both sides of the Atlantic, industry continued to decline.

Many commentators mistakenly talked about this era of massive credit expansion as the high tide of neo-liberalism. However, the de-regulation of the financial markets coincided with a regime of state intervention in economic life. In Britain, the public sector became the main source of new employment over the past decade. Around two thirds of the jobs created since 1999 have been funded through state expenditure. Once one takes into account the role of state expenditure and of credit expansion, the feeble character of the recent cycle of economic growth in the West becomes evident.

Any serious engagement with the contemporary crisis needs to refocus attention away from banking and finance and on to the rest of the economy. No society can continue indefinitely to consume more than it produces. The problem is not that the big deficit economies – the US, Britain, Spain, France, Italy – borrowed so heavily. The problem is that this credit fuelled the rise of property prices and unproductive consumption instead of serving as productive investment in infrastructure or the restructuring of economic life. Now, Western governments have adopted the narrow policy of trying to contain the downside of the contraction of credit. But attempting to stimulate the economy through new injections of credit is likely to perpetuate the conditions that led to the credit crunch in the first place. It is about time we had a public debate about the real economy, the economy itself, and began to consider such fundamental questions as how we might restructure and reorganise it. 

First published by spiked, 16 December 2008

Terror in Mumbai: the same old, same old
Claims that the attacks represent a new form of ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’ are infused with historical amnesia and fearmongering.

Major terrorist outrages, such as 9/11 and now Mumbai, are frequently followed by dire predictions that the world will never be the same again.

Time and again, the public is told that since 9/11 the world has changed, and we now live in a New Era of Terrorism. Similarly, after the terrible events in Mumbai, numerous commentators hinted that the world had entered a new phase of terror. ‘With the attacks in Mumbai, Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) has entered a new phase’, noted one American observer. Others claimed that the attack on Mumbai represented a new strategy that ‘brought together a diverse combination of terrorist activities in order to maximise the effect of their operation’.

However, experience shows that such claims about a ‘new age of terror’ or a ‘new phase of terrorism’ are usually symptomatic of a fundamental misreading of the situation. More depressingly, such claims distract communities from facing up to the real threats that confront them.

The fantasy of new terrorism

Numerous observers claim that the ‘new’ tactics and strategy of global terrorism represent a break with the practices of the past. This is historical amnesia. Indeed, the idea that some manifestation of terrorism is ‘new’ is as old as the 100-year-long debate about terrorism itself.

One British police officer reported in 1898 that ‘murderous organisations have increased in size and scope; they are more daring, they are served by the most terrible weapons offered by modern science, and the world is nowadays threatened by new forces which… may someday wreak universal destruction’.  In 1970, after a series of domestic terror incidents, the US News and World Report observed that ‘officials and citizens all across the country are wondering if the United States is entering a new and highly dangerous era’.  Five years later, Newsweek characterised 1975 as the ‘Year of Terror’.

‘If this is an age of terror, then it has become all the more important for us to understand exactly what it is that terrorism means’, wrote American historian David Fromkin in 1975.  Fromkin also believed that the world was confronting a new type of terrorism and was concerned that its ‘novelty’ had ‘not been perceived’.  ‘True, other ages have suffered from crime and outrage, but what we are experiencing today goes beyond such things’, he warned. Like many commentators around today, he fretted over the powerful technology that was available to the terrorist of the mid-Seventies, believing that ‘the bazooka, the plastic bomb, the submachine, and perhaps, over the horizon, the nuclear mini-bomb’ had led to a ‘transformation’ that ‘enabled terrorism to enter the political arena on a new scale’.

By the late 1990s, the idea that terrorism had become a qualitatively new threat was an integral part of the security doctrine of the United States. The US government’s 1997 Annual Defense Report argued that the terror threat had ‘changed markedly in recent years’.

This periodic discovery that terrorism represents a new and unprecedented danger is driven by an impulse to dramatise the terror threat. It is a confused response, which distracts attention from understanding the real level of danger, and which unwittingly and unhelpfully amplifies the threat of terrorism. Today, doom-mongering about terrorists with dirty bombs, chemical and biological agents and other catastrophic weapons has become so common that it is easy to forget that the real threat is far more mundane. The terrorists in Mumbai used old-fashioned ruthless guerrilla tactics, relying on an element of stealth and surprise. The weapons they used – guns and grenades – were far from hi-tech.

It is worth remembering that the terrorists responsible for 9/11 relied on Stanley knives and aircraft to accomplish their deed. And at a time when security experts are dreaming about global terrorists with access to weapons of mass destruction, the world is confronted with the revival of old-fashioned piracy off the shores of Somalia. Pirates using speedboats, like zealots randomly shooting at pedestrians in Mumbai, are enough of a problem without inventing apocalyptic scenarios, too.

The contrast between the real and fantasy threat of terrorism was captured well during the Mumbai outrage. On the very day that Mumbai came under attack from small groups of mobile gunmen, newspaper headlines in the UK warned the public that terrorists might infect Britain with bird flu. This scenario was contained in a report published by the Institute of Public Policy Research’s Commission of National Security for the Twenty-First Century. According to this fantasy document, the threat from pandemic diseases such as SARS and Avian Flu is growing all the time – and because of inadequate preparation, ‘a serious disease outbreak or bio-terrorism incident in the next 18 months could tip the global economy from serious recession into global depression’.

In line with Hollywood’s fantasy plots, the report invited us to imagine the possibility of a terrorist purchasing ‘genes for use in engineering of an existing and dangerous pathogen into a more virulent strain’.

So what is ‘new’ about the new terrorism?

There is very little that is genuinely ‘new’ about terrorism today. Those devoted to political violence have always sought to use the latest technologies in order to maximise their destructive impact. More than three decades ago, in 1972, a group of terrorists belonging to a right-wing sect called the Order of the Rising Sun were arrested after they were found to be in possession of a large quantity of epidemic typhus pathogens, with which they wanted to poison the water supplies of cities in the Mid West of the US.  Nor is there anything new in official concern about the proliferation of WMD. For almost a half a century, officials have been discussing how to deal with a catastrophic terrorist attack – yet in all this time, there is little empirical evidence that there has been a qualitative transformation in the terror threat.

The one event that observers continually point to as proof of our New Era of Terrorism is the attempt by members of the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, to launch a sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995. Although this millenarian sect did seek to cause mass casualties in Tokyo, fortunately, due to its inability to design an effective delivery system, only 12 passengers lost their lives. In one sense, the failure of the release of sarin in Tokyo can be interpreted as a good news story. It points to, as one writer puts it, ‘the difficulties in developing, producing and deploying biological agents’.  It is worth noting that although Aum Shinrikyo was a relatively sophisticated organisation, with access to scientific expertise and significant financial resources, it still failed to realise its objectives. One important assessment of this incident concluded that ‘the probability of a major biological attack by either a state or a sophisticated terrorist group seems remote’.

Nevertheless, the Aum Shinrikyo incident was quickly seized upon as the harbinger of a new era of catastrophic terrorism. In the US, the Senate Armed Services Committee launched its own inquest into the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Leading American politicians treated the incident almost as an attack on the US itself. Senator Richard Lugar said Americans had ‘every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear, chemical, or biological terrorism’. Subsequently, numerous studies insisted that the Tokyo attack represented the ‘crossing of a previously unthinkable line’ and showed that WMDs were ‘within the technical reach of sophisticated terrorist organisations’.

John Gearson, writing on ‘the nature of modern terrorism’, notes that after the Tokyo incident, ‘the way in which terrorism was understood changed forever’: ‘Terrorists had achieved the unthinkable and were now able to pose threats to states that previously only other states had.’ After Tokyo, terrorism ‘was said to have made a qualitative leap’ since for the first time a terrorist organisation was prepared to discharge materials of mass destruction . But more than a decade after the Aum Shinrikyo attack, it is clear that this assessment is entirely anticipatory in character. The evidence so far indicates that those keen to inflict violence on civilians still use more conventional weapons to create mass casualties.

Superficially, 9/11 might be interpreted as confirmation of the ‘catastrophic terrorism’ thesis. Yet one of the principal defining features of the ‘new terrorism’ – the use of WMDs – was conspicuously absent during 9/11. As John Mueller wrote in his book on terrorism scares, Overblown: ‘Not only were the 9/11 [attacks] remarkably low-tech, but they were something that could have happened long ago: both skyscrapers and airplanes have been around for a century now. In addition the potential for destruction on that magnitude is hardly new: any band of fanatical, well-trained, and lucky terrorists could have sunk or scuttled the Titanic and killed thousands.’

In retrospect, it is clear that the destruction of the World Trade Center was the outcome of tactics that have been deployed by terrorists for a very long time. As Gearson observes: ‘Instead of technologically sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, the superterrorists of 11 September utilised the long-established terrorist approach of careful planning, simple tactics and operational surprises to effect the most stunning terrorist “spectacular” in history.’ The violence inflicted on Mumbai is also a textbook example of careful coordination and operational surprises.

One of the most persuasive arguments used to distinguish the ‘new terrorism’ from traditional forms of terrorism is the claim that, today, terrorism is far more brutal, destructive and indiscriminate in its attitude towards human life. Specialists frequently counterpose the traditional terrorist, who was relatively selective in his choice of targets, to today’s perpetrator of catastrophic acts of mass casualty. However, this argument has been also restated since at least the 1970s. After noting that insurgent groups were historically selective in their choice of targets, a commentary written in the aftermath of the Palestinian attack on passengers at the Lod Airport reported that ‘most “revolutionaries” now… seem to consider indiscriminate slaughter a primary tactic and one of which they are proud’. The author added said ‘it is clear that such groups would not be deterred from nuclear terrorism by the fact that thousands of innocent and uninvolved people might die’.

Acts of apparently indiscriminate violence have a long history. As Alexander Spencer noted, ‘indiscriminate mass-casualty attacks have long been a characteristic of terrorism’. He gives numerous examples, such as the simultaneous bombings of the US and French barracks in Lebanon in 1983, which resulted in the deaths of 367 people; the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which killed 270 people; and the bombing of an Air India plane by a Sikh group, which resulted in 329 deaths.

At first sight, it is far from evident what has changed about terrorism. Virtually every characteristic associated with this new breed of destructive behaviour has been linked with terrorism in the past. However, the very fact that contemporary terrorism is perceived as ‘new’, uniquely dangerous and the greatest threat to global stability renders it a distinct phenomenon. What is most important about terrorism, as a social phenomenon, is how society responds to it. And the more dangerous that terrorism is perceived to be, the more dangerous it becomes. The impact of terrorism is determined by the way society reacts. If 10 to 15 armed men are turned into a new breed of super-terrorists, then society sends out the signal that it is powerless to deal with relatively routine acts of organised violence. Such a response only encourages further acts of violence; it inadvertently serves as an invitation to be terrorised. And that is one compelling reason why we should not make a drama out of a crisis.

First published by spiked, 1 December 2008

Parents of obese children charged with abuse in Britain
In England, it's not a question of whether the government should intrude in family life, but how and when.

During the past decade, the British government has adopted an interventionist stance towards the management of family life. It continually lectures mothers and fathers about how to bring up their children and it constantly criticizes parents for behaving in ways that run counter to the ethos of expert-approved child rearing. The government does not simply advise or provide information, it is also in the business of saving children from their parents.

In early November a six-year-old boy from Derby was taken into care by social workers for being overweight. This is the first time that obesity has been listed by social workers as one of the reasons for taking a child away from its family. But behind the scenes more and more families are targeted by social services. Last month it was reported that seven obese children have been put into care and that obesity was a factor in at least 20 child protection cases last year.

In recent years public officials and child protection experts have taken upon themselves to police the weight of youngsters. Many of them take the view that parents who allow their children to become overweight or obese are actually guilty of child abuse. Back in February 2007, when two men in Cambridgeshire were convicted of causing unnecessary suffering by allowing their dog to become obese, child protection entrepreneurs responded by inviting the state to react the same way to abusive parents. “We wouldn’t treat a dog this way,” argued Tam Fry of the Child Growth Foundation before stating that since child obesity is a form of abuse, parents should be held to account. Dr Tom Solomon, a doctor at Royal Liverpool University Hospital, pointed out that that since the state punishes parents who do not send their children to school, why not penalize them for making their kids fat?

During the past year, the crusade to expand the meaning of child abuse to encompass obesity has gained significant momentum. Only a few months ago, David Rogers, the public health spokesman for the Local Government Association, announced that “parents who allow their children to eat too much could be as guilty of neglect as those who did not feed their children at all.”

His big idea was to subject overweight youngsters to child protection procedures. The main outcome of this campaign is to encourage the surveillance of parental behavior. This approach was advocated by Dr Colin Waine, former head of the National Obesity Forum, who called for closer monitoring of children to avoid them being taken into care. He stated that “this would enable appropriate action to be taken so we eliminate the need for such drastic measures.” As if policing parents was not drastic enough!

Thankfully there are still some health professionals who are prepared to argue that obesity is not a child protection issue. My friend Dr Michael Fitzpatrick argues that it is illegitimate to equate bodily harm that is “the direct result of parental abuse” with long term health risks that are the “result of a complex (and poorly understood) combination of factors, including the wider ‘obesogenic’ environment — cheap, fast and fattening food, sedentary lifestyles, and so on — as well as the behavior of the child and her parents.”

The readiness with which officials and experts are prepared to accuse parents of abuse is symptomatic of a cultural climate where parents are not trusted to bring up their children. Since the Tony Blair years officials have opted for policies that rely on getting their hands on the nation’s toddlers before their parents get a chance to ruin them.

To counter what they perceive as the “parenting deficit” they promote the idea of “early intervention” in family life. The tone of the crusaders promoting state intrusion into private life have become more assertive. It was in this vein that former Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge insisted that the government has a “powerful” role to play in family life. She argued that “it’s not a question of whether we should intrude in family life, but how and when.”

No doubt as far as she is concerned policing overweight children is an exemplary way for the state to exercise its “powerful” role.

First published by Pajamas Media, 22 November 2008

Paranoid parenting
Why officialdom’s suspicion of adults is bad for children.

A few years after the publication of the first edition of my book Paranoid Parenting in 2001, I was flicking through a research report commissioned by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). I was very struck by one of the objectives outlined in the conclusion: the NSPCC should ‘avoid becoming too negatively-focused or critical of parents and parenting’, the report said.

The words that stuck in my mind were ‘too negatively’. Apparently, the NSPCC is all too aware that its public relations material projects a distorted and caricatured view of parents, and has now decided that it wants to be just negative enough rather than ‘too negative’. Of course, nobody wants to be too negative about parents and parenting. Nevertheless, politicians, policymakers and the child protection industry appear less and less inhibited about lecturing parents on their numerous failings.

In the seven years between the first and second editions of Paranoid Parenting (which is republished this month), childrearing has become a veritable obsession for policymakers. Problems that were once associated with the failures of society are increasingly blamed on parents. Month after month, reports blame an alleged parenting deficit for problems such as low achievement at schools, low self-esteem, drug-taking, obesity, crime and mental health problems.

Every policy proposal related to parenting appears more reckless than the last. A few months ago, David Rogers, the public health spokesman for the UK Local Government Association, announced that ‘parents who allow their children to eat too much could be as guilty of neglect as those who did not feed their children at all’. His big idea is to subject overweight youngsters to child protection procedures.

All the main political parties in Britain seem convinced that government should assume the role of a supernanny and train mothers and fathers to be responsible parents. Former UK children’s minister Margaret Hodge is unapologetic about this idea, arguing that government has a ‘powerful’ role to play in family life.

Parent-bashing is not confined to the domain of politics. Back in 2001, hectoring parents about their inability to manage their children’s behaviour or to provide their kids with a nutritious diet had not yet become a popular way to entertain the public. There were no TV shows such as Supernanny or The House of Tiny Tearaways to remind parents of their congenital defects on the childrearing front. Over the past five or six years, however, the notion that parental incompetence is quite normal, even widespread, has become deeply entrenched – especially in the TV schedules. One intelligent 36-year-old mother wrote to me recently: ‘I know it exploits my emotions, I know that I should not watch these shows – but I do, even though they make me feel shit.’ Sadly, the images and arguments that haunt her imagination have been embraced by significant sections of British society.

The perpetual politicisation of parenting has two destructive outcomes. The constant labelling of parenting as some kind of ‘problem’ undermines the confidence of mothers and fathers. Although the target audience of politicians is a minority of so-called dysfunctional parents, the depressing message our leaders communicate about the problems of childrearing has a disorienting impact on everybody. Consequently, the numerous helpful initiatives designed to ‘support’ parents do anything but reassure us – they simply encourage the public to become even more paranoid about parenting. The second regrettable outcome of the politicisation of childrearing is that it has intensified our sense of insecurity and anxiety about virtually every aspect of children’s lives and experiences.

The paranoia is getting worse

At the turn of this century, it was evident that children had become subject to an obsessive culture of childrearing. At the time, Paranoid Parenting documented the growing tendency to extend adult supervision into every aspect of children’s lives. It was apparent that ‘outdoors’ had become a no-go area for many youngsters, and that the majority of parents did not even allow their offspring to walk to school on their own.

The idea that children were too vulnerable to be allowed to take risks had already become entrenched. Many readers of my book shared with me their hope that the regime of child protection would gradually give way to more relaxed and balanced attitudes. Little did they suspect that paranoia towards the safety of children was about to expand even further and encompass even children’s experiences that it had hitherto not touched.

Who would have imagined that British children would be prevented from pursuing the age-old custom of conkering? Many adults were rightly shocked and bemused when a few local authorities introduced a new policy of ‘tree management’: a euphemism for preventing children from climbing on chestnut trees or playing with conkers. More than any other bans introduced in subsequent years, the attempt to discourage children from playing with chestnuts symbolised the relentless drive to diminish young people’s experience of the outdoors. At the time, many people sneered at the busybodies who decided that children were not fit to go near conkers. Today, however, when local authorities chop the branches off horse chestnut trees to save children from this terrible danger there is barely a murmur of protest.

In recent years, banning children from activities that appear remotely adventurous has become an institution of British political life. It seems that kids are so feeble that we must protect them from everything. Earlier this month, a teacher informed me that children in her school are actively discouraged from running around or playing ball games during break time. Her rationale for promoting this anti-activity ethos was that ‘someone could easily get hurt’.

Traditional children’s games are disappearing because experts claim that they are too dangerous. Some primary schools have banned tag during break time, while some have got rid of contact sports. In January 2007, Burnham Grammar School banned impromptu football in order to prevent young people being hit by stray balls. The headteachers argued that pupils were ‘kicking balls quite hard at each other’. In February 2007, St John’s primary near Lincoln banned games like kiss chase and tag because staff felt that such activities were too rough.

Obsession with paedophilia

Suspicion towards adult motives has become a pathology in British society. Numerous informal rules have been introduced to prevent adults from coming into direct physical contact with kids. Even nursery workers feel that their actions are under constant scrutiny. Adult carers have not been entirely banned from applying suncream to children; some still follow their human instinct and do what they believe is in the best interest of the child. But frequently, such practices require formal parental consent: it is now commonplace for nurseries and schools to send out letters to parents asking for their signed consent to allow teachers to put suncream on their child.

Some schools would rather that teachers had no physical contact with their pupils at all, and insist that either the parent or the child applies the suncream. Schools now state in their handbooks for parents that ‘it is most helpful if children are able to apply their own suncream’! Some nurseries have sought to get around this problem by asking their employees to use sprays rather than to rub suncream on children’s bodies. One former nursery worker told me she packed in her job after she was ‘banned’ from taking the kids in her care to the toilet on her own.

There is now an informal ban on adults taking pictures of children. Although taking photos is not against the law, many petty officials have decided to take the law into their own hands. As a father, I resent the climate of hysteria that makes it difficult for parents to take photos of their children during school plays or concerts and sporting activities. I would love to have a shot of my son Jacob running with the ball, but after four years of competitive football I still don’t have a single picture of him in action.

In January, a friend of mine who decided to take a photo of his son during a Saturday football match was accused of gross irresponsibility. He was lucky, however: the referee at least allowed the game to continue. There are numerous reports of officials stopping play when they spot a parent taking pictures. One referee stopped an under-15s match in Ashford and instructed both team managers to confiscate parents’ cameras. ‘You can’t take photographs, it’s child protection’, he lectured a parent.

When it comes to sport, many parents have given up on the idea of taking snapshots for the family album. They don’t want to end up in the same predicament as a married couple who took pictures of a junior rugby game on a sports field in Surrey: they were detained by club officials and were later visited at home by the police.

Time to fight back

The promotion of paranoia in relation to every aspect of children’s lives accomplishes the very opposite of what it sets out to do. When youngsters are protected from risks, they miss out on important opportunities to learn sound judgments and build their confidence and resilience. The promotion of suspicion towards adult behaviour seriously undermines the ability of grown-up people to play a constructive role in the socialisation of youngsters. The estrangement of adults from the world of children has the perverse effect of leaving youngsters to their own devices and diminishing their security.

We do not have to abide by the rules concocted by self-appointed experts intent on policing how we engage with children. Nor do we have to acquiesce to a culture that denigrates parental competence and fuels suspicion about adult motives towards children. Although none of us can opt out of the culture that we inhabit, we can challenge it. We can challenge it in small ways, by protesting against the many idiotic but all-too-insidious bans that aim to restrict children’s freedom or adults’ access to youngsters. We can challenge it by encouraging our children to develop a positive attitude towards the outdoors and the adult world. Most important of all, we can challenge it by working together as active collaborators committed to providing more opportunities for children to explore their world.

CHERYL’S STORY

We were so excited to be taking our baby son swimming for the first time. We picked a quiet, midweek morning to take him to our local swimming pool because we didn’t want him to be scared by lots of commotion and splashing on his first venture into the water.

The children’s pool was totally empty that morning so we had the place to ourselves. Our son, Frank, took to the water like a fish and he splashed and played joyfully. I grabbed my camera to take a snap of him playing, but before I had pressed the button, a lifeguard was by my side warning me that I was not allowed to take photographs in the pool area.

I was incredulous. I tried to dismiss him with a joke; after all there were no other children in the water, the photo was just to be of my husband and son playing and splashing together. He insisted, and the more he told me that it was ‘just the policy’, the angrier I became. He told me that we would all be asked to leave if we did not observe this regulation.

I was indignant. How dare they prevent me from capturing this precious memory? I wanted to take the photo anyway, but my husband pointed out that we would ruin Frank’s first swim by doing so and he would not be allowed to come to the pool in the future. We left feeling slightly unclean. What harm did they think we would do with a photograph of our child’s first swim?

First published by spiked, 21 November 2008

Nine out of ten dogmas
The assumptions, agendas and distinctly iffy data behind those ubiquitous words, 'research shows'.

As someone devoted to academic research, I feel increasingly embarrassed when I encounter the words “research shows” in a newspaper article. The status of research is not only exploited to prove the obvious, but also to validate the researcher’s political beliefs, lifestyle and prejudice.

So last month a study by John Alford of Rice University proved that right-wing Americans are likely to be far more nervous than left-wing counterparts. Liberal readers will be delighted to learn that they are typically relaxed.

We know this is cutting-edge research because he interviewed as many as 46 people. There was also good news last month for people of faith. University of Oxford researchers have discovered that belief in God works as a wonderful form of pain relief. After testing 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists, they concluded that believers can draw on reservoirs of spirituality to endure suffering with greater fortitude than unbelievers.

This was not news to the Anglican Bishop of Durham, who observed that the “practice of faith should, and in many cases does, alter the person you are”. It also turns people into honest, generous, trusting citizens, according to a study published in Science in October.

If you are offended that your lifestyle and belief have not been validated by gold-standard research, you will be delighted to know that there must be a study out there that proves your moral worth. Liberals may be more chilled out, but right-wing folk are nicer. There is now an important corpus of research that demonstrates that a right-wing outlook disposes people to be happy and to act philanthropically.

They are even less materialistic than those shopping addicts on the left. Peter Schweizer, in his book Makers And Takers, provides incontrovertible data to show that liberals are twice as likely to resent others’ success. Conservatives also do well in the nurturing stakes; they hug children more often than frigid lefties.

Thankfully, there is robust research out there that challenges the association of nurturing with a right-wing mindset. The Democratic Party’s favourite academic, George Lakoff, is certain that liberals are inspired by the values of “empathy and responsibility”.

The politicisation of research is not a new development. Throughout the 20th century, advocacy research served to promote moral crusades and political agendas. Cold War-era psychologist Hans Eysenck reassured his refined readers that “middle-class Conservatives are more tender-minded than working-class Conservatives; middle-class Liberals more tender-minded than working-class Liberals; middle-class Socialists more tender-minded than working-class Socialists and even middle-class Communists are more tender-minded than working-class Communists”.

In current times the kind of prejudice promoted by Eysenck is recycled through the dark art of brain research. Scientists can now prove that contrasting political outlooks are related to differences in how the brain processes information. Scientists at NYU and UCLA believe that their experiments show that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of the way their brains function. They too have numbers - liberals are 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to indicate activity in the brain circuits that engage with conflict.

Despite its links with the past, advocacy research has now acquired an unprecedented significance in Western culture. One important driver of its expansion is the growing significance that people attach to their lifestyles. The very subjects that advocacy research addresses suggest that lifestyle issues such as emotional orientation, parenting styles and the management of relations have become increasingly politicised.

In a world where lifestyle has unprecedented significance, people seek to endow it with moral worth. So it matters when a study concludes that children of gay parents “do just fine” or that single mothers’ sons can succeed at school, or that marriage protects elderly adults from mental illness.

Naturally, academics also take their lifestyles very seriously. But it is important that we resist the temptation to discover the moral worth of our lifestyle through our research. And maybe we should take the lead in informing the public that when they see the words “research shows”, they should assume the role of a sceptic.

First published by Times Higher Education, 20 November 2008

Why moral opportunists are exploiting this tragedy
The death of Baby P has been turned into a morality tale through which people can express their outrage and affirm their decency.

Baby P, who died in Haringey, London, in August 2007, is the latest child victim to exercise the imagination of British society. Every now and then, a brutal and depraved killing or death of an infant is turned into a morality play through which people can express outrage and affirm their sense of decency.

The tendency, over the past week, to transform the tragic death of a 17-month-old boy into a national spectacle is symptomatic of the impoverished state of contemporary public discourse. This time, the usual dramatisation of the issue of child protection is being linked to the stigmatisation of poor, marginalised families living on benefits – as if the sort of cruelty visited upon Baby P is quite normal in the very poor parts of Britain.

There is no doubt that there are many so-called ‘dysfunctional people’ who inhabit disorganised and fragmented family units. But what happened to Baby P should not be presented as an extreme manifestation of the kind of abuse that occurs routinely in isolated, disorganised communities who subsist on welfare. Whatever the numerous problems that afflict such communities, they should be distinguished from the fortunately very rare violent treatment of Baby P.

It would also help if moral entrepreneurs would stop using Baby P as an advert for their various crusades. There are those who argue that this terrible event shows the need for social workers to act more decisively and to stop giving parents the benefit of the doubt. They believe that if more children are taken into care, then the fate and lives of youngsters living in precarious circumstances will improve. For many members of the child protection industry, Baby P’s terrible demise reinforces their faith in ‘early intervention’ into family life.

However, the expansion of state intervention into family life is one of the most stupid ideas in contemporary society – yet it is one that has captured the imagination of our current government. In truth, the state has proven to be uniquely ill-suited both for understanding and responding to the problems that families face.

It is worth noting that Baby P was not only on the at-risk register; he was also visited 60 times by a veritable army of child professionals. That means, averaged out, he was seen virtually every week of his short life by a professional early interventionist. The inability of these 60 good people to grasp the tragedy unfolding before their eyes cannot be reduced to a question of professional incompetence alone. Nor is it the result of ‘bad practice’ or ‘poor process’; this is simply how a bureaucratic system of intervention works in contemporary Britain.

Others argue that the Baby P tragedy proves the need to promote marriage and make it more difficult for people to divorce. Yet given that most people living in precarious circumstances do not get married in the first place, and the vast majority of them do not go on to batter or seriously neglect children, it is difficult to see what good could be achieved from a policy that bears so little relationship to reality.

Instead of trying to prove a point or draw policy lessons from Baby P’s death, we need to find the maturity to recognise that, from time to time, tragic events like this cannot be avoided. What can be avoided, however, is the kind of cheap moralising that has dominated the response to Baby P’s demise. We really need to clear the air and learn to treat exceptional cases of human depravity as precisely that: exceptional.

Then we can move on, and maybe learn to deal with the more banal – yet potentially very destructive – forces of social and moral disorientation that are impacting on many of our communities today.

First published by spiked, 18 November 2008

We keep children safe to let them run wild
British adults have become estranged from the world of children. Many of them, according to a survey released yesterday, would go so far as to admit that they are scared of youngsters.

About half of 2,021 grown-ups polled by YouGov for Barnardo’s indicated that children should be regarded as dangerous; a majority of them went so far as to state that children behaved like animals.

This survey is confirmed by interviews I have carried out with men and women in their thirties and forties, who frequently acknowledge that they feel intimidated and sometimes scared when they encounter groups of adolescents.

At first sight, this perception of children does not make any sense. How can grown-ups possess such depressing attitudes towards youngsters when we are meant to be more “child centred” than ever before?

The truth is that the negative sentiments are the direct consequence of the mistrust and suspicion fuelled by the prevailing paranoid regime of child protection. It is our obsessively protective parenting culture that is responsible for the erosion of inter-generational relationships.

Last week, we discovered that music teachers have been advised not to touch their pupils, to protect themselves from allegations of abuse.

Meanwhile, numerous informal rules have been introduced to prevent adults coming into direct physical contact with children and these unofficial guidelines have been institutionalised in some nurseries.

One nursery carer told me that she no longer embraces her toddlers because she fears her action could be misinterpreted. If that’s how a professional teacher feels, is it any surprise that adults are anxious about interacting with other people’s children?

We rarely come into contact with children other than our own. A crying five-year-old is no longer picked up and reassured by a nearby adult.

And a six-year-old boy who misbehaves will not be told off and reprimanded by grown-up passers-by. Children always test boundaries, act naughtily and challenge adult authority. And that’s how it should be.

But these days, children’s behaviour is no longer contained and controlled through the response of adults. Childcare has become entirely privatised: the neighbour, the shopkeeper, the child’s friend’s father and even the aunt no longer has a role in the upbringing of a child.

This growing disconnection between the generations fuels the confused response that adults have towards children.

The estrangement of adults from childhood is caused by many factors: the growth of single households, of childlessness, of having children late in life, the rise of individuation.

But the principal cause is mistrust. Fuelled by policies that insist that millions of adults are police-checked, such mistrust undermines the traditional qualities of spontaneous compassion and commitment.

Adults are implicitly encouraged to avoid taking responsibility for other people’s children. But if children are taught to regard grown-ups as strangers who are likely to be dangerous, it becomes difficult for adults to carry out their role of guiding and socialising the young.

Moreover, children pick up the signal that adults are unlikely to be worth very much respect. Yet the assumption of adult responsibility for children is the precondition for socialising them.

Nowadays, the real damage begins when children are as young as four or five. Their behaviour is uncontained by the intervention of responsible grown-ups.

A long time before they become teenagers, children know that they face no sanctions from anyone other than their parents. Is it any surprise that a minority will come to regard the absence of adult intervention as an invitation to bad behaviour?

Consequently, there is now an assumption that grown-ups have no responsibility for dealing with the public behaviour of adolescents. One likely consequence is the growth of anti-social behaviour.

But what is potentially a much graver outcome is further inter-generational disconnection. Unable to give meaning to adult authority, many grown-ups cannot interact with youngsters.

Many indicate that they do not like children and would prefer to live in a child-free environment. This is a problem we have brought on ourselves.

However, we do not have to accept the prevailing disconnection. Adults who are prepared to act like grown-ups must challenge the petty rules that discourage their contact with children.

We need to reaffirm the primacy of adult responsibility for the welfare of young people and act on an instinct of compassion, instead of irrational fear.

First published by Daily Telegraph, 18 November 2008

The Battle for Truth
The debate about truth should not be confused with the conflict between religion and science.

At the London Battle of Ideas, 1-2 November 2008, Frank Furedi debated the Battle for Truth with Professor Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick; Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason; and Professor David Jones, author of Approaching the End: a theological exploration of death and dying.

Watch the debate on Fora TV here. 

First published by Fora TV, 14 November 2008

Stop this primitive search for scapegoats
Everyone from ‘extreme capitalists’ to ‘the Jews’ is being blamed for the recession. This gets us nowhere.

A major world event such as the current economic recession always creates a demand for explanations. Unfortunately, today the demand for answers quickly gives way to an obsessive desire to avoid taking responsibility. Public figures who tend to suffer from the disease of Responsibility Aversion continually assure us that ‘it wasn’t me’, before pointing the finger of blame at someone else.

So President George W Bush blamed easy credit for his America’s difficulties. President-elect Barack Obama denounced the economic policy of the Republicans for creating the mess. And his opponent in the elections earlier this month, John McCain, attacked the regulators for creating the crisis.

In Britain, Tory leader David Cameron never tires of denouncing Labour prime minister Gordon Brown for the country’s ‘broken economy’. But Brown is not having any of it. He has rounded on the irresponsibility of the financial sector. And like most national leaders, he insists that he is helpless in the face of external market forces. ‘It’s the global economy, stupid’, he remarked. Meanwhile, in Australia, Kevin Rudd has blamed global financial forces and ‘extreme capitalism’ for landing us all in this mess.

Responsibility Aversion often leads to an even more ominous tactic: searching for scapegoats. The leaders of France, Germany and Russia claim that America is responsible for the global recession. This is also the view of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who went a step further and recycled history’s favourite scapegoat. He stated that the financial crisis was the fault of a ‘small number of acquisitive and evasive people’. Which is another way of saying that behind the crisis lurks the greedy palm of Shylock.

Jews are not the only targets of racially motivated conspiracy theories. In the US, some hold ethnic minorities responsible for the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. They claim that misguided liberal policymakers encouraged easy credit to black and Hispanic borrowers, who then ended up with a disproportionate percentage of sub-prime loans.

At a time of economic uncertainty conspiracy theorists can readily draw on the historic repertoire of anti-Jewish fantasies. Did you know that just before its collapse, Lehman Brothers transferred $400billion to three Israeli banks? Such anti-Semitic stories about nefarious Jewish financial manipulation are widely promoted on white supremacist and jihadist websites.

Mustafa al-Fiqqi, head of the Egyptian parliamentary foreign liaison committee, is convinced that the economic crisis is a ‘new kind of conspiracy’. But as he develops his argument it is evident that, far from being new, this is the same old conspiracy fantasy. ‘It would be wrong to assume that the Jewish mind is not involved and implicated in these developments’, he notes. And it’s also the same old, same old as far as Umayma al-Jahama, a lecturer at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia, is concerned. She sees history repeating itself. As in the past, so today the instigators of the financial collapse ‘remained hidden behind the scenes’. This Saudi academic detects the malevolent influence of the Rothschild family behind the crisis today, as in the past.

The desire to discover invisible scapegoats – to argue that complex realities are the fault of some malevolent actor – is motivated by a primitive search for simplistic answers. In the Dark Ages, people’s illnesses and epidemics of plague were blamed on evil witches who were often burned at the stake. In Stalinist Russia, the phrase ‘it is no accident’ was routinely used to imply that every negative event was really an act of carefully orchestrated collusion among hostile forces.

Conspiracy theory offers an explanation of the causes and motives for otherwise inexplicable developments. It is difficult to believe or accept that the decisions made by policymakers have consequences that are very different from their original intent. Even educated politicians find it difficult to acknowledge that they lack the policy instruments with which they can predict or control the workings of economic forces.

Conspiracy theories are appealing because they provide us with a semblance of control over powerful forces that influence our lives. Even before the present financial crisis, acts of misfortune were frequently associated with intentional malevolent behaviour. Nothing happens by accident, apparently. Human malevolence is suspected to be at work behind the death of Princess Diana in a car crash, or when there is a sudden electrical blackout. Unexplained illnesses or a spillage of chemicals are frequently blamed on the self-serving irresponsible acts of politicians, public and business figures, doctors, scientists; all kinds of professionals have been held responsible for all sorts of freak occurrences.

An economic crisis tends to fuel anxiety and fear about an uncertain future. In such circumstances people naturally attempt to make sense of the powerful destructive forces that affect their lives. One of the most important ways in which an absence of meaning is experienced is the feeling that the individual is manipulated and influenced by hidden powerful forces – not just by spin doctors, subliminal advertising and the media, but also by powers that have no name.

Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil figures pull all the strings. That is why we frequently attribute unexplained physical and psychological symptoms to unspecific forces caused by the food we eat, the water we drink, an extending variety of pollutants and substances transmitted by new technologies, and other invisible processes. As a result, global warming is not simply a climatic phenomenon but an all-purpose evil that can account for a bewildering variety of destructive events.

Thankfully, at present, the insidious conspiracy fantasies have only a marginal influence over the public in Western societies. Which is why curbing our addiction to the blame game is so important. Public figures have a responsibility to own up to the fact they, too, along with the greedy bankers and narrow-minded market makers, were all too happy to go along with the regime of low interest rates and the ethos of easy money. They need to acknowledge their own shortsighted take on the economic cycle. Instead of avoiding it, they should take responsibility for the many difficult decisions that will have to be made in the years ahead. Having a grown-up conversation with the public is the best antidote to preventing an epidemic of conspiratorial fantasies.

First published by spiked, 11 November 2008

Obama en de teloorgang van de zwijgende meerderheid
Decennialang richtten de Republikeinen zich op de ’zwijgende meerderheid’. En met groot succes. Intussen verzuimden ze om een coherente politieke identiteit uit te werken. Met als resultaat dat ze nu de jongste generaties zijn kwijtgeraakt.

Download this article in .pdf here.

First published by De Verdieping Trouw, 8 November 2008

Obama and the fall of ‘the silent majority’
The election of Obama brings to an end an important chapter in America’s culture wars. But will it create the space for a new political debate?

The context and the timing of the 2008 American presidential election make it difficult to come to any firm conclusions about its meaning, or what its long-term legacy will be.

It was always clear that the failures of the Bush presidency would influence the outcome of this contest. Indeed, the low esteem in which a significant section of the electorate holds Bush today meant that both McCain and Obama considered it pointless even to debate his years in office. Furthermore, the final phase of the 2008 election coincided with the collapse of the financial markets, which had the effect of alienating the public even further from the Republicans. In such circumstances, it was always going to be almost impossible for the Republicans to win this election.

In recent times, challengers to incumbents have tended not ‘to win’ elections positively so much as those holding office have tended to lose them. However, what is interesting about this election is that not only did the incumbent party clearly lose, but Obama decisively won on his own account.

The election of Obama heralds the erosion of the Republican Party’s ‘silent majority’ strategy as well as bringing to an end an important chapter in America’s culture wars. The term ‘silent majority’ was promoted by former President Richard Nixon; in a speech in November 1969 he applied it to those people who respected American institutions, did not participate in anti-Vietnam demonstrations, and who were appalled by the counterculture of the 1960s.

The term ‘silent majority’ had very clear populist connotations. These were people who were held in contempt by the cultural elites and whose sentiments and interests were ignored by Hollywood and the media. The term also contained unspoken assumptions about the racial fears of both middle-class and lower-income and particularly suburban whites. It signalled the idea that it was okay to feel insecure about the implications of the civil rights revolution and to oppose the ‘unreasonable’ demands associated with the aspiration of black people for a better life.

During the past 40 years, the Republican strategy of cultivating the silent majority proved remarkably successful in consolidating a base of support for the party. Its ability to attract even blue-collar Democrats in the 1980s demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach. However, the appeal to the silent majority was always fundamentally defensive in its orientation. It spoke to people who were worried about the impact of change on their lives; it tended to represent change as a negative and hostile thing. And in a world of rapid and constant change, such an outlook could provide very little guidance to people facing everyday practical problems. Until recent times, the incoherent and shallow character of the ideas contained in the ‘silent majority’ approach did not much matter because, in many respects, this was indeed a silent conversation.

However, the silent and taken-for granted nature of this constituency’s views and sentiments deprived them of any political, intellectual and ultimately cultural influence or coherence. From the outside, the silent majority was perceived by friend and foe alike as a stable block with fixed ideas. But the very fact that it relied on unspoken sentiments, particularly on the subject of race, meant that it lacked a capacity to influence American society in any significant way. Indeed, although most commentators failed to notice this fact, the group labelled ‘the silent majority’ was itself coming under the influence of the cultural elite’s views and attitudes, as institutionalised through education, the media and other institutions.

The very fact that the passions that influenced the silent majority could not be openly articulated betrayed a sense of confusion, bad faith, even guilt. Consequently, even the influence of racial fears began to diminish. And although people could still be driven by their individual prejudices, the strength of race as a public and political force gradually declined. Indeed, for some time the political significance of race has become less important than most analysts and commentators have believed.

Obama’s victory is testimony to the diminished significance of race. Obama did not win the majority of white voters. But his support among whites is equal to the votes achieved by the last three white Democratic presidential candidates and represents a slight improvement on the number won by 2004 Democratic nominee, John Kerry. The exit polls indicate that Obama received 40 per cent of the votes of white men and a significant majority of the younger white people’s votes. More significantly, he did remarkably well among those who were formerly part of the silent majority. He succeeded in gaining significant support from white voters in working-class areas and in many key white suburbs. He carried areas like Cambria County in Western Pennsylvania, a region dominated by white blue-collar workers. And he even won Virginia, home to the capital of the Confederacy.

The politicisation of cultural differences, which gave meaning to the silent majority, has blown up in the faces of the founders and representatives of this silent group of people. Whereas in the past the Nixon critique of the liberal media and the cultural elites could mobilise significant support, today such critiques fail to provide the Republicans with any political momentum. In fact, in the past decade the liberal cultural elites have gone on the offensive and have embraced the culture war with relish. They have successfully discredited the all-too-easy target of the Bush administration. They also ran an effective campaign against Sarah Palin and managed to contain her impact on the electorate.

The unspoken assumptions of the silent majority are no match for the very public and vociferous cultural values of the silent majority’s opponents in the liberal elite. For many decades, the strategy of cultivating a silent constituency spared the Republicans the trouble of having to put forward a coherent political identity that might have engaged and inspired the public. As a result, they have lost the younger generations. Their support among Hispanics – the fastest growing constituency in America – has disintegrated. The Republicans have lost support in traditional red states in the South, Midwest and Rocky Mountains, too. Obama has a larger mandate than any Democratic president-elect since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

The election also demonstrates that America is No Country For Old Men. The only group where Obama failed to make any headway was among senior citizens. This is the constituency that is most intimidated by change and least likely to disassociate itself from the unspoken values of the silent majority. Of course, their defiant stand against the temper of the times can also be interpreted as an obituary to the silent majority.

The disintegration of silent-majority populism represents a positive development. It might encourage public debate to acquire a more open and reflective character. The only downside of this development is that it was in part brought about by the influence of the narrow-minded anti-populism of America’s cultural oligarchy. Their success in demonising smalltown America and its unenlightened rednecks has often been assisted by prejudices that are in fact the mirror image of those held by their opponents. However, hopefully the fluidity that has been introduced into public life through the course of this election will create opportunities for debating issues of substance, rather than hiding behind cultural caricatures.

First published by spiked, 5 November 2008

When the bucks stop, just point the finger
A major event such as the present global recession always creates a demand for explanations.

Unfortunately, today the demand for an answer quickly gives way to an obsessive impulse to avoid responsibility. Public figures who tend to suffer from the disease of responsibility aversion continually assure us that “it wasn’t me” before they point the finger of blame.

So President George W. Bush blamed easy credit for his country’s difficulties. Barack Obama denounced the economic policy of the Republicans for creating the mess. His opponent, John McCain, has attacked the regulators for the crisis.

In Britain, Tory leader David Cameron never tires of denouncing Gordon Brown for the country’s “broken economy”. But Brown is not having any of this. Brown has rounded on the irresponsibility of the financial sector. And like most national leaders he insists he is helpless in the face of external market forces. “It’s the global economy, stupid,” he remarked.

In Australia, Kevin Rudd blames global financial forces and “extreme capitalism”.

Responsibility aversion often leads to the more ominous tactic of searching for scapegoats. The leaders of France, Germany and Russia claim the US is responsible for the global recession. This is also the view of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who also went a step further and recycled history’s favourite scapegoat. He stated that the financial crisis was the fault of a “small number of acquisitive and evasive people”. Which is another way of saying that behind the crisis lurks the greedy palm of Shylock.

Jews are not the only targets of racially motivated conspiracy theories. In the US some hold minorities responsible for the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. They claim that misguided liberal policymakers encouraged easy credit to black and Hispanic borrowers who then ended up with a disproportionate percentage of sub-prime loans.

At a time of economic uncertainty conspiracy theorists can readily draw on the historic repertoire of anti-Jewish fantasies. Did you know that just before its collapse Lehman Brothers transferred $400 billion to three Israeli banks? Such anti-Semitic stories about nefarious Jewish financial manipulation are widely promoted on white supremacist and jihadist websites. Egyptian parliamentary foreign liaison committee head Mustafa al-Fiqqi is convinced that the economic crisis is a “new kind of conspiracy”. But as he develops his argument it is evident that far from new, it’s the same old conspiracy fantasy. “It would be wrong to assume that the Jewish mind is not involved and implicated in these developments,” he notes. It’s the same old, same old as far as Umayma al-Jahama, a lecturer at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia, is concerned. She sees history repeating itself. As in the past, so today the instigators of the financial collapse “remained hidden behind the scenes”. This Saudi academic detects the malevolent influence of the Rothschild family behind the crisis today as in the past.

The desire to discover invisible scapegoats—to argue that complex realities are the fault of some malevolent actor—is motivated by a primitive search for simplistic answers. In the Dark Ages, people’s illnesses and epidemics of plague were blamed on evil witches who were often burned at the stake. In Stalinist Russia, the phrase “it is no accident” was routinely used to imply that every negative event was really an act of carefully orchestrated collusion among hostile forces.

Conspiracy theory offers an explanation of the causes and motives for otherwise inexplicable developments. It is difficult to believe or accept that the decisions made by policymakers have consequences that are very different from their original intent. Even educated politicians find it difficult to acknowledge they lack the policy instruments with which they can predict or control the workings of economic forces.

Conspiracy theories are appealing because they provide us with a semblance of control over powerful forces that influence our lives. Even before the present financial crisis, acts of misfortune were frequently associated with intentional malevolent behaviour. Nothing happens by accident. Human malevolence is suspected to be at work behind the death of Diana, princess of Wales, in a car crash or when there is a sudden electrical blackout. Unexplained illnesses or a spillage of chemicals are frequently blamed on the self-serving irresponsible acts of politicians, public and business figures, doctors, scientists; indeed, all professionals.

An economic crisis tends to fuel anxiety and fear about an uncertain future. In such circumstances people naturally attempt to make sense of the powerful destructive forces that affect their existence. One of the most important ways in which an absence of meaning is experienced is the feeling that the individual is manipulated and influenced by hidden powerful forces, not just by spin doctors, subliminal advertising and the media but also by powers that have no name.

Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil figures pull all the strings. That is why we frequently attribute unexplained physical and psychological symptoms to unspecific forces caused by the food we eat, the water we drink, an extending variety of pollutants and substances transmitted by new technologies and other invisible processes. As a result, global warming is not simply a climatic phenomenon but an all-purpose evil that can account for a bewildering variety of destructive events.

Thankfully, at present, the insidious conspiracy fantasies have only a marginal influence over the public in Western societies. Which is why curbing our addiction to the blame game is so important. Public figures have a responsibility to own up to the fact they too, along with the greedy bankers and narrow-minded market makers, were all too happy to go along with the regime of low interest rates and the ethos of easy money. They need to acknowledge their own short-sighted take on the economic cycle. Instead of avoiding it, they should take responsibility for the many difficult decisions that will have to be made in the years ahead. Having a grown-up conversation with the public is the best antidote to preventing an epidemic of conspiratorial fantasies.

First published by The Australian, 4 November 2008

When politicians try to be parents, families lose out
Back in 2001 when I wrote Paranoid Parenting, I did not imagine that the problems it raised would get far worse. During the past seven years child rearing has turned into a veritable obsession for policy-makers.

Problems that were once associated with the failures of society are blamed on parents. The parenting deficit is blamed for problems such as that of low achievements in schools, low self-esteem, drug-taking, obesity, crime and mental health problems. Every proposal appears to be even more reckless than the previous one.

Only a few months ago, David Rogers, a spokesman for the Local Government Association said that “parents who allow their children to eat too much could be as guilty of neglect as those who did not feed their children at all”. His big idea was to subject overweight youngsters to child protection procedures. And this week, we discovered that seven overweight children have been taken into care.

Parent-bashing is not confined to the domain of politics. Back in 2001, hectoring parents about their inability to manage the behaviour of their children or to provide their kids with a nutritious diet had not yet turned into a popular genre for entertaining the public. There was no Supernanny or The House of Tiny Tearaways to remind parents of their congenital defects on the child-rearing front. During the past five or six years the belief that parental incompetence is quite normal and widespread has become deeply entrenched. One intelligent 36-year-old mother wrote to me saying “I know it exploits my emotions, I know that I should not watch it – but I do, even though it makes me feel shit”.

This perpetual politicization of parenting has two destructive outcomes. Through the constant association of parenting with a problem it undermines the confidence of mothers and fathers. Although politicians target a minority of so-called dysfunctional parents, their depressing message has a disorienting impact on everyone. Consequently the helpful initiatives designed to “support” parents make them more paranoid. The second regrettable outcome of the politicization of parenthood is that it intensifies our anxiety about virtually every dimension of children’s experience.

First published by Independent, 31 October 2008

Capitalism after the ‘credit crunch’: what is it good for?
On capitalism’s half-hearted advocates and misanthropic critics.

Society has found it increasingly difficult to interpret or give meaning to the current global recession. So far, the dominant response has been to seek refuge in mechanistic, formulaic phrases: ‘The world will never be the same again.’ That tired old line, echoing similar facile pronouncements made after 9/11, is of course so vague and meaningless that it can never be proved wrong.

There have been numerous variations of this portentous diagnosis. Joseph Stiglitz argues that recent events will be to ‘market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism’. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France says American-style capitalism is finished, soon to be replaced by a more benign etatist alternative. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and one of the public figures most associated with neo-liberalism, has acknowledged that he ‘made a mistake’ and that, quite possibly, the markets do not regulate themselves.

Reading the numerous obituaries to neo-liberalism, it is difficult to work out precisely what has come to an end. Sarkozy says that ‘laissez-faire is finished, the all-powerful market that is always right, that’s finished’ – yet this merely restates the widely accepted prejudice that neo-liberalism actually ran the world during the past two decades. In fact, contrary to this myth, it is inaccurate to characterise the recent era as one of ‘laissez-faire’ capitalism.

To be sure, since the 1980s there has been a lot of talk about neo-liberalism and free market economics. But the global economy was not transformed into a deregulated paradise for ruthless profiteers. Yes, deregulation was widely acclaimed, but its implementation was confined to the banking and financial sectors. Nor was the massive expansion of credit in the late twentieth century the direct and spontaneous outcome of the workings of the free market. The American and British housing bubbles were underwritten by the political intervention of the state. Governments pursued loose monetary policies to provide consumers access to cheap credit. It was the Federal Reserve, not the markets, that established a regime of low interest rates which made possible the reckless expansion of credit.

It is tempting to blame the deregulated financial markets for unleashing today’s powerful destructive global forces. Yet the deregulated financial markets did not emerge directly from the market; they were the product of political decisions and of various kinds of wheeling-and-dealing. Governments were more than happy to accommodate to the interests of the banking and finance sectors. The expansion of credit provided governments with tax revenues that could be used to support public expenditure. The recent era of easy money, of parasitically living off borrowed wealth, was as much an outcome of short-termist political opportunism as it was of greed-driven markets.

Despite the Reagan and Thatcher governments’ promotion of monetarist policies, the state continued to be a key player in the economic life of global capitalism during their rule and after it. Even before the arrival of the so-called ‘credit crunch’, state expenditure played a massive role in the economic life of Western capitalist societies. It is worth recalling that in 2007, state expenditure in Britain accounted for 44.7 per cent of gross domestic product. Even in the US, the home ground of so-called neo-liberalism, state expenditure accounted for 37.4 per cent of GDP. And it seems likely that these figures will turn out to be underestimates, as an increasing amount of public spending is ‘off balance sheet’.

It is odd that the last phase of credit-led expansion has come to be associated predominantly with the ideas of market fundamentalism and deregulation. For this is a period in which there has been a steady growth of state and bureaucratic regulation of industrial activity, scientific experimentation, technological innovation and anything that might remotely impact on the environment. The truth is: the recent phase of global economic expansion was inextricably bound up with state intervention.

History shows that during times of boom and prosperity, bankers, businesspeople and politicians can lose sight of the realities of economic life. Some public figures get so carried away with their fantasies that they end up equating the paper economy with the real one. From time to time, politicians believe their own hype, though UK prime minister Gordon Brown will be remembered as being in a class of his own for his promise to ‘end’ boom and bust.

However, the illusions that defined the conventional wisdom of recent times were internalised by both the so-called market fundamentalists and their opponents. We should remember that the ideologues of the ‘anti-capitalist’ and environmental movements have warned the public about the dangers of an ever-growing turbo-capitalism. As far as they were concerned, the problem was the expansionary dynamic of the system, its limitless ambition, and its ability to increase production and consumption continually. Like Brown, they were captivated by the idea of a permanent boom, and thus overlooked the barriers to global economic expansion. Their critique of neo-liberalism did not fundamentally question the capitalist system, only its capacity to distribute resources equitably. As far as the critics of capitalism were concerned, the system worked, but unfairly.

Whatever illusions the neo-liberals may have had in the power of their system, it was more than shared by their naive anti-consumerist critics. They were so intoxicated by their own myth of globally dominant neo-liberalism that they came to believe that capitalism’s potential to keep growing was an iron law of history. The Australian anti-consumerist critic Clive Hamilton predicted that ‘modern consumer capitalism will flourish as long as what people desire outpaces what they have’. For Hamilton, the problem was that neo-liberalism works too well. ‘The fact is that neo-liberalism has fulfilled its promise of prosperity, delivering a large increase in income across the board’, he argued (1).

Who needs market fundamentalists when their critics’ analysis of economic life is so fundamentally wrong? In reality, the current global economic crisis indicates that prosperity is a transient and ever-elusive commodity.

Capitalism’s fickle friends

It is not surprising that the terms ‘neo-liberal’ and ‘market fundamentalists’ now have such negative connotations. Even before the credit crunch, capitalism had few high-profile intellectual advocates. Indeed, what has been most striking about our recent era of alleged neo-liberal triumphalism is the feeble moral, cultural and intellectual support that capitalism has enjoyed. At best, it has been begrudgingly accepted. It is more frequently denounced for its excess and for encouraging a destructive consumerist culture. At a time when the ideal of sustainability enjoyed widespread cultural affirmation, a system wedded to economic expansion was always going to be short of friends.

Capitalism was unable to take the moral high-ground before the current recession; so its advocates are likely to face formidable obstacles when they try morally and culturally to rehabilitate it in the years ahead. In retrospect, it is striking how, despite its considerable economic success, capitalism has not succeeded in developing a system of intellectual support for itself. To understand this problem, it is worth reviewing the historical origins of the intellectual crisis of capitalism.

The ideals associated with laissez-faire swiftly became discredited the last time global capitalism faced a major crisis. By the late 1930s there was an intellectual consensus, supported by virtually the entire ideological spectrum, that the notion of free-market capitalism was not sustainable. The moral and intellectual malaise of the time was so profound that many leading thinkers in the West believed that, unlike their sick economy, the economy of the Soviet Union was going from strength to strength. With hindsight, however, it is clear that it was the absence of confidence in the West, caused by perceptions of the weakness of the capitalist system, which meant many Western thinkers had such exaggerated views about the progressive potential of the Soviet Union.

Intellectual trends in the 1930s and 40s, like today, were deeply hostile to the ideals of economic liberalism. Planning was seen as an intellectually acceptable strategy, while free-market economics had an outdated and stale image. Friedrich Hayek, probably the most renowned intellectual advocate of the free market and widely hailed as the father of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, sounded much more tentative four decades earlier. Anyone re-reading his book The Road to Serfdom will be struck by its tone of defensiveness. ‘It is no longer fashionable to emphasise that “we are all socialists now”; this is so merely because the fact is too obvious’, he complained, before predicting that ‘scarcely anybody doubts that we must continue to move towards socialism’.

Hayek’s arguments against planning conveyed a sense of hesitancy. Planning is not inevitable, he said with a sense of resignation. But he is prepared to accept that some form of rational planning is unavoidable and insists that he is not a supporter of dogmatic laissez-faire. He pleads: ‘The fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created, does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.’ (2) And this from the most articulate and vociferous opponent of planning in the 1940s!

One by-product of the general loss of faith in capitalism was the creation of a new consensus around the acceptance of planning and the creation of a mixed economy committed to welfare provision. This was a response to the perception of capitalist weakness and the ideological alternative posed by the Soviet Union. Its most articulate advocates were New Deal liberals in the US and social democrats in Europe. However, this consensus drew upon a far wider constituency; it included many conservative thinkers in Britain and individuals who would be associated with Christian Democracy after the Second World War.

Throughout the Cold War era, capitalist societies found it easier to gain legitimacy through mobilising support against the Soviet threat than by encouraging a positive identification with a clear system of values. This was a problem that exercised the energies of the sociologist Daniel Bell who in his seminal work The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) grappled with the question of why capitalism failed to generate any cultural or intellectual system of support. He observed that the ‘traditional bourgeois organisation of life – its rationalism and sobriety – has few defenders in the serious culture; nor does it have a coherent system of cultural meanings or stylistic forms with any intellectual or cultural respectability’ (3).

At least provisionally, the problem raised by Bell was suspended during the Reagan/Thatcher era. During this period, the ideas associated with economic planning, the mixed economy and the welfare state became undermined by the crisis of state expenditure of the 1970s. For a brief moment, Thatcher’s celebration of TINA (There Is No Alternative) seemed to suggest that liberal capitalism stood vindicated by experience. However, on closer examination TINA was another form of negative affirmation of the capitalist system. It was a way of saying that there is no other game in town rather than an argument for endowing capitalism with moral authority. Nevertheless, in the circumstances of Thatcher’s time, the celebration of TINA could foster the illusion of triumph – an illusion that was internalised as much by the critics of liberal capitalism as by its adherents.

As everyone knows, capitalism has survived a series of crises during the past two centuries. It has shown that it has an alarming capacity to disrupt and destabilise everyday life, and also a formidable potential for growth and innovation. In the past, people have sought to minimise the damage caused by this system’s destructive tendencies while maximising the benefits accrued through growth. From this perspective, a crisis works both as a problem and as a potential resolution to a problem. Today, as in the past, we feel the pain of a capitalist crisis. However, unlike in previous eras, there is widespread hesitancy about reorganising the system so that it can work to its potential. Most critics of neo-liberalism are driven by their dislike of, and estrangement from, modernity; they have very little to say about the real workings of capitalism. Of course, the alternative of permanent austerity is unlikely to inspire very many outside of a small coterie of green reactionaries and survivalists. And the critics of neo-liberalism are less than enthusiastic about explicitly pursuing their etatist alternative because memories of the failure of the old mixed economies are still fresh in their minds.

In these confused times, we should attempt to defend capitalism from its small-minded opponents. While they occasionally manage to make useful criticisms about some of the irrationalities of the system of finance and banking, they show little real understanding of the workings of the capitalist system. More fundamentally their attack is inspired by a reactionary impulse that fears change and despises human progress. Through their attitudes and behaviour, they legitimise the dogma of TINA, for how can a backward-looking rejection of modernity offer a plausible alternative to anything?

What the current crisis indicates is that we have to rethink the categories and ideas through which we make sense of the human condition. Capitalism was and remains a system driven by expansion. Through the accumulation of capital this system of production has encouraged innovation, technological development and raised living standards, albeit unequally throughout the world. Periodically, capitalism is forced to come up against the barriers to its further development. As a result, this is a system of booms and busts, and the busts are sometimes transformed into a crisis of historic proportions. Until now, the capitalist system has always succeeded in overcoming the barriers to its further development. Through global expansion and the export of goods and investment it has overcome the limits set by its domestic economies. From time to time it has restructured and rationalised its economies, but at a great cost to sections of society. In recent decades it has developed a system of finance and credit that could underwrite economic growth on a global scale. The impressive scientific and technological progress of the past 30 years were in part financed through the easy-money regime.

Now capitalism has come up against new barriers – ones that are far more global than in previous times. The question that this development poses is: how do we deal with this crisis? Every crisis interrogates society’s capacity to deal with unexpected challenges. The answers society comes up with will play a decisive role in influencing how people experience and understand the recession. Every crisis is a crisis of meaning and of ideas. The way we respond can either contain the destructive effects of this crisis, or amplify them.

What is important is that we do not look for quick-fix technical solutions. What we need is not just more effective fiscal and monetary policies but clarity about the kind of world we want for our children. These days, ideals and idealism get a bad press. And we know from history that, in practice, we fail to achieve most of our ideals. However, ideals about the world we would like to create help to focus the mind. They motivate society to think beyond the short-termist agenda of damage limitation. Most important of all, they give society something positive to think about and achieve.

(1) See Clive Hamilton ‘What’s Left? The Death of Social Democracy’ in Quarterly Essay, issue no 21, 2006, p.34

(2) F. Hayek (1976) The Road To Serfdom, Routledge and Kegan Paul : London, p.29

(3) D. Bell (1980) Sociological Journeys: Essays 1960-1980, Heinemann : London, p.302.

First published by spiked, 30 October 2008

Feeding a fine hunger
Whatever their social and cultural backgrounds, students will flourish if we take them seriously and impart a love of our subject.

After three decades of working with undergraduates, I remain convinced that teaching is best learnt on the job. The more teaching I do, the more it becomes evident that, in the university, good teaching is not a separate and distinct activity from the rest of academic work.

Although the “teaching” experts can provide us with a few interesting tricks, their training often misses the point: that academic teaching cannot be recycled as a series of distinct skills and competencies. Yes, we all have to learn how to teach - but not everything that has to be learnt can be taught. The “trick” is how to learn from the experience of teaching.

The most important lesson I have learnt is that to be successful as a teacher, you have to take students seriously - and I do mean really seriously. Undergraduates are young adults who possess the potential for self-direction and autonomous inquiry.

Yet often we are told that students today are little more than biologically mature pupils who require three things - support, support and more support. According to contemporary pedagogic wisdom, we live in a fluid world where teaching must adapt to new, changing realities.

It is frequently suggested that the body of undergraduates has become more diverse and no longer comes from a small pool of the traditional elite-educated middle class. The implication of this argument is that an “inclusive” pedagogic approach must cater for different needs, and in particular focus on the problems of so-called non-traditional students. It appears that they have individual deficits that require not only “support” but also new and different forms of assessment. “Student-centred teaching” is the order of the day.

Over the years, I have drawn the conclusion that an obsession with student-centred teaching has two damaging consequences.

It distracts academics from pursuing the intellectual logic of their discipline with their undergraduates, and it can also lead to the cultivation of a regime of low expectation in the student body. Whatever their social and cultural backgrounds, students who want to learn will flourish if we take them seriously.

I had my first experience with “non-traditional” students back in 1976-77, when I ran an evening Workers’ Educational Authority course on “contemporary international relations” in the Kentish working-class town of Deal.

Most of my students were working miners or former miners who worked at the now long-closed Betteshanger Colliery. They may have been “non-traditional”, but they were thirsty for ideas and continually put pressure on me to account for arguments. I knew that they were getting on top of the material because, by the end of the course, I too had learnt much about my own subject.

I had a similar experience a few years later when I gave a series of seminars to students at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. Some of my students were very non-traditional. They had parents who had barely finished their primary education.

What dominates my memory of these students was their intense hunger for ideas. Once when I protested that I had to finish a seminar discussion and resume my research, one of them pointed out to me that they “expected me to teach for the love of it for they loved learning”. It was evident to me that despite their poverty, what they craved was intellectual stimulation and not support.

So what have I learnt? Regardless of who is in the lecture hall, academic teaching always contains a tension between motivating undergraduates to study and getting across a body of complex ideas. The content of what is taught is dictated by the academic subject matter.

But the presentation of a subject should be influenced by the reaction and signals transmitted by students. In these days of officially formalised feedback, it is easy to overlook the fact that the most useful feedback is the spontaneous reaction and body language of students in a lecture hall or seminar room. Those semi-verbal responses constitute an important dimension of a dialogue that we need to learn from.

One of the most difficult lessons I had to learn as a teacher was that the problem with lectures that did not work was not reducible to style or presentation. Over the years, I discovered that lack of clarity in presentation was in part attributable to a lack of clarity about the subject matter.

Teaching in higher education requires that we continually develop our understanding of our subject. As a young lecturer, I remember feeling constant frustration about my inability to get my students to grasp the meaning of simple concepts such as “society” and “the social”.

I still feel a twinge of embarrassment when I recall my early futile attempts to go beyond very formal expositions about the difference between nature and nurture. It was only after a series of disappointing episodes of miscommunication that I decided to spend some time reading about this subject to see if I could teach it more effectively.

It was while reading the introduction to Karl Marx’s Grundrisse one evening that the proverbial light bulb was switched on. The passage that did it was about the socially mediated meaning of eating: “Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth.”

A week later I tried it out in one of my seminars. “Even an apparently biological act like eating is socially mediated,” I explained, before elaborating on Marx’s example. Did it work? Almost immediately one of my Nigerian students pointed out that “you Europeans worry about overeating while we in Africa are concerned about not having enough food in our belly”.

A few minutes later another student raised the question of eating disorders. “It is unlikely that people in the Stone Age knew very much about anorexia,” she posited. By the end of the seminar, the students had begun to internalise the concept of “social” and I learnt how to teach this subject more effectively.

It was not the magic of the Grundrisse that achieved this revelation. I could have gained inspiration from numerous other texts. For me, what was significant about this episode was that I finally learnt to treat a problem of teaching as an issue that was inseparable from matters to do with my scholarship.

Frequently we extol the virtues of research-led teaching but often overlook the significance of teaching-led research. That is why it is not a platitude to conceive of academic teaching as an engagement or a relationship. Indeed, these relational aspects give this form of teaching its distinct academic character.

Most of the discussion on university teaching has as its focus the problem of motivating undergraduates. Many of the techniques proposed to deal with this problem are pedagogic gimmicks designed to keep students awake and active. Some higher education experts regard “old-fashioned” lectures and seminars as far too formal for the new digital generation.

One quality-assurance maven who advised me to experiment with “group work” reminded me of advocates of “circle time” in primary school. Such techniques are designed to keep children active, awake and included. The problem is that it encourages participation without focus.

And unfortunately such unfocused activity does not encourage students’ aspiration for autonomous inquiry. Indeed, all too often group work distracts undergraduates from developing their sense of self-direction.

Motivational techniques and pedagogic tricks are not able to deal with what is probably the most important challenge facing lecturers in the social sciences, which is the teaching of abstract concepts and theory.

Even the most lively mind can get discouraged when forced to tackle a text written by Max Weber or Emile Durkheim. “There is no royal road to science and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits,” wrote Marx.

I have often had to bite my lip to stop myself from quoting this advice to my students. After my first year of teaching, I learnt that exhortation does not work. Some of my colleagues suggested that I try using humour. Others advised that I try bringing my lectures down to earth and do my best to ensure that the material that I use is seen as relevant by students.

Humour, lively anecdotes and relevant information are useful tools for spicing up a lecture and gaining the attention of students. But they don’t necessarily motivate students to study.

Indeed, sometimes they incite students to underestimate the challenge they face when confronted with concepts that are not directly relevant to their lives. And since most abstract concepts do not derive from direct individual experience, there are limits to the promotion of relevance.

Motivating students needs to be more than a psychological exercise - it requires academics to get their undergraduates to grasp the point of their discipline. The question is, how? The lecturers I know who have succeeded in achieving this are those who continually demonstrate that they take their subject seriously.

The passion, commitment and enthusiasm transmitted by a lecturer are traits that are peculiarly effective for communicating the idea that theirs is a really important subject. Nothing can motivate students more than the belief that they are participating in a very important discussion or an important intellectual event.

Of course it is not possible to feel enthusiasm for every lecture, nor can academics be expected to feel passionate 24 hours a day. But such sentiments can be renewable resources through the pursuit of our work. The pursuit of knowledge changes the way we teach - I could never again experience the intense sense of importance that I experienced as a new lecturer.

When every new lecture is perceived as an adventure, it is difficult not to motivate those around you. The sheer energy of some new lecturers is sufficient to create a real buzz in the lecture hall. But after a while that energy needs to be renewed through the development of new intellectual interests and a confrontation with new challenges if we are to continue to inspire our students.

But it is a two-way process because often it is our students who stimulate us to move in new directions. The formal provision of staff development does little to enhance the quality of teaching. What we need are not courses in communication skills but time to develop the ideas that are worth communicating to our classes.

At its best, good university teaching does something that impacts on the lives of our students and occasionally even changes them. So whenever you feel frustrated with all the pointless paperwork demanded of you, remember that academic teaching is a privileged vocation. You get to influence cohorts of lively students, and through them you gain important insights into your own subject. Sometimes it even seems unfair, because you get more out of the deal than the students. Teaching is learning both about your subject and yourself.

First published by Times Higher Education, 30 October 2008

How ‘Black September’ will redraw the contours of fear
After an era of pick’n’mix scares, from obesity to eco-doom, will the economic crisis encourage a more collective form of fearmongering?

Today, fears are often promoted as truly global threats. We have global terrorism, global warming, the global obesity epidemic, and now, of course, a global economic crisis.

It is not hope that excites and shapes the cultural imagination in the early twenty-first century; it is fear. Terms like ‘politics of fear’ and ‘culture of fear’ have become everyday phrases through which we communicate a sense of unease about our place in the world. It is therefore not surprising that the current economic crisis is frequently discussed through the prism of fear.

Headlines report that ‘fear grips the market’ or that ‘banks act on meltdown fear’. This simplistic diagnosis of global fear usually serves as a prelude to warnings that people might panic, as they unthinkingly follow their herd instincts. Of course, our current addiction to the rhetoric of fear should not be taken as proof that people are necessarily more scared than in previous times. Rather, it shows that fear serves as an influential cultural device through which society makes sense of experience.

Since the first global threat of this century – the Millennium Bug – the world has been exposed to a succession of apocalyptic ‘fear appeals’. Often one fear appeal builds on another. ‘It is like a combination of global warming and HIV/AIDS’, said Dr David Nabarro, a UN health official, in 2005, talking about a potential worldwide bird flu pandemic. He said up to 150million people could be killed.

In March 2006, Richard Carmona, the US surgeon general, described obesity as a greater danger to national security than terrorism. He said that unless something was done about obesity, ‘the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist attempt’. The steady promotion of dramatic warnings about human survival indicates that whatever the problems facing the financial sector today, the market of fear continues to prosper. But how does the dramatisation of global threats impact upon our lives?

Research carried out for the recent World Social Summit (WSS) suggests that, at least until recently, most people perceived the problem of everyday survival as far more threatening than the big global fears. Moreover, threats are experienced very differently across the continents. The WSS report, titled Fear in the Mega-Cities, attempts to capture the experience of fear in 10 major cities across the world. Based on a survey carried out in July 2008, it provides important insights into the way that the public perceives and feels about threats in London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Mumbai, Beijing, Tokyo, São Paulo and Cairo.

Anxious but not panicking

In popular culture, the dramatisation of fear encourages the belief that when confronted with a crisis or a threat, people panic and become irrational. Fortunately, this ‘Towering Inferno’ model of human behaviour is contradicted by the WSS survey. The study suggests that while a large majority of the respondents (90.2 per cent) acknowledge that they have day-to-day worries or serious anxieties (42.4 per cent) about an important area of their lives, only a minority (11.9 per cent) claim to feel overwhelmed by a sense of fear. The majority say they have a positive attitude towards life (55.3 per cent), and almost a quarter (24.3 per cent) defined themselves as optimistic.

Within an urban community, people’s position in the social hierarchy appears to be the most significant factor influencing the way they fear. The WSS study indicates that the intensity of fearing increases with the level of poverty and social insecurity. Almost a quarter of those who come from poorer families (22.5 per cent) named fear as their dominant emotion, compared with only eight per cent of those from better-off circumstances. Also, those who are economically insecure are more likely than the well-to-do to report that their personal fears have intensified in recent years. As expected, the elderly are more likely than young people to perceive themselves as fearful.

One of the most interesting points to emerge from the study is the decisive influence that local urban culture has on the experience of fearing. In all the cities surveyed, people said they had experienced a sense of uncertainty and anxiety. However, in some urban centres – Tokyo, São Paulo, Cairo – uncertainty often mutates into fear. Around a quarter of the people surveyed from these cities said fear was a dominant factor in their lives. Of all the cities surveyed in the study, Tokyo is the one where personal fears have increased the most during the past decade, followed by São Paulo.

Of the Western cities, Rome turned out to be the least optimistic and confident. One surprising finding is that people in London are relatively confident and optimistic about their futures. Of all the Western cities studied, in London fears have increased the least over the past decade. However, it is in the two Asian urban centres – Beijing and Mumbai – where fear has had the least impact. The economic dynamism of these cities appears to have had a significant impact on people’s outlook. In Mumbai, 83.3 per cent assert that they are either optimistic or confident about the future. In Beijing, 65.4 per cent of the population have a positive view of life. Beijing is the only city where the number of those who said their fears have decreased in recent years (38.4 per cent) significantly outweighed those who say they have increased (15.4 per cent).

Global threats are not globally feared

The evidence provided by this study suggests that it is not the big global threats that prey on people’s fears; most people focus on local and individual problems that directly touch on their lives. Traditional anxieties about death, losing a loved one and physical and mental suffering top the list of fears. Even before the recent meltdown of the banking system, anxieties about unemployment, economic security and the fear of ‘falling behind’ preoccupied most of those interviewed.

Apprehension about becoming a victim of violence or anti-social behaviour was also an important source of insecurity. Concerns about individual security far outweigh public concern about high-profile threats such as terrorism. As one would expect, the anxiety about the threat of terrorism was most pronounced in New York, where 16.6 per cent said it was their top fear. Yet even in New York, more people were concerned about not being able to maintain their quality of life in the future (17.2 per cent).

Overall the respondents were more worried about losing their homes (10 per cent) or their jobs (9.7 per cent) or being a victim of crime (11.7 per cent) than they were about a terrorist attack (8.2 per cent). Of the big dramatic threats, natural disasters were feared the most (8.5 per cent). The intensity of this fear is linked, it seems, to previous experiences of natural disasters: so anxieties about such disasters were most apparent in Mumbai (22 per cent) and Beijing (15.4 per cent).

One of the most interesting findings is the fairly minor role that collective fears play in the lives of the urban public. For example, relatively few people appeared to be worried about the threat of war or international conflict (6.7 per cent). Overall, the WSS survey highlights the highly personalised and individuated way that fear is experienced. This trend is particularly striking in large European centres. In contrast, what the report calls ‘collective fears’ remain quite important in Asian cities. In Tokyo, the fear of an earthquake and other natural disasters tops the list.

After Black September

Many of the findings of the study resonate with previous global surveys. Although dramatic global threats grab the headlines, most people’s anxieties are focused on the mundane and ordinary problems of existence. This fact transcends different societies and cultures. People in Mumbai and Sao Paulo may fear differently than people in Paris and London, but in all these places it is highly individualised, even privatised fears that dominate people’s thoughts.

The fact that the most distinctive feature of fear in the twenty-first century is its atomised and individual character stands in sharp contrast to previous historical experiences. Throughout history, communities tended to live and experience their fears in common. In the twentieth century, people living through the interwar era feared unemployment and the precarious existence associated with old age. In the 1950s, it was the fear of nuclear war that exercised the public’s imagination. In all of these cases, people feared a common threat; in some sense, the anxiety of the age often defined communities and bound them together.

There is no single fear that defines our era. One day we are told to worry about global terrorism, the next we are warned about a flu epidemic. By the time the average week is over, we have heard about the risk of catching a super-bug in a hospital and about the imminent collapse of the eco-system. These threats, as dramatic as they appear, rarely turn into a focus for society-wide solidarity. Even in the immediate post-9/11 era, the threat of terrorism – despite the insistences of the Bush administration – failed to become the defining fear of our times. As the WSS study indicates, we continue to fear ‘on our own’.

The research for Fear in the Mega-Cities was carried in July 2008. That was a time when the term ‘credit crunch’ had entered into the public’s consciousness but before massive upheavals overwhelmed the banking system in September. So what do recent economic events mean for the way that we fear? It appears that what we now have is a global threat that directly resonates with the pre-existing social and economic insecurities highlighted in the WSS report. What is fascinating about the response to the economic crisis is the emergence of a genuine global language of fear. This is a threat that has captured the imagination of the public from Russia to China, and from Australia to Europe. Such a fearful reaction is evident even in societies in Asia, where the economies appear relatively robust. Given the findings of Fear in the Mega-Cities, this global-wide reaction is not surprising. The very individuated and existential culture of fearing has acquired a more society-wide form in a world where everyone is confronted with economic insecurity.

It is likely that the global economic meltdown will not be experienced merely as a threat to the individual but as a disaster that affects the entire community. No doubt perceptions of this crisis will be subject to cultural variations, but it seems that we are also gradually developing a common vocabulary for expressing our fears. That at least may hold out the prospect that we need not simply suffer our fears in isolation, but can confront them as a community.

First published by spiked, 21 October 2008

Britain’s War Against Competitive Sports
Kids understand that when nobody loses, nobody wins. Why don't the anti-competition crusaders?

There was a time when Britain had a reputation for excelling in competitive sports. These days, however, the experience of children engaging in competitive sports comes with a health warning. Since the 1980s, many schools have drawn the conclusion that team sports are an outdated and psychologically risky masculine vice that should be heavily regulated if not banned altogether.

A bit of a problem for a nation that will host the Olympics in 2012; that is why Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the nation needed to have more competitive sport at school. He stated that his government had begun to “correct the tragic mistake of reducing the competitive element in school.” Brown’s announcement is unlikely to undermine the powerful cultural crusade against children’s natural instinct to compete against one another. It is worth noting that back in 2000, a government minister, Chris Smith, promised to put competitive sport “back on its feet.” Three years later a member of the Cabinet, Charles Clarke, argued that it was “ridiculous” to ban competition on school sports days, and last year another minister, Alan Johnson, stated that it was “absurd and perverse political correctness” that led to the outlawing of this practice.

Unfortunately, the challenge of reversing this “tragic mistake” faces formidable obstacles. The ideals associated with a sporting ethos are bitterly opposed by a formidable army of educators, psychologists, and health professionals who contend that competition threatens the emotional well-being of children. They claim the spirit of competition sends the wrong signals since it undermines cooperative behavior. Apparently, children who fail to come in first suffer long-term trauma and their self-esteem risks becoming damaged for life.

That is why the English Football Association has recently ruled that the results of matches between children aged seven and eight must not be published. It also banned the publication of league tables and the giving out of prizes. Some local soccer associations have extended these bans to cover 9, 10, and 11-year-olds. Some politicians would like to ban competitive sports altogether. One member of Parliament, Sandra Gidley, described sports days as her “pet hate” and accused schools of being insensitive to the feelings of children with little athletic ability.

The crusade against the ethos of competition is always in search of new arguments.

In early September, a report published by Loughborough University came up with the ridiculous conclusion that an overemphasis on competitive team sports has led to the decline of physical exercise in schools. As a result, pupils are not learning about politically correct forms of exercise such as aerobics and pilates. In reality, British state schools find it difficult to affirm the ideals of competitive sports.

Official figures show that the number of school children who are not involved in sports rose by over a million last year. Many schools regard contact sports with dread. Others have introduced so-called “cooperative games” where there are no losers. Anti-competition crusaders advocate a carefully managed form of therapeutic sporting education for children. They believe that children gain great psychological benefits from cooperative sport since everybody receives applause and gains in self-esteem. In reality, children gain nothing from the manufactured forms of tokenistic rituals that accompany such emotionally correct gestures. When every child receives a prize for “trying their best,” the youngsters readily see through the empty gesture. Even at an early age they understand that when nobody loses, nobody wins.

The main consequence of the stigmatization of competition is that it reduces children’s ambition and lowers their expectations. Children today, like those of previous generations, will certainly continue to engage with each other through cooperation as well as competition. Learning to do both is an essential dimension of human development. But if kids are discouraged from participating in competitive activities, their ability to learn how to manage success and failure will be undermined. In particular, they will never understand that losing is not synonymous with failing and that coming in second or third — or even last — can provide them with lessons about how to do better in the future.

Yes, losing may be painful. But the consequences of not being exposed to the spirit of competition are far more damaging then the temporary setback of losing a game.

First published by Pajamas Media, 19 October 2008

Fear and the city
These are alarming times, but what are we all most afraid of? From London to Cairo to Beijing, a new geography of global anxiety is emerging.

Are we living in an age of fear? Is fear, rather than hope, shaping the cultural imagination of the early 21st century?

This new era has already offered the world a succession of apocalyptic invitations to panic, from the millennium bug onwards. In 2005, bird flu was compared to “a combination of global warming and HIV/Aids” by UN health officials, predicting a pandemic that could kill up to 150 million people. In March 2006, the US surgeon general, Richard Carmona, described obesity as a greater danger to national security than terrorism and said that, unless something was done about it, “the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9/11”. This steady promotion of dramatic warnings about human survival suggests that the market of fear is thriving.

In July, citizens of ten major world cities were surveyed for the World Social Summit (WSS) to find out how London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, New York, Mumbai, Beijing, Tokyo, São Paulo and Cairo experience fear and insecurity. The report, Fear in the Mega-Cities, was presented to the WSS in Rome last month and reveals much about the state of global anxiety.

While the experience of worry is universal, the report shows how in some urban centres, such as São Paulo and Cairo, uncertainty often mutates into outright fear. Of the western cities, Rome turned out to be the least - and London, curiously, the most - optimistic. Of the great Asian centres, Beijing not only scored highly on confidence, but was also the only city whose citizens said their fears had actually decreased in recent years: economic dynamism seems to have had a significant impact on their outlook.

On the whole it is not global threats that people fear the most. Across the world, anxieties are focused on local and individual problems that directly touch everyday life - death, losing a loved one and physical and mental suffering top the list. Anxiety about the threat of terrorism, for instance, was most pronounced in New York; but even there, more people were afraid about not being able to maintain their quality of life. Even before the recent meltdown of the banking system, concerns about unemployment and economic security preoccupied a significant proportion of those interviewed, as did apprehension about becoming a victim of violence or antisocial behaviour.

Overall, the respondents were more worried about losing their homes or jobs or being a victim of crime than about a terrorist attack. Fear of natural disasters was strongest in cities that had experienced them in the past, such as Mumbai and Beijing. Relatively few appeared to be worried about the threat of war or international conflict. The survey highlights the highly personalised, almost “privatised”, way that fear is experienced. This trend is particularly striking in the large European centres. In contrast, what the report calls collective fears - such as of earthquakes - remain quite important in Asian cities.

Many of the findings of this study resonate with previous global surveys. Although dramatic global threats grab the headlines, most anxieties are focused on the mundane and ordinary problems of existence. Citizens in Cairo and São Paulo may feel fear differently from those in Paris and London, but in all these places it is individualised fears that dominate.

Twenty-first-century fears stand in sharp contrast to those of previous centuries. Throughout history, communities tended to experience their fears in common. In the 20th century, people living through the interwar period feared un employment and old age. In the 1950s, it was fear of nuclear war that exercised the public imagination. In all these cases people feared a common threat, and the anxiety of the age often defined and bound communities together.

At the time the WSS report was researched, the term “credit crunch” had only just entered into the public consciousness, but the huge upheavals that overwhelmed the banking system in September were yet to come. The global financial crisis now presents us with a threat that directly resonates with pre-existing social and economic insecurities. In response to the crisis, a global language of fear is emerging: this is a threat that has captured the imagination of the public from Russia to China, through to Australia and western Europe. The reaction is evident even among societies in Asia, where the economies are relatively robust. Given the findings of Fear in the Mega-Cities, this is not surprising.

The global economic meltdown will be experienced not merely as a threat to the individual, but as a disaster that affects the entire world community. Perceptions will vary from culture to culture. However, if we are also gradually developing a common vocabulary for expressing our anxieties, this may hold out the prospect that we need not suffer in isolation, but confront our fear of the future as a world community.

First published by New Statesman, 16 October 2008

The state won’t be the saviour of the economy
Having spent 30 years depoliticising economic issues, state institutions are now spearheading an apolitical form of nationalisation.

It seems likely that the problem confronting society today is not that of a recession, but a more fundamental disruption to the workings of economic life.

The massive expansion of state control over the banking system may counter the powerful forces threatening to destabilise the financial sector and the currency markets. But, at best, all that the government-led rescue packages can achieve is a framework for managing the imminent decline of economic activities. Banks may have been rescued, but at present there is no strategy for re-engaging them with the rest of the economy.

It is evident that there is a lot more pain to come. Existing levels of state expenditure cannot be maintained without unleashing massive inflationary pressures, the outcome of which will be cuts in living standards. In any case, the choice is not between inflation and deflation. We are likely to see both as the contraction of credit forces numerous businesses to cut investment and production. Nor will it be easy for companies to export their way out of the predicament. There is now the danger that the global flows of goods, like capital investment, will decline.

The fact that the different government rescue packages have been coordinated has helped to minimise the destructive impact of the collapse of the banking system. However, despite high and unprecedented levels of international cooperation, governments are forced to pursue a national agenda. Not surprisingly, international coordination has coincided with the emergence of national tensions and rivalries. The EU has found it very difficult to speak with one voice, highlighting the potential for national conflicts to become more destabilising. The row between Britain and Iceland may well be a sign of far more ominous conflicts to come, once some of the smaller and weaker economies begin to spiral out of control. There is little doubt that the degree to which international coordination can be maintained will have a significant influence on how the crisis unfolds. One of the most interesting issues thrown up by the crisis is how the state will act to prevent the recession from turning into a depression.

The role of the state

Numerous commentators claim that, with government rescue packages leading to the ‘nationalisation’ of so many banks, we have entered a new era of regulated capitalism. There is little doubt that the massive bailout of the financial sector marks an important departure from the previous phase of deregulated finance markets. But the idea that we have moved from a neo-liberal global economy to a state-interventionist era is overdone.

The neo-liberal era initiated in the 1980s was never as liberal as many claimed. Despite the Reaganite commitment to rolling back the state, this was a period in which there was a rise in large budget deficits in the US. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the state was used pragmatically to manage interest rates and the value of the dollar. Nor was the US administration averse to saving ‘toxic’ banks. In 1984, the Reagan government believed that the Continental Illinois was far too important to be allowed to fail, so it spent an estimated $1billion buying up its bad debts. A long time before the ‘credit crunch’, the state had adopted a highly interventionist role in the economic life of mature capitalist societies.

Historical experience shows that a global economic crisis invariably invites new forms of state intervention. This was evident during the first Great Depression of 1875-1895. The state played an active role in encouraging the establishment of trusts and cartels and in coordinating world trade and capital exports. During this period, governments adopted an expansionist foreign policy in order to improve the competitive positions of their nations.

In succeeding decades, governments were actively engaged in industrial policy and finance. The depression unleashed by the 1929 stockmarket crisis also led to the further expansion of state intervention in economic life. At the time, the emergence of a new regime of regulation was perceived by many to be the beginning of the socialisation of the economy. One Labour Party thinker predicted in 1935 that the adoption of planning by the then beleaguered government may ‘accelerate the transition to socialism’ (1).

Since the 1930s, state intervention in economic life has often been described as ‘antithetical’ to the workings of the free market. Reality, however, is far more complicated. The issue is not whether or not the state plays a role in economic life but the form that its intervention takes. The deregulation of finance and the various privatisation initiatives in the 1980s coincided with widespread state-led intervention in economic life. The rhetoric of liberalisation was not entirely without content; but the deregulation of parts of the economy went hand-in-hand with growing regulation in other sectors. Indeed, the two processes were closely linked. The constant expansion of new derivative-led financial instruments actually provided the government treasury with some of the funds for large state budgets.

The distinctive feature of the so-called neo-liberal era was the tendency to de-politicise economic life. Since the 1980s there has been a self-conscious attempt to distance political policymaking from economic affairs. The very meaning of TINA – There Is No Alternative – was to detach economic life from public policy. TINA meant that in the absence of alternatives, politics had no place in the managements of markets. One consequence of this de-politicisation of economics has been the marginalisation of strategies that aim to harness economic forces towards political objectives. Even the environmental critique of consumer capitalism has adopted the premise of TINA: instead of elaborating an alternative political economy it puts forward a moralistic critique of excess and ambition.

The de-politicisation of economics in the 1980s ran directly counter to the previous 50 years. Throughout the interwar and postwar periods, politics was principally linked to competing visions of economic strategy. The economy became politicised, linked to issues relating to welfare, redistribution, employment and industrial strategy. By the end of the 1970s, however, the politicisation of the economy had reached a dead end. It had become clear that the economic realities of the late 1970s had undermined the case for an activist interventionist state. From that point onwards, economic problems were increasingly perceived as technical rather than political in nature.

The legacy has been the demise of political debate about the big economic issues. Periodically the discussion of taxation becomes political, or at least takes on a political language, but most economic issues have been regarded as technical subjects that need to be managed by experts. That is why the response to the current economic upheaval has so far been distinctly apolitical. The so-called ‘political response’ to the crisis amounts to little more than a frustrated denunciation of greedy bankers and their high bonuses. It is as if politicians and public figures cannot bring themselves to use political language to interpret this economic crisis. That is why counter-crisis measures, like the nationalisation of finance, are rarely justified politically. This is state intervention without purpose.

The most important consequence of the economic crisis is likely to be the re-politicisation of the economy. This could lead to more demands for extending and deepening the system of financial regulation, and for the state to adopt a greater role in economic affairs. In one sense, such a re-politicisation of the economy would not be a negative development. It may well encourage a more serious public debate about issues that are fundamentally important to people’s lives. However, the downside of the re-politicisation of the economy is likely to outweigh the benefits. After the rescue of the banking system, the state will be under pressure to adopt a more active role in the economy – and the current pragmatic approach of the state may well give way to a more statist tendency towards micro-management and the bureaucratisation of economic affairs.

In the current climate of political confusion, there is a danger that hopes will be invested in the role of the state as an economic saviour. But the institutions of the state, which are already dominated by powerful bureaucratic impulses, are in no position to play a positive role in the area of economic management. We should remember that these institutions are no less responsible for the current predicament than are the greedy market makers with their large bonuses. Replacing an unrestrained derivative market with unrestrained state intervention will make a complicated situation even more difficult to sort out.

A major shakeout and restructuring of capital markets and businesses cannot be avoided – and nor should they be. But instead of dwelling on the losses brought about by the downturn, we should be discussing about how this crisis can be turned into an opportunity for innovation in both economic and political life. Instead of a fruitless debate about the markets vs the state, the focus should be on what can work.

(1) Hugh Dalton (1935) Practical Socialism For Britain, Routledge : London, p.248

First published by spiked, 15 October 2008

Only thing to fear is rhetoric
Probably the two most overused words in the present economic crisis are panic and fear.

The word panic has been used so routinely it has been emptied of meaning. So a headline in a newspaper asks “World economy: is now the time to panic?” as if an overwhelming fear and anxiety is the normal way to react to bad news.

Others tell us that “panic grips Europe” or that it strikes, spreads, escalates, even “rules the markets”. The rhetoric of panic is mobilised to promote the idea that we are all scared and, if we are not, we should be.

Past fears are regularly recycled to lend weight to the claim that being scared is the default option.

One German analyst warns of the danger of a “banking tsunami”, while British Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman Vince Cable demands that interest rates should be slashed to prevent the “bank tsunami”.

The language of environmental catastrophism is recycled to dramatise our predicament. The metaphor of pollution is deployed to describe the workings of the financial system: we have toxic debt, toxic assets and toxic funds. The Arctic icecap may not have yet melted but banks face a physical meltdown. “This week the crash went nuclear,” a columnist from The Guardian warns before predicting “Britain will feel the worst of the fallout”.

The world may have changed since the crisis of the banking system but the way the public is instructed to respond to a threat has not. Scaremongering has become a normal dimension of our lives.

Warnings about the future continue to escalate and the usage of terms such as human extinction and destruction of the planet has become commonplace. The present crop of warnings about “fear gripping the markets” continue a 21st-century tradition that was initiated with alarmist statements about the millennium bug and the threat it represented to human survival. At the time Morris Cerullo, a Pentecostal healing revivalist, prophesised a catastrophe of biblical proportions. “This panic that will sweep the nation will translate into a global depression,” he warned. Some would like us to believe our predicament vindicates his prediction.

Since the turn of our century there has been a veritable epidemic of the rhetoric of fear. Scaremongers today constantly transmit the idea that we ought to be scared. Like therapists who tell us “not to be afraid to cry and show your emotions”, fear entrepreneurs invite us to live our lives as passive and scared individuals. So Cable insists “panic is the all-too-human reaction” before noting that so is fear. Fortunately, the good news is that people panic only in rare and exceptional circumstances. The vast majority of humankind refuses to play the role assigned to actors in a Hollywood disaster movie. People may be angry and apprehensive about their savings and economic security, but their response has little to do with panic.

But how does the dramatisation of global threats affect our lives?

Research carried out for last month’s World Social Summit in Rome suggests that at least until recently most people perceive the problem of everyday survival as far more threatening than the big global fears. The WSS report Fear in the Mega-Cities attempts to capture the experience of fear in 10 key cities across the world. Based on a survey carried out in July this year, it provides important insights into the way the public perceives and feels about threats in London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Mumbai, Beijing, Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Cairo. The study suggests that while a large majority of the respondents (90.2 per cent) acknowledge they have day-to-day worries or serious anxieties (42.4 per cent) about an important dimension of their lives, only a minority (11.9per cent) feel overwhelmed by a sense of fear. Most state they have a positive orientation towards life (55.3 per cent) and almost one-quarter (24.3 per cent) define themselves as optimistic.

One key point that emerges from this study is that the rhetoric of fear is far more pervasive than fear-led behaviour.

It is always difficult to ascertain how people’s beliefs and behaviour are influenced by scaremongers. Most people are exposed to a wide variety of views and claims about problems and threats. Such claims often conflict with other statements and opinions transmitted through the media. People often ignore warnings or at least try to respond to them in light of their experience and circumstances. Many of the mega-scares are far too impersonal and abstract for people to visualise and imagine. For example, warnings about population growth rarely lead people who desire large families to cut down on having children. However, that the big global and apocalyptic scares do not directly influence behaviour does not mean they do not influence our lives. Such scares provide us with a ready-made story about what to fear and their cumulative effect is to make us more anxious about the future.

It is not hope but fear that excites and shapes the cultural imagination of our times. Indeed, fear has become a caricature of itself. It is no longer simply an emotion or a response to the perception of threat. It has become a cultural idiom through which we signal a sense of growing unease with the workings of the world. To acknowledge fear is to demonstrate awareness. This self-conscious affectation does not mean people are more scared than before. It merely signals the idea that they ought to be.

Although, fortunately, most people are able to refuse the invitation to panic, the constant repetition of fear appeals distracts people from engaging with the problems they face. At a time of global economic insecurity, society needs to draw on its reserve of strength and steady its nerves. Instead of treating the crisis as a drama, we need to turn it into an opportunity for learning from our experience.

An edited version of this article appeared as Panic is not the normal ‘human reaction’ on spiked, 13 October 2008

First published by The Australian, 11 October 2008

The ‘credit crunch’ and the crisis of meaning
The key problem today is not so much the banking meltdown, as our inability to understand the threat as a prelude to managing it.

When I first heard the term ‘credit crunch’, it sounded like the brand name for a new product. I was half expecting a voiceover to announce that it is chocolaty on the outside and crunchy on the inside. That was then – now, as we head towards one of the world economy’s greatest upheavals, there is still great confusion about the language we should use to describe the meltdown of the banking system and its destructive impact on what is cheerfully called the ‘real economy’.

It is not always clear how linguistic experts can distinguish between the real and unreal economy. Take a country like Iceland, which has transformed itself into a sub-sub-sub-prime hedge fund. Iceland is dominated by the unreal economy to the point where the banking sector’s assets are nine times Iceland’s annual GDP of £6.8billion. Is it any surprise that this country’s current interest rate is 15 per cent and the rate of inflation lies at 14 per cent? In Iceland, the question is not whether a bank will default, but whether the entire nation will become bankrupt. Iceland may be exceptional in its pathological addiction to credit and debt, but its current predicament exposes the falsity of the idea that the real and the unreal economies inhabit two different worlds. Whatever the challenge facing Iceland, it is no longer confined to the banking and financial sectors.

But why worry about a tiny economy like Iceland’s? Because historical experience shows that a chain reaction can be unleashed from the most unexpected places. Back in 1931, it was the failure of Austria’s largest bank, the Creditanstalt, that precipitated a panic that would eventually envelop the European banking system.

In the UK, where manufacturing now accounts for little more than 11 per cent of GDP, it is far from evident where to draw the line between the real and the unreal. Consider the case of housing. Over the past decade, the housing boom, based on the speculative expansion of credit, has been a critical driver of economic expansion. Both the service and manufacturing sectors have relied on speculation in the housing market for their prosperity. Recently, French president Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of the need to uphold what he called ‘entrepreneurial capitalism’ as opposed to ‘financial capitalism’. However, his desire to separate the good from the bad evades confronting today’s reality, where the different sectors of economic life are more intertwined than ever before.

In the first instance, the current deliberations on the global financial crisis demonstrate a failure of language and a failure of the imagination. Let’s deal first with the imagination deficit. Understandably, analysts draw on the experience of the past to make sense of the present. However, the ceaseless attempts to compare and contrast today’s global disequilibrium with the Great Depression is not a little overdone. The Great Depression serves as a powerful cultural marker for economic failure. This devastating historical episode symbolises an economic system so out of control that people’s everyday lives are turned upside down. It is useful to remind ourselves how bad things can get, but the questions we should be asking and answering ought to emerge from the current experience of global economic dislocation.

The term ‘depression’ is used to describe a severe economic downturn that lasts for many years. A depression is not simply the bust side of an economic boom-and-bust cycle. It represents, not only market failures, but more fundamental problems to do with production and the prevailing political institutions that manage and regulate economic life. Traditionally, economic depressions have also had an important geopolitical dimension. Geopolitical rivalries were intensified through the disequilibrium between capitalist powers with conflicting national interests. Both domestic political conflict and national rivalries have served to complicate the management of economic crises through turning problems to do with the market into irreconcilable differences.

Today, the world economy is also confronted with a loss of its equilibrium. Yesterday’s creditor nation, the US, has turned into a debtor – and a not-entirely developed power, China, has emerged as an industrial giant and the banker of the world. Matters are made more complicated by the fact that, in economic terms, we live in a multi-polar world. The US may be the only global power with serious military and political clout, but it can no longer play the role of guarantor of global economic stability. The European Union is itself facing deep internal divisions on the issue of economic policy, as its member states scramble to secure their own individual advantage. At best, the EU is one player amongst many. China, Russia, India and the oil-rich Gulf states are all significant economic powers, yet we are fast moving into a leaderless world where for some time to come there may not even be a primus inter pares.

The imbalances in the global sphere can only undermine the effectiveness of the numerous international institutions established since the signing of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944. All of these institutions were based on the belief that the US would continue to play the role of guarantor of global economic relations. Steeped in the legacy of the past, these organisations – the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G8 – now lack the ability to respond effectively to the current situation. These are supra-national bodies that are too lacking in imagination or institutional flexibility to yield to new experiences.

If the current trends towards economic decline accelerate and turn into a full-blown depression – as seems to be the likely scenario at the moment – it will be because of the absence of institutions that can implement measures to stabilise the financial system and encourage the flow of capital into productive investment. These same problems are also evident in the sphere of domestic politics. Many of these institutions evolved by adopting practices that were consistent with the demands of so-called ‘liberalisation’: deregulation, privatisation; measures of the 1980s. They lack the capacity to tackle the fundamental and structural problems of global capitalism. Their menu of options – raise or lower interest rates, nationalise or recapitalise failed banking institutions – indicate that their ambition is simply to carry out an unimaginative form of reactive fire-fighting.

The present cohort of government officials, politicians and economic and financial experts are too steeped in the traditions of the good times of the past two decades to be able to take any really difficult decisions. That is why none of them is prepared to spell out the difficult challenges facing Western economies, which must involve a severe reduction of existing forms of state expenditure and the overseeing of a potentially very painful process of ‘shaking out’ the industrial and service sectors. Instead, they talk about council tax rates or push forward moralistic campaigns to convince people to live on less and ‘make do and mend’.

Institutional stasis reflects a manifest lack of imagination, which in turn is most eloquently expressed through the failure of language. The language of economics appears to have been displaced by that of psychology. How many times have you heard that ‘fear grips markets’ or ‘fear grips investors’? Apparently, the emotion of fear is the result of another feeling: a loss of confidence. And once fear grips people, they panic and adopt a ‘pack mentality’ as they give way to their ‘herd instincts’. Turning the world upside down, this diagnosis of mass psychological disorientation confuses the response to the crisis with its cause. Of course, it may well be that a handful of bankers and traders suffer from psychological deficits. But how people respond to uncertainty, whether or not they have confidence in existing arrangements, is far from a psychological issue: it is shaped by the meaning that they are able to give to the experience. If there is meaning, then there is the potential to gain a measure of control over rapidly unfolding events; without meaning, individuals face an existential crisis – the source of the many dysfunctional psychological responses that the media label as ‘panic’.

Language is important because it communicates the ideas with which society attempts to make sense of its current predicament. Every crisis puts to test society’s intellectual resources and its system of meaning. A crisis forces communities to account for the unexpected and to develop answers in accordance with their ideas and beliefs. A crisis can become destructive when society responds to it with readymade analogies with the past or with psychobabble about people’s mental deficits. Such a response demonstrates the absence of language and concepts that are necessary to give meaning to what is potentially a destructive experience. So the key problem is not so much the meltdown of the banking system as our inability to understand this threat as a prelude to managing it. Without a measure of clarity about the meaning of the global turmoil, a crisis will swiftly mutate into a far more ominous threat.

At the moment, the failure of language is fostering a mood of passivity and fatalism. For the first time since the nineteenth century, there are no competing counter-crisis alternatives. Indeed there is little to ‘counter’ to. The disappearance of a meaningful language with which we can comprehend the unravelling of the global system of credit is itself proof of the gravity of the crisis facing humanity. Western culture is far better at constructing a vocabulary of fear around apocalyptic scenarios to do with millennium bugs, climate change, avian flu and other imagined catastrophes than dealing with one that is genuinely unravelling in front of our eyes. Credit crunch, anyone? 

First published by spiked, 6 October 2008

This week on The Forum
Clinical psychologist Dorothy Rowe explores our intimacy and rivalry with our brothers and sisters, American economist Marshall Goldman shows us how powerful Russia has become and sociologist Frank Furedi claims we could be trapped by our own dire predictions.

The Forum is a BBC World Service programme which boldly crosses boundaries: scientific, creative and geographic, presented by Bridget Kendall.

This week:

Clinical psychologist and writer Dorothy Rowe explores why relationships with our siblings are key to understanding our sense of self in her book My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend.

American economist Marshall Goldman assesses Russia’s new status as an energy super power in his latest book Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia.

Sociologist Frank Furedi argues we are too quick to blame global problems on humankind and should confront this ‘new misanthropy’.

Listen to the programme

Each week one guest presents an idea to enhance the world. This week it’s the turn of sociologist Frank Furedi.

Listen to the 60 Second Idea To Change The World

First published by BBC World Service, 5 October 2008

De heksenjachtclub
De progressieve vrouwen van Amerika waren er heel snel bij om Sarah Palin, de Republikeinse kandidate voor het vicepresidentschap, aan het kruis te nagelen. Niet zozeer vanwege haar ideeën, maar vanwege haar levensstijl, constateert Frank Furedi. „De kwaadaardigheid van de taal die jegens Palin gebezigd wordt laat zien met hoeveel minachting de kosmopolitische elite naar gewone mensen kijkt.”

Download a .pdf copy of the article here.

First published by De Verdieping Trouw, 27 September 2008

Climate crisis and the idea of humanity
How the very definitions of freedom and humanity have changed since their Enlightenment conception.

This speech was given at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia, in August 2008. Watch it here.

First published by Fora TV, 23 September 2008

Whatever Happened to ‘Sticks and Stones’?
The freedom to offend is a very small price we pay for upholding a democratic way of life.

We live in a world where you really have to watch what you say. As Ben Stiller recently discovered, even authors and film directors are not exempt from censorious crusaders. A few days before the release of the film Tropic Thunder, co-written and directed by Stiller, protesters denounced this comedy for its repeated use of the word “retard” to describe one of the characters.

You don’t need to be a director of a multi-million dollar comedy to become subject to the attention of censors. The other day I received a helpful guide to the words that I should not use by a publisher who was interested in my work. As expected, the guide warned me about using the word “retard” to refer to retarded people. But I was surprised to discover that the term “mentally ill” was now deemed so offensive that I was instructed to use the term “mental health service user.”

One day I will write a book about the kind of mental state and imagination that leads people to cobble together such a long list of blasphemous words.

But what struck me was how out of touch I had become with the sensibility of contemporary censorship. I was genuinely taken aback when I discovered that the term “Chinese Whisper” was offensive because of its apparently racist connotations. I was moved to despair when I found out that one of my favorite words, “civilized,” ought not be used by a culturally sensitive author because of its alleged racist implications. But “seminal”? Who other than a sad retard could imagine that the word conveyed a powerful hint of patriarchal domination.

The censorious moment

Censorship has a long history. Back in Roman times two magistrates — or “censors” — were charged not only with counting the population but also with the supervision of public morals. Although in the 19th and 20th centuries censorship was frequently driven by a political imperative, its aim remained essentially the policing of moral behavior.

Twenty-first century censorship continues this tradition of moral enterprise. Today censorship is not simply the project of state or religious authorities. Advocacy groups, educators, media organizations, and professionals are actively engaged in rhetorical crusades to ban certain words and/or to promote their own favored ones. In modern times there has never been an era such as ours where language is so carefully regulated and policed by both private and public institutions.

The main reason for this development is the ascendancy of the belief that words can hurt far more than we previously suspected and that people have the right to be protected from them. It is a sign of the times that acts of censorship are not interpreted as what they really are — the coercive regulation of everyday communication and the repression and stigmatization of certain ideas. Instead, they are often represented as enlightened attempts to prevent offending people or as a sensible way of minimizing conflict.

Words are frequently depicted as weapons that can traumatize and psychologically damage its targets. Consequently, the right to free speech often competes with the right not to be offended. From this perspective, censorship is not perceived as a form of authoritarian intrusion but as an enlightened measure designed to protect the vulnerable from pain.

The idea that language offends is not new. But the notion that because offensive speech has such a damaging consequences on people that it needs to be closely regulated represents an important departure from the way it has been conceptualized in previous times. Such an orientation has as its premise a radical redefinition of human subjectivity. It assumes that people lack the intellectual resources to deal with competing ideas. Consequently, the public that lacks independence of thought or moral autonomy it needs to be protected from making the wrong choices in the marketplace of ideas. In such circumstances, ideas can be very dangerous and their suppression can be represented as an act of public service.

The aspiration to protect individuals and people from painful words is underwritten by powerful cultural forces. Consequently, in contemporary times there is only a feeble cultural affirmation for free speech. Indeed, one often gains the impression that academics and public figures are more interested in criticizing the ideal of free speech than in upholding this right.

Many contributors on this subject are not particularly worried about the role of the state in policing speech. Therefore, the original impetus behind the emergence of the cause of free speech — fear of the power of the state to censor and persecute people for their beliefs and words — is dismissed as a historical footnote. It is implicitly discarded as an old fashioned and irrelevant obsession.

Perversely, the exercise of free speech is associated with elite privilege. It is represented as affirming the status of the powerful and the negation of the oppressed and the vulnerable. This radical reinterpretation of the role of free speech is underwritten by a fundamental redefinition of what constitutes the problem. For critics of free speech the locus of the problem is not the state but individual speech acts that wound those without power.

Sadly, we are in danger of forgetting that it is precisely because words have such power that democracy relies on free speech. The freedom to offend is a very small price we pay for upholding a democratic way of life.

First published by Pajamas Media, 13 September 2008

Turning Sarah Palin into a twenty-first century witch
In our era of lifestyle politics, the PC moral crusade against Palin exposes the cosmopolitan elite’s contempt for the common people.

So, Sarah Palin or her vicious, spiteful critics – who is worse?

As a libertarian humanist, I find Palin’s prejudices about creationism and family life troubling. And I am always disturbed when politicians cynically pretend that they are just ‘regular guys’ or ‘hockey moms’. Call me old-fashioned, but when it comes to picking a candidate for the vice president of the United States, I am less interested in the individual’s mothering identity than in her policies.

That is also why I find the attacks on Palin for her role as a mother so nauseating, too. As an advocate of choice in reproductive matters, and in the conduct of personal morality, I strongly disagree with Palin. However, I find myself in the strange position of disagreeing even more with her critics, who seek to dehumanise her and cast her in the role of a twenty-first century witch.

Feminists used to complain that in medieval times it was mainly women who were accused of being witches and burned at the stake. Now many of them have signed up to a vicious internet-driven witch-hunting club against Palin. In their obsessive desire to expose the ‘real’ Palin, they have even tried to crucify her for ‘wanting it all’! She ‘returns to work three days after giving birth’, exclaims one feminist, adding that Palin is ‘living the life of a caricature of the feminist who “wants it all”’.

‘After the birth of her fifth child, she was back in the office after a few days’, complains Sally Quinn of the Washington Post. Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist, asks: ‘How does [Palin] square her role as a mother and a politician?’

When did the aspiration to combine motherhood with a successful career become a focus for the hatred of so-called progressives and feminists? In their opportunistic denunciation of Palin, many of her critics reveal their own barely concealed sense of envy. Take the good Reverend Debra W Haffner, who finds it ‘hard to imagine how a new mother of a five-month-old baby, no less one with special needs, is running a state, no less a national campaign’. In a distinctly mean-spirited tone, she adds: ‘Maybe it’s gotten a lot easier since I had mine.’ This woman of the cloth, who describes herself as a ‘minister and a sexologist’, has no problem with denouncing Palin for putting her career ahead of her family. ‘My family values – and the decisions I’ve made throughout my career – have always put challenging times in my family first’, Haffner boasts. From Haffner’s perspective, a mother pursuing a serious career means putting children and family second.

It seems that even fervent advocates of women’s rights will adopt outdated and chauvinistic moral rhetoric when targeting a woman they do not like. Jane Smiley castigates Palin for her ‘bitchy and arrogant point of view’, which is apparently a ‘characteristic of all conservative women’. ‘The bitch is in there’, observes this signed-up member of the otherwise sophisticated American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The reaction to Palin suggests that many supporters of the pro-choice lobby have adopted a radically new definition of choice. It now means ‘choose what we think is good’, otherwise you will be denounced as a feckless breeder or an irresponsible mother. Jane Smiley took it upon herself to question Palin’s right to have a child at the ripe old age of 44. Smiley the prescriptive inquisitor asks: ‘If she produces a child at 44, I want to know if she believes in birth control.’

Other pro-choice commentators find it incomprehensible that a 44-year-old woman would choose to give birth to a child in the first place. ‘I think getting knocked up when you’re 44, at the peak of your career and [when you] already have four children, is more than slightly narcissistic’, writes the blogger Molly Lambert. Lambert also seems to believe that Palin has only herself to blame for the fact that her youngest child has Down’s Syndrome. ‘I am not saying that being old gets you a retarded baby, but it certainly doesn’t help’, she observes helpfully.

In its ‘Top Ten Most Disturbing Facts and Impressions of Sarah Palin’, the popular liberal magazine AlterNet seems adamant that Palin ‘takes unnecessary risks with the health of her child’. Progressive America, it seems, is now in the business of moralising about how a mother ought to manage her pregnancies. Palin apparently has ‘taken unnecessary risks in the delivery of her child’, and as far as AlterNet is concerned she is not fit to be a mother, never mind a serious political candidate.

This sentiment is echoed by Bonnie Fuller on The Huffington Post, who asks if Palin is ‘ready to take the mantle of the worst mother of the year’. For AlterNet, Palin’s ‘uber-motherhood’ is a façade since she is the ‘right’s version of what a strong woman should look like’. Evidently, right-wing women can be treated as white trash by an otherwise morally refined and ‘progressive’ online publication.

Others condemn Palin for allowing her 17-year-old daughter to get pregnant and for not being embarrassed by this ‘family secret’. For Bonnie Fuller, one of Palin’s crimes is her attempt to ‘normalise’ her daughter’s pregnancy. ‘She opposes sex education and her daughter is pregnant’, writes the Democratic Party’s favourite academic George Lakoff. As far as he is concerned, that alone is proof of Palin’s moral inferiority.

America’s cultural elite sometimes expresses its contempt for simple-minded ordinary folk – yet when it comes to circulating rumours and conspiracy theories, this elite can outdo the most gullible, poorly-educated of America’s ‘trailer trash’. Spreading the rumour that Palin’s youngest son (Trig) is really the offspring of her daughter (Bristol), one reproductive advocate employed by the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center in Pittsburgh writes: ‘My own sicko scenario: Trig is Bristol’s baby.’ Others speculate that Palin has cynically encouraged her 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy in order to use her as a poster child for her own anti-abortion and abstinence-only education policies.

The virulence of the language used by the anti-Palin crusaders reflects the contempt with which the American cosmopolitan elite regards common people. Such explicit denunciations of ordinary people’s morality and lifestyles by self-confessed progressive or liberal commentators are rare today, at a time when American culture professes to be non-judgmental and tolerant – certainly such vicious stereotyping would be condemned if it was directed at minorities or any other section of society apart from ‘rednecks’. That is why, normally, such top-down contempt is expressed through euphemisms and nods and winks.

In the US, terms such as ‘Nascar Dads’, ‘Valley Girls’, ‘Joe six-pack’ or ‘redneck’ have become codewords for the white working classes or the ‘underclass’. In Britain, commentators use different phrases for undesirable sections of society: ‘chavs’, ‘white van man’, ‘Worcester Woman’, ‘tabloid readers’. These are the kind of people who do not write for The Huffington Post and whose lifestyles are looked upon as alien by the very high-minded cultural elites. The very fact that ‘these people’ breed, are unashamedly carnivorous, are not on a diet, sometimes drink beer, sometimes smoke and sometimes partake in even cruder pleasures of life means they cannot be treated as the moral equals of their cosmopolitan superiors.

The invective hurled at Palin is directed not at her politics, but at her lifestyle. This shows that the real dividing line in the American election is not between left and right, but between competing lifestyles. Indeed, the politicisation of lifestyle has become one the most distinctive features of American public life today. Some seem to take their lifestyles so seriously that they do not simply disagree with people who have a different outlook to them – rather they heap contempt and loathing on those who possess different manners, habits and values.

What is most striking is the passion and force with which certain individuals are attacked if they take a different position on, say, the right to abortion or the right to bear arms. These passionate denunciations suggest that some people, most notably those in the liberal elite, feel that their very identity – as expressed through their lifestyles – is being called into question by those who dare to disagree on the environment, abortion, sexual behaviour or any other issue. That is why the denunciation of Palin has assumed such an intensely personal and bitter character. When lifestyle becomes politicised, the new breed of politically-correct moral crusaders cannot help but embrace the language and approach of the witch hunters of old.

First published by spiked, 8 September 2008

Moralisers on a PC witch-hunt
As an advocate of choice in reproductive matters and in the conduct of personal morality, I strongly disagree with Sarah Palin. However, I find myself in the strange position of disagreeing even more with those who seek to cast her in the role of a 21st-century witch.

Feminists used to complain that in medieval times it was mainly women who were accused of being witches and burned at the stake. Now many of them have signed up to a vicious, internet-driven witch-hunt. She “returns to work three days after giving birth”, exclaims one feminist, before adding that Palin is “living the life of a caricature of the feminist who ‘wants it all“‘. Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer prize-winning essayist, asks: “How does she square her role as a mother and a politician?” Her lament is echoed by minister Debra W. Haffner, who finds it “hard to imagine how a new mother of a five-month-old baby, no less one with special needs, is running a state, no less a national campaign”. With a distinctly mean-spirited tone, she adds: “Maybe it’s gotten a lot easier since I had mine.”

Fervent advocates of women’s rights have no hesitation about adopting outdated chauvinist morals and rhetoric when targeting a woman they don’t like. Smiley castigates Palin for her “bitchy and arrogant point of view”, which is “characteristic of all conservative women”. Many supporters of the pro-choice lobby have adopted a radically new definition of choice. It now means “choose what we think is good”, otherwise you will be denounced as a feckless breeder or an irresponsible mother.

America’s cultural elite is rarely inhibited from expressing its contempt for ordinary folk. But when it comes to circulating rumours and conspiracy theories, it can outdo the most gullible, poorly educated trailer trash. The virulence of the language adopted by the anti-Palin crusade reflects the contempt with which the American cosmopolitan elite regards common people. The direct and transparent denunciation of ordinary people’s morality and lifestyle by self-confessed progressive and liberal commentators is rare in a culture that professes to be non-judgmental and tolerant. Such vicious stereotyping would meet with condemnation if it were directed at minorities or another section of society. That is why such contempt usually is transmitted through euphemisms and through nods and winks.

In the US, such attitudes are expressed through terms such as NASCAR dads, Valley girls, Joe six-pack or redneck. In Britain, NASCAR dads have a different name. They are dismissed as chavs, white van man, Worcester Woman or tabloid readers. These are people who do not write for the Huffington Post and whose lifestyles are alien to those of the very high-minded cultural elites. Some may even resemble those folk in Australia who voted for Pauline Hanson. That they breed, are unashamedly carnivorous, are not on a diet, drink beer, sometimes smoke and partake in the cruder pleasures of life disqualifies them from being treated as the moral equals of their cosmopolitan superiors.

The invective hurled at Palin is not so much directed at her politics but principally at her lifestyle. It shows that the real dividing line in the US election is not between Left and Right but between lifestyles.

Indeed, the politicisation of lifestyle has become one the most distinctive features of public life in contemporary America. Some seem to take their lifestyles so seriously that they do not simply disagree with people who have a different outlook from them; rather, they heap contempt and loathing on those who possess different manners, habits and values.

What is most striking is the passion and force with which certain individuals are attacked if they take a different position on, say, the right to abortion or the right to bear arms. These denunciations suggest some people, most notably those in the liberal elite, feel their identity - as expressed through their lifestyles - is being called into question by those who dare to disagree on the environment, abortion, sexual behaviour or any other issue. That is why the denunciation of Palin has assumed such an intensely personal and bitter character. When lifestyle becomes politicised, the new breed of politically correct moral crusaders can not help but embrace the language and outlook of the witch-hunt.

Also read:

Redefining feminism: Have activists morphed into female chauvinist piglets? The Australian, 5 September 2007

First published by The Australian, 5 September 2008

Hurricane Gustav and the incitement to panic
US officials’ overblown reaction to Gustav shows that the politics of worst-case thinking can seriously harm community safety and solidarity.

Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans called it ‘the storm of the century’. Was he talking about the heavy monsoon rains that have caused disastrous flooding in Bihar, one of the poorest states in India? That catastrophe has killed many people and left more than a million homeless. No – Mayor Nagin, along with the global media, was not particularly interested in the floods in Bihar. Rather, his and the media’s attention was focused on Hurricane Gustav. Because Gustav’s winds were heading in the direction of New Orleans, it was considered politic to treat it as if it were the storm of the century.

For some observers, the apocalyptic significance attached to Hurricane Gustav coupled with the relative indifference to the devastation in Bihar is proof of double standards in the Western media. It is true that Gustav turned out to be a fairly normal hurricane which caused minimal damage in the New Orleans area, while nearly three million people were displaced by the floods in Bihar. The striking contrast between the media’s treatment of these two storms suggests that stories about calamitous events have greater significance when they occur in America rather than in India.

However, the narrative of scaremongering that was attached to Hurricane Gustav was not simply a product of a mean-spirited Western obsession with ‘our own problems’ – it was also shaped by a powerful mood of cultural disorientation that afflicts Western societies today. And one troubling symptom of this affliction is a tendency to inflate the destructive potential of all kinds of natural phenomena. Increasingly, even quite normal weather forecasts can take on an increasingly menacing tone.

The way that a society perceives and responds to acts of misfortune, such as a natural disaster, can provide important insights into its values and beliefs. The response to Hurricane Gustav suggests that in the West, the threat posed by natural disasters is increasingly perceived from the standpoint of worst-case thinking. In the case of Gustav, the tendency to anticipate the worst was reinforced by memories of the US government’s inept and tragic response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Unfortunately, the main lesson drawn from the humiliating failures during Katrina is that officials can avoid blame by acting according to worst-case principles. Consequently, any hurricane that heads for Louisiana is likely to be treated as yet another ‘storm of the century’. One consequence of this precautionary approach is a thoroughgoing disruption of people’s lives; millions of citizens were put under pressure to evacuate their homes as Gustav approached. And it’s worth noting that some of the lives lost in New Orleans in recent days were a result of the evacuation: four people were killed in traffic accidents; three patients died during their evacuation from hospitals and nursing homes.

Officials who oversaw the evacuation of New Orleans argue that it is better to be safe than sorry. ‘There will be some criticism’, noted Dick Gremillion, head of emergency operations in the Calcasieu Parish of Louisiana – but he added that, ‘particularly after Katrina, I don’t think anyone expects us not to do everything that we can to make sure no one is hurt’. Others claim that a lot more folks would have died if people had not been cleared out of New Orleans as Gustav approached.

Unfortunately, reality is not that simple. Taking a one-dimensional approach to threats and dangers does not give rise to an effective strategy for keeping communities safe. The tendency to scaremonger and to inflate dangers itself contributes to a heightened state of insecurity in affected communities. Once hurricanes are represented as a threat to the very existence of New Orleans, then people’s sense of existential security and ability to cope with adversity are directly undermined. ‘Survivors of Hurricane Katrina and Rita watched in horror as Hurricane Gustav threatened to wipe out their rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and along the Louisiana coast’, reported the New York Times on 2 September. The NYT said that ‘many evacuees confessed that they would not have the strength to return home to New Orleans if Gustav proved any where near as devastating’; it quoted numerous people who felt so disoriented by this episode that they seriously considered abandoning their homes and community. Such a mood of defeatism is the inexorable consequence of the risk-averse approach taken by the authorities to Gustav.

Officialdom’s attitude to this emergency effectively invites people to feel confused and insecure. If people are told to expect a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, as they were in New Orleans, it is difficult for them to respond with resilience. Moreover, the heavy-handed, top-down, mandatory demand that residents evacuate will have reinforced people’s sense of powerlessness and insecurity. Such bureaucratic procedures actually erode a sense of community and render people passive. ‘You need to be scared’, said Nagin: ‘You need to be concerned and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now.’

Such incitement to fear inevitably discourages people from relying on their own coping skills. To make matters worse, Nagin’s hysterical denunciation of looters-to-be – who were told they would be put straight in jail – threatened to turn a routine hurricane into a Hollywood disaster movie. The sense of anxiety about the potential scale of Gustav’s destruction was compounded by officialdom’s sensationalist and speculative fears about desperate criminals stalking the streets of a ravaged New Orleans.

Many observers have commended the response of the Louisiana authorities to Gustav, describing it as an exemplary form of ‘responsible behaviour’. In reality, this response is best understood as a clear example of responsibility avoidance. Everyone involved in the management of this disaster was influenced by a desire to avoid blame. Instead of carefully evaluating the risks, and formulating a strategy that cautiously evaluated all the different options, the response was to evacuate and run. Mass evacuation was promoted to create the impression of responsible behaviour; and such impression management is really about avoiding taking difficult, responsible decisions.

Unfortunately, ‘crying wolf’ has become a routine response to uncertain climatic conditions. And not just in New Orleans. In England, officials frequently react to heavy rainfall by issuing flood warnings. Moreover, floods are no longer treated as a normal part of human experience but as potential tragedies that may overwhelm local communities. In England, as in New Orleans, such alarmist reactions are motivated by a desire to avoid blame just in case a storm suddenly turns really nasty.

Policies founded on worst-case thinking can exact a heavy price. For a start they dispossess communities of their ability to manage their affairs. After a major bureaucratic exercise, such as a mass evacuation, life rarely returns to normal. It will take more than a few days before the majority of the evacuees are able to return to New Orleans. By this time they will discover that their lives have been disrupted far more by the official response to the storm than by the physical damage caused by the storm itself. History shows us that major top-down initiatives such as evacuations and quarantine measures often serve to disorganise and undermine community life, which is why such measures should be used only as last resorts by emergency planners.

The one-dimensional precautionary response of officialdom to natural disasters is underwritten by a culture that insists on dramatising every unexpected natural event. It is as if we have returned to medieval times when acts of nature were interpreted as signs that some malevolent force was at work. We no longer have prophets and seers who interpret the ‘real meaning’ of a storm or an earthquake. Instead we have experts who insist that human greed is the cause of the predicament faced by people who live in the path of hurricanes. They also claim that all these disparate natural events are the consequence of the most powerful existential threat of all: climate change. In such circumstances, the rhetoric of the ‘storm of the century’ appears as, not what it really is – a form of irresponsible scaremongering, but as a prophecy based on the wisdom of experts. And sadly, this disastrous response to a disaster diminishes our capacity to cultivate human resilience in the face of adversity.

First published by spiked, 3 September 2008

Phobias: in Greek
There is something rotten in the trend to label political or cultural views as 'phobias' that must be treated. Essay republished in Issue 5 of the Greek bi-monthly magazine monkie.

Issue 5 can be downloaded as a .pdf here.

The English version of the essay can be read here.

First published by monkie magazine, 1 September 2008

Dare to be moral
Susan Neiman’s fascinating new book, a guide to morality for grown-up idealists, reminds us of the importance of human reason in resolving the age-old philosophical tension between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’.

Sadly today, the language of morality has been monopolised by moral entrepreneurs, by individuals who are in the business of peddling simplistic ideas about ‘good’ and ‘evil’. True moral judgements, based on values and convictions, are increasingly rare. 

Mainstream society seems to have become estranged from the arena of morality; many public figures seem embarrassed by morality. As Susan Neiman argues in Moral Clarity: A Guide For Grown-Up Idealists, ‘even people whose lives’ are ‘clearly guided by deep moral commitments to moral values’ are ‘reluctant to speak in moral terms’. Instead, politicians argue that their policies are ‘evidence-based’ rather than ‘good’ or ‘just’. Unless they are traditional religionists, public figures hold back from making explicit moral judgements.

Worse still, when some public figures do try to promote an idea of good and evil, they often do so in a caricatured form. For example, time and again the Holocaust is mobilised to remind people of how awful things can get. It is as if anything short of this exceptionally horrific event cannot really be categorised as truly bad. Occasionally, the spectre of the paedophile or the serial killer is wheeled out to animate a sense of public moral revulsion. Once again, only the extreme and exotic seem to deserve our moral condemnation.

We seem to have created a kind of ‘psychic distance’ between ourselves and various moral problems, and this is inhibiting society’s ability to develop, and agree on, the ideals we should live by.

One of the problems tackled by Susan Neiman in her important new book is the left’s disenchantment with moral ideals. ‘With consequences too unhappy to be ironic, most of the voices willing to speak in universal moral terms at all now consider themselves conservatives’, she writes. Many others note that in the US, the right wing’s use of the language of values has hampered the Democrats’ attempt to appeal to the self-interest of ordinary folk. Often, observers respond to this development in America by urging the Democrats to cobble together their own set of values. In Britain, too, New Labour politicians have tried to invent values in a similar way to businesses that employ public relations consultants to magic up a mission statement.

Such a calculating and instrumental approach to values does little to provide meaning to people’s lives. It also does not provide a vision of the world that might help people engage with the problems of everyday life. One of the merits of Moral Clarity is that it refuses to fall into the trap of opting for opportunistic quick-fix solutions. Instead, it ‘aims to reclaim the moral concepts that the left no longer uses with full voice’. And inevitably, that means revisiting the ideals of the Enlightenment and thinking through their implications for today.

Secular thinkers often complain that morality has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists. What they overlook is that it is often the reluctance of secular intellectuals themselves to develop and express moral ideas that helps create the narrow equation between religion and morality today. Neiman argues compellingly that religion is not the source of morality but is merely one of the forms through which people can voice their moral convictions. Philosophical ideals about virtue and good and evil were explored by thinkers such as Plato without the aid of the Bible. Moral reasoning emerges through human activity, and it does not depend on the authority of any religious text.

Indeed, it can be argued that, both logically and chronologically, moral ideals emerged prior to their codification in religious texts. From a humanist standpoint, people do not require a God or a priest to instruct them on what is good and evil. In an interesting reinterpretation of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Neiman argues that Abraham’s questioning of God’s intentions derives from his moral courage. She puts forward a provocative thesis: that the real dividing line is not whether you believe or do not believe in God, but whether or not you uphold the principle that ‘there must be reasons for everything that happens, and that those reasons are up to us to find’. And it is precisely a lack of respect for the value of reason that creates so much moral confusion today.

Society continues to be defined by humanity’s disappointment with the promise of ideas in the twentieth century. Those who espouse ideas that they consider to be important are frequently dismissed as ‘idealists’, a term that now has an almost entirely negative ring to it. Important ideas associated with key moments in history – the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions – are often portrayed as pompous rhetoric or impossible myths. Most important of all, ideas are endowed with little meaning in public life today. Indeed, instead of ideas we have the ‘knowledge society’, where change is constant and where yesterday’s insights and wisdom tend to give way to tomorrow’s new temporary truths. In such circumstances, society’s attachment to ideas takes on an episodic and pragmatic character.

Worse still, there are powerful cynical influences that are obsessed with deconstructing ideas and exposing them as myths. Post-modernists and other ‘critical’ thinkers uncritically regard ideals as ‘myths’, and, as Neiman notes, they express a sense of ‘disillusionment with the process of thinking itself’.

In fact, human reasoning is one of the most powerful moral resources for people living in an uncertain world. If we take a grown-up approach to moral reasoning, then we should recognise that there are no off-the-shelf answers to the problems that humanity faces. Intellectual maturity means having a disposition to trust the ability to reason and to make judgments. ‘The Enlightenment gave reason pride of place, not because it expected absolute certainty, but because it sought a way to live without it’, observes Neiman.

Moreover, through reasoning, human beings can learn to exercise their active side and cease being merely the objects of forces beyond their control. ‘Growing up means taking our lives out of others’ hands and into our own’, Neiman argues. And one of the ways we can do this is through the power of ideas. Critics of ideals and idealism claim that ideas can never provide all the answers to the problems facing the world. It is true that ideals do not possess magical powers, but ideas can help to shape reality. As Neiman says: ‘Ideals function as ideals precisely because they lead us on past all that we know.’

Today, the powerful sense of low expectations amongst cynics and realists, and their disdain for the role of ideals, has all the hallmarks of moral and intellectual immaturity. To counter this outlook, Neiman has subtitled her book ‘A Guide For Grown-Up Idealists’. It is worth recalling that Kant associated reason, the key Enlightenment principle, with growing up. For Kant, the growing child served as a symbol for the Enlightenment. Neiman reminds us that for Kant the Enlightenment was ‘less a matter of knowledge than courage’. The challenge he threw in humanity’s face – ‘Dare to know’ – demands that we take ideas seriously. Neiman’s attempt to appeal to our grown-up imagination is one of the most attractive features of her book. Hers is an activist stand, which insists that clarity about reasoning can help us make the kind of moral judgments that promote civilised public life.

One of the ways that moral clarity can be gained is through focusing, not only on the way that the world is, but also on how it ought to be. Neiman takes the view that ‘truth is a matter of the way the world is’ and ‘morality is a matter of the way the world ought to be’. Throughout Moral Clarity, she demands that we enforce a clear distinction between is and ought. She goes so far as to argue that this distinction is the ‘most important one we ever draw’. The tension between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ has haunted philosophers through the centuries, and it is a tension that many religions refuse to accept.

Neiman is perhaps too uncompromising in following Kant’s tendency to separate these two spheres, however. Sometimes, such a perspective can promote a sense of fatalism, as usually what is becomes the end of the story. Neiman is aware of this dilemma, and writes: ‘The abyss that separates is and ought is too deep to bridge entirely; the most we can do is narrow it.’ Perhaps. But true moral clarity is the outcome of the very difficult process of moral clarification which promotes a continuous exchange between what is possible and what is necessary. The very significance that the Enlightenment attached to ideals was based on a recognition that ideals could take us closer to where we ought to be. That is why moral clarification is not reducible to philosophical reflection on abstract possibilities; it also has an important historical dimension that provides people with insights on which we ought to act.

Growing up also demands that the mature take responsibility for the future. Contrary to the conventional view, being grown up need not mean becoming cynical and resigned to the world as it is. Perhaps if we were to take ideas a little more seriously, we could begin by attaching greater moral status to ourselves, both as individuals and as members of a human community. 

First published by spiked Review of Books, 29 August 2008

Why the West can’t kick its Cold War habit
In an era of juvenile diplomacy and patternless foreign policy, Cold War talk can easily become Hot War horrors.

All of a sudden, we are confronted with the prospect of a new Cold – or Not-So-Cold – War. What started off as an opportunistic and misconceived local land-grab by a juvenile Georgian government has, in the space of a week, turned into a dangerous and potentially catastrophic international crisis.

The most worrying aspect of the crisis is its volatility and unpredictability. Its trajectory is unpredictable because global diplomacy lacks any genuine diplomats today. In place of diplomacy, we have immature political leaders, who are driven more by public relations and opinion-polling concerns rather than by clearly defined aims or interests.

This kind of behaviour has become routine in the arena of domestic politics, where its negative consequences tend to be contained by the media and by party competition. However, such irresponsible grandstanding in the sphere of international relations can have far more destructive consequences. As the current crisis shows, it can unleash a dynamic of reaction and counter-reaction, where at a certain point ‘fighting words’ serve as a prelude to real fighting, and to military competition and conflict.

According to the story being peddled by a new generation of Cold Warriors in London and Washington, the world is confronted by a ‘resurgent’ Russia bent on becoming a new superpower. They claim that the Caucasian crisis is the outcome of the expansionist ambitions of Moscow, and that unless the Russians are stopped in Georgia then the Ukraine will be next – and before too long Europe will face the military might of its old adversary.

This fantasy of the ‘Rise of Russia’ overlooks the fact that Russia is a relatively feeble and divided nation. Yes, it possesses oil and other important commodities, but it is a conservative and even defensive, status-quo power. There is little doubt that Russia is dominated by an authoritarian and self-serving regime, which is capable of ruthless and violent behaviour. But its recent actions in response to the invasion of South Ossetia by Georgia are no different to those that would have been undertaken by any regional power confronted by a similar challenge.

The crisis in the Caucasian region has important local origins. But the most recent episode in the conflict is the outcome of broader international influences, the most important of which is the project of extending NATO into Caucasia and the Ukraine. Is it any surprise that Russia, or any other power that found itself in a similar situation, should be concerned about the consequences of being surrounded by nations signed up to a hostile military alliance?

Matters have been made worse by Washington’s decision to site missile launchers in Poland. The policy of NATO expansion eastwards and the siting of new missile systems in Europe provide the context for the current crisis. These developments provided the signals encouraging the Georgian government to launch a war in South Ossetia.

What is puzzling about the current situation is not Russia’s response to the Georgian invasion but the reaction of the West, particularly the US. Future historians will surely ask the questions: Why did the Bush administration embark on a course of an aggressive foreign policy towards Russia? Why encourage former regions of the old Soviet Union to join NATO, knowing that it can only provoke and humiliate the Russians? And most importantly, at a time of global uncertainty why open up a possibly dangerous conflict on a new front?

The West is fully occupied with the ‘war on terror’, with conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and with the wider tension in the Middle East. In such circumstances, geo-political interests would surely dictate that Western governments should seek accommodation with Russia and China instead of attempting to relive Cold War fantasies and revive Cold War tensions. The attempt to force Russia on the defensive in the Caucasian region can only benefit that other regional power, Iran – a development that is likely to cause even more headaches for Washington and London.

It is difficult to discover clear patterns in the working of twenty-first-century global affairs. Simplistic commentators have claimed that oil was the real reason behind the invasion of Iraq – no doubt today they will argue that the Georgian crisis has been caused by a conflict over resources or by the geo-political ambitions of Russia or the US. Unfortunately, there is a more dangerous force at work. The US in particular (but also other powers) is uncertain of its place in the world. Wars are being fought in faraway places against enemies with no name. In a world where governments find it difficult to put forward a coherent security strategy or to formulate their geo-political interests, a re-run of the Cold War seems like an attractive proposition. Compared to the messy world we live in, the Cold War appears to some to have been a stable and at least comprehensible interlude.

Tragically, governments thrashing about and constructing new enemies can unleash forces that cannot be restrained through conventional diplomatic means. They provoke local actors to embark on military adventures which in turn let loose the dog of wars in the most unexpected of places. Only this time, we lack the clearly worked out rules that helped ensure that the old Cold War did not become Hot.

First published by spiked, 18 August 2008