Frank Furedi

A depletionist view of history and humanity
David Willetts is one of today’s very few intellectual parliamentarians, which makes the fact that he has now written a neo-Malthusian, generation-bashing book all the more depressing.

The poverty of contemporary political discourse is conspicuous in the run-up to the UK General Election. There are very few politicians today who have the intellectual presence of a Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Churchill, Crosland, or even a Denis Healey. Increasingly the search for policies is outsourced to think thanks and public relations companies, who are assigned the task of spotting the next ‘Big Idea’.

In such an intellectual desert, the Tory shadow minister for universities and skills, David Willetts, stands out as one of the few parliamentarians who combine intellectual eloquence with an ability to communicate complex ideas clearly. It is unfortunate, then, that his latest offering, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future, and Why They Should Give it Back, seems to show how difficult it is for any individual, even someone like Willetts, to transcend the intellectual wasteland that surrounds parliament these days.

Willetts’ book addresses a very important issue in British society: the erosion of meaningful contact between generations and the menacing crisis of adulthood. The roots of this crisis are moral and cultural, but sadly, in line with current think-tank wisdom, The Pinch relies on demographic, naturalistic and socio-biological explanations to account for the crisis.

Willetts uses the metaphor of the clash of generations to explain many of the cultural and socio-economic ills afflicting contemporary society. Apparently, the baby boomers – those born in the post-Second World War baby boom – have been far too selfish and self-centred to pay any heed to the needs of future generations. The sheer demographic weight of the boomers has led to, and exacerbated, Britain’s economic ills and threatens to compromise the welfare of generations to come, says Willetts. Here, classical environmentalist guilt-tripping of the elderly for threatening the wellbeing of the planet and of unborn generations is recast in the form of a socio-economic generational analysis. The book’s subtitle – ‘How the baby boomers took their children’s future’ – hints at the guilt-tripping to come.

In an age when neo-Malthusianism has an unprecedented influence over Western public life, it is not surprising to discover that the dismal Reverend Thomas Malthus himself (1766-1834) is the hero of Willetts’s drama. Willetts writes of the ‘ingenious application of the insights of Malthus’ to explain why we live so long, and criticises those who dismiss fears about the future with ‘the charge of neo-Malthusian pessimism’. His book is based on a depletionist theory of economic history. In line with the Malthusian model, The Pinch presents resources as being entirely fixed and all variables as more or less constant, except, of course, population growth. From this perspective, one generation utilises resources at the expense of the next generation. Willetts concedes that the boomers ‘continue to do some great things’, but ‘now the bills are coming in’ and ‘it is the younger generation who will pay them’. This outlook also underlies today’s view of the ageing population as a potential ‘social catastrophe’, where the costs of looking after elderly boomers are seen as an unfair burden on the income of younger and future generations.

Here and there, Willetts tries to modify his depletionist thesis. ‘We certainly recognise that the innovative power of the almost seven billion humans alive today is a resource which dwarfs all others’, he writes – yet he then goes on to dismiss such an optimistic perspective. Sadly, he is drawn towards a model that presents people as predominantly the consumers of resources rather than the creators of resources. Such an analysis overlooks the fact that the boomers were, and remain, highly innovative people who created far more wealth than was left to them by the previous generations. If today’s and future generations of young people make good use of the intellectual, scientific and cultural legacy that they inherit, they are likely to be even better off than their parents were. The only limit they face is their own imaginations.

In line with the advance of neo-Malthusianism, The Pinch seeks to extend its analysis to explain a variety of socio-economic and cultural trends. Numerous problems are recycled as essentially generational problems. Generational segregation – which is a very real problem, but not for the reasons Willetts puts forwards – is described in The Pinch as a consequence of the ‘economic gap’ between generations. The alleged failure of the baby boomers to act responsibly towards future generations has also given rise to the crisis of citizenship, apparently. It is also claimed that the demographic weight of the boomers was responsible for the rise of the 1960s counterculture, which in turn promoted individualism – divorce, abortion, and so on – and anti-family values. Even the failure of the market and of the financial system is blamed on the boomers, who have apparently ‘been pinching too big a share of the wealth’. So economic stagnation and low levels of investment are not so much failures of markets as the consequence of greedy boomers wanting to have it all.

At times, The Pinch uses a shockingly crude form of generational determinism to explain events. Willetts argues that ‘being a big generation gives you a lot of power’. And accordingly, the boomers rule the world: ‘Your large cohort will dominate marketplaces. You will be kings and queens among consumers. Elections will be pitched at you – you will be able to spend your life in a generational bubble, always outvoting and outspending the generation before and after you.’

But do generational consciousness and behaviour have the power and influence that Willetts believes they do? And is there anything unique about generational relations in the early part of the twenty-first century?

Generational analysis

According to Willetts, ‘generational analysis’ begins with the nineteenth-century sociologist August Comte and was first systematically set out by Karl Mannheim in his 1928 essay ‘The Problem of Generations’. Actually, anxiety about generational tensions goes back to the beginning of human history. Since early human civilisation, young people were reminded, through proverbs and myths, of their obligation to obey authority.

In ancient Mesopotamia, instructions on obedience were communicated through cuneiform script. According to a study of Sumerian proverbs, one of the aims of these proverbs was to promote the ideal of respecting parents and elders. So in a typical proverb a son is instructed to pay heed to his father’s commands as if they were the words of God. There were similar proverbs and myths in Ancient Egypt and Greece. In 2450 BCE, in one of the earliest attempts to codify personal conduct, Ptah-hotep, a vizier of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt, proclaimed the necessity for the young to heed ‘the thoughts of those who have gone before’.

Of course, sometimes the assertion of authority invariably invited the contestation of authority. It was in ancient Greece that the generation gap emerged as a topic for political debate and philosophical reflection. The defeats suffered by Athens during the Peloponnesian War unleashed a tirade of criticism by the younger generation of the mismanagement of the campaign by their elders. This denunciation of the wisdom and influence of the elders provoked a furious backlash. In subsequent years the older generation sought to restrain the pretensions of the young through associating such pretensions with immaturity and destructive behaviour. The charge of ‘corrupting the youth’, levelled at Socrates, indicated how serious the potential for generational conflict was taken. As far as Plato was concerned, generational conflict undermined the authority of the elders and led directly to anarchy. Those who misled the young were denounced for threatening the future of Athens.

Throughout history, the authority of the older generation over the young was taken for granted in all cultures. All traditional societies can be characterised as gerontocracies. That is why the rebellions against traditional authority that did occur were not only directed against the old way of doings things but against the old themselves. Frequently, such revolts were driven by the animus that sons felt towards their fathers and their way of life. By the nineteenth century, the young often expressed their aspirations through a distinct form of generational consciousness and a rejection of the old. The emerging cult of the young communicated the idea that the elders were not to be trusted.

Until the twentieth century, any questioning of the power of elders focused on the manner in which authority was exercised. Youthful critics pointed to the failures, betrayals and cowardice of older generations, but they did not question the right of elders to possess authority. Over the past century, by contrast, the criticism of adult authority has acquired a more ideological streak, leading to what has been labelled as the ‘de-authorisation of elders’. Never mind the question of whether they exercise authority in a good way or bad way – today elders are no longer seen as possessing any real moral or cultural authority. Indeed, in recent times it is not only the authority of the old that has been called into question, but also the authority of all adults.

Yet there is something very distinctive in the way that generational tension and conflict are understood and discussed today. Until recently, criticism of the elders expressed the frustrations of young people, who were determined to acquire some of that authority and status associated with being a grown-up. By contrast, today such criticisms are promoted by members of the older generations themselves, who are uncomfortable with exercising adult authority.

Catastrophic accounts of the pensions crisis or the idea that grown-ups are responsible for the destruction of the environment speak to an alarming loss of faith in adult authority itself. A process that I have described elsewhere as ‘socialisation-in-reverse’ teaches young people the idea that they are morally superior to their polluting parents. An example of this project of de-authorising grown-ups can be seen in ‘A letter to your father’ written by the Australian climate alarmist Clive Hamilton. ‘There is something you need to know about your father’, wrote Hamilton in his public letter to Australia’s youth, telling children that their dad is ‘helping’ companies pollute the environment, which will mean that ‘lots of people, mostly poor people, are likely to die’.

There are many problems with relying on a generational analysis to interpret broad socio-economic trends. The concept of the generation is an abstraction. Most people do not identify themselves as members of a particular generation. Indeed, identities based on ethnicity, class, religion and lifestyle almost always override the identity of generation. Sociological research suggests that generational consciousness was, and remains, extremely feeble. As the American critic Harold Rosenberg noted, ‘belonging to a generation is one of the lowest forms of solidarity’ (1).

So why is there so much discussion about generational conflict today? What distinguishes today’s problematisation of the authority of the elders is that it is principally promoted from above rather than below – it is the elders themselves who are questioning their own authority. This indicates that the issue at stake is not so much the greed of the boomers as their confusion about how they should relate to the younger generations.

Naturalising human behaviour

Contemporary neo-Malthusianism continually draws on the intellectual resources of sociobiology and naturalistic models of human behaviour. In recent years, the British political class has invested heavily in ideas about sociobiological behaviour, borrowing liberally from brain research to explain socio-economic and moral issues.

The Pinch wholeheartedly embraces this naturalisation of human moral and social behaviour. Thus, readers are informed that the phenomenon of vampire bats sharing blood with one another shows that even a competitive environment can encourage cooperation, indicating the potential for reciprocal altruism. Experiments involving rhesus monkeys apparently demonstrate that these animals have a capacity for empathy. It seems that capuchin monkeys can also exhibit reciprocal altruism, thereby creating hope for us humans, too.

From this naturalistic worldview, any idea of moral reasoning, of engaging people in a serious debate about society and morality, becomes severely denigrated. Instead, policymakers are encouraged to influence citizen’s behaviour by appealing to their narrow self-interests and to instrumental reasoning. ‘I believe [that a] naturalistic account of morality is increasingly going to contribute to public discourse about the many ethical issues in public policy’, writes Willetts. From this perspective, even the Ten Commandments can be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis. So the call to honour thy father and mother is here justified instrumentally – apparently you will benefit if you honour your parents because you are more likely to be honoured, too. There is little room for moral autonomy and decision-making in a world where our choices are apparently programmed by our brains and our short-term self-interests. It seems that ‘neuroscientists have indeed established that the same bit of the brain which makes decisions on inter-temporal choices is used for altruism and fairness’, says Willetts. So it is a bit of your brain rather than moral reasoning that accounts for your altruism or lack of it.

In the world of The Pinch, when human behaviour is not determined by biology it is dominated by some pre-existing force. So even those Germans who acted bravely by sheltering Jews during the Nazi era were not really acting as morally autonomous agents. Willetts cites a researcher who apparently found that all these Germans ‘had one thing in common – they all came from strong families’! Does that mean that Germans born into ‘weak families’ lack the moral capacity for heroism and sacrifice? When even people’s sense of duty and sacrifice is apparently pre-programmed, it is not easy to have any real confidence and belief in the human potential.

And that is what The Pinch is really about. Do we believe that future generations can carry on and develop human civilisation by developing science, technology, the arts and culture? Or do we simply see the future as an era of limits, where we will gradually exhaust the planet and fail to create and construct a better world? Our children’s futures have not been stolen by the baby boomers. The future is there for the taking if the world of adults takes its moral responsibilities more seriously, and properly prepares young people for their freedom and authority.

The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future - And Why They Should Give it Back, by David Willetts, is published by Atlantic Books.

(1) Harold Rosenberg (1959) The Tradition of the New, (New York; Horizon Press) p.244

First published by spiked, 26 February 2010

Let children be children
We can't hide all sexual images from children but we can stop reading their behaviour through a prism of adult motives.

It is difficult not to feel disturbed by the sexualisation of childhood. We live in a world where a significant proportion of 11-year-olds have been regularly exposed to pornography and where many actually believe that what they see is an accurate depiction of real-life relationships.

It is tempting to panic in response to this development and lose sight of the real problem. Sadly, the Home Office report published today proposes the tired old strategy of “protecting” children from exposure to sexual imagery. The report’s addiction to banning and censoring is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. The real problem is not simply inappropriate sexual imagery but a highly sexualised adult imagination that continually recycles its anxieties through children.

Why worry about lads’ magazines when the adult world continually signals to children the idea that sex is more or less everything? Inadvertently, adults – including many child experts and policy makers – continually sexualise children by interpreting youngsters’ behaviour through the prism of adult motives.

We live in a world where six-year-olds are expelled from school for inappropriate sexual behaviour, where nine- and 10-year-old boys are put on the sex offenders register for touching a girl and where playing doctors and nurses is interpreted as a precursor for sexual violence. The main accomplishment of this highly prurient representation of youngsters’ behaviour is the normalisation of sexual motivation in children’s lives. And once children understand that their behaviour is regularly assessed according to adult sexual norms they are likely to internalise their elders’ take on the world.

The Home Office report is dominated by an agenda where the various problems of adulthood are revisited on children. Legitimate adult concerns about domestic violence and sexual crimes are rediscovered in childhood. In many ways this form of adult intervention is simply the flip side of the commercial sexualisation of children. Sadly, “inappropriate sexual behaviour” by young children has emerged as a new policy obsession.

The difference between “inappropriate” and “appropriate” behaviour is in the eye of the beholder. New guidance for social workers states that they should recognise that children are at risk from their peers, and that they should not interpret sexual play as “normal”. Social workers are advised not to accept a high threshold before taking action. There are numerous experiences that are entirely harmless in the context of children’s lives which would take on a more sinister meaning if they were carried out by an adult. The Home Office report falls into the trap of seeing the dark side of adult sexuality in the playground.

Yet there is a very disturbing development we need to address – which is the failure of society to draw clear distinctions between forms of behaviour appropriate for adults and those for children. We can address the issue not by banning sexual imagery but by demystifying it with our children. We can’t prevent them from being exposed to sexual images but we can help them to understand that such images have nothing to do with the real world.

First published by Guardian, 26 February 2010

Turning peer review into modern-day holy scripture
The treatment of peer-reviewed science as an unquestionable form of authority is corrupting the peer-review system and damaging public debate.

Suddenly, the esoteric system of peer review has hit the headlines.

The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, has acknowledged that it made a serious error in publishing a study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and bowel disease. Earlier this month, a group of leading stem cell researchers wrote an open letter pointing out the systematic abuse of peer review by a small cabal of scientists, whom they accuse of using their position to slow down the publication of the findings of their competitors.

Then there is the scandal surrounding the leaked emails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England, and the dubious data published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which further exposes a worrying trend towards the corruption of peer review.

Peer review is a system that subjects scientific and scholarly work to the scrutiny of other experts in the field. Ideally it ensures that research is only approved or published when it meets the standards of scientific rigour and its findings are sound. At its best, peer review guarantees that it is disinterested science which informs public discussion and debate. When established through peer review, the authority of science helps to clarify disputes and injects into public discussion the latest findings and research. Peer reviewing depends on a community of experts who are competent and committed to impartiality. It depends on the commitment and collaboration of scientists and scholars in a given field.

However, the individuals who constitute a ‘community of experts’ also tend to be preoccupied with their own personal position and status. Often, the colleagues they are reviewing and refereeing are their competitors and sometimes even their bitter rivals. The contradiction between working as a member of an expert community and one’s own personal interests cannot always be satisfactorily resolved.

Unfortunately, even with the best will in the world, peer reviewing is rarely an entirely disinterested process. All too often the system of peer review is infused with vested interests. As many of my colleagues in academia know, peer reviewing is frequently carried out through a kind of mates’ club, between friends and acquaintances, and all too often the question of who gets published and who gets rejected is determined by who you know and where you stand in a particular academic debate.

Peer reviewing cannot remain immune to the preoccupations, agenda and interests of the individuals who carry it out. Even when they have the best intentions, academics and scientists can overlook errors and become blind to the importance of a new but maverick contribution. They are ordinary mortals who have their fair share of prejudices, and are often no less petty or self-centred than other people can sometimes be. Nevertheless, peer reviewing has traditionally, at least, been the most effective way of exercising quality control over the proposals and output of the scholarly and scientific communities.

The experience of the past few months indicates that there at least three different ways that the system of peer review can be undermined.

First, there is the genuine mistake. One example of this was the failure of the Lancet’s refereeing process to spot the flaws in the study associating the MMR vaccine with autism and bowel disease. Now that the Lancet has retracted this flawed study, questions need to be asked as to whether in this instance the desire to gain publicity for the Lancet influenced the decision to rush into print.

Second, there is the damaging influence of nepotism and professional jealousy. Academics and researchers are all too conscious of how their prestige and career opportunities can be enhanced by getting their work published in a major journal. Sometimes, reviewers regard the research they are refereeing as the work of a competitor and adopt the tactic of either delaying or preventing its publication. This is the accusation made by 14 stem cell researchers in a letter to several major journals in their field. The researchers claim that the peer-review process was corrupted by reviewers who deliberately stalled, and even prevented, the publication of new results so that they or their associates could publish the breakthrough first. They also accused the journals of not doing enough to prevent this stalling from taking place.

The third, and in recent years the most disturbing, threat to the integrity of the peer-review system has been the growing influence of advocacy science. In numerous areas, most notably in climate science, research has become a cause and is increasingly both politicised and moralised. Consequently, in climate research, peer review is sometimes looked upon as a moral project, where decisions are influenced not simply by science but by a higher cause. The scandal surrounding ‘Climategate’ is as much about the abuse of the system of peer review as it is about the rights and wrongs of the various claims made by advocacy researchers in and around the IPCC and the UEA.

Turning peer review into a dogma

The usual problems associated with peer review, as outlined above, have been exacerbated through the transformation of peer review into a form of authorisation. Increasingly, peer review is cited as kind of unquestioned and unquestionable authority for settling what are in fact political disputes. Consequently, the findings of peer review are looked upon, not simply as statements about the quality of research or of a scientific finding, but as the foundation for far-reaching policies that affect everything from the global economy to our individual lifestyles.

Increasingly, peer review has been turned into a quasi-holy institution, which apparently signifies that a certain claim is legitimate or sacred. And from this perspective, voices which lack the authority of peer review are, by definition, illegitimate. Peer review provides a warrant to be heard – those who speak without this warrant deserve only our scorn.

You can almost visualise peer-review dogmatists waving their warrant and demanding that their opponents be silenced. For someone like George Monbiot, the British climate-change alarmist, peer review is the equivalent of a holy scripture. Boasting of his encounter with an opponent, who challenged him to a debate on speed cameras, Monbiot wrote: ‘I accepted and floored him with a simple question.’ Predictably, the question was: ‘Has he published his analysis in a peer-reviewed journal?’

In a world where opponents can be ‘floored’ simply because they lack the authority provided by the ritual of peer review, it is not surprising that there is considerable incentive to manipulate the system of peer review, to bend it to one’s own will and needs. Andrew Dessler, a climate-change researcher, also sought to floor an opponent, who apparently wrote a ‘denier op-ed’ in the Wall Street Journal, by dismissing its value on the grounds that that newspaper is not peer reviewed. Dessler argued that, since ‘the only place’ where this ‘denier’ can present his views is in ‘non-peer-reviewed venues like conferences and press releases’, he is worthy only of censorious contempt.

Climate alarmists do not simply boast of their monopoly over peer-reviewed outlets – they also do their best to call into question peer-reviewed outlets that dare to publish research that challenges any aspect of their moral crusade. When Cambridge University Press published Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, it faced bitter criticism from campaigners who hinted that something had gone wrong with the publisher’s system of review. Stephen Schneider, a professor in environmental studies, asked why ‘a publisher with so excellent a reputation in natural sciences (it even published the IPCC reports) publish[ed] a polemic under its imprimatur’, and demanded to know if Cambridge University Press had ‘the book completely reviewed?’ It seems that as far as Schneider is concerned, it is simply unthinkable that a publication that questions the prevailing consensus could have been properly reviewed.

The zealous policing of peer review by campaigners is directly encouraged by the IPCC itself. As Reiner Grundman argued in (the peer-reviewed journal) Environmental Politics, the IPCC ‘characterises outside critics as unscientific as they do not publish in peer-reviewed literature’. With so many moral resources invested in the authority of peer review, it is not surprising that some supporters of the IPCC consensus adopt an almost casual attitude towards the violation of academic protocols. The leaked ‘Climategate’ emails show how one UEA scientist, Dr Keith Briffa, wrote to a colleague to ask for help in keeping a paper that he did not like out of an academic journal that he edits. US climate scientist Michael Mann has proposed that a journal should be ostracised for daring to publish a paper criticising his work. ‘I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal’, he argued. Phil Jones, the central figure in the Climategate scandal, promised to keep two research papers out of the IPCC report. ‘I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is’, he said.

Another dodgy dossier

Sadly today, there are far too many researchers for whom science has become an instrument for the realisation of a higher cause. As a result they are scientists in name, but moralisers in practice. The manipulative exploitation of peer review is underwritten by a culture where campaigners are permitted to have a cavalier attitude towards facts.

While the IPCC insists that its critics should be judged by the most rigorous standards of peer review, it has a more relaxed attitude towards its own publications. In recent weeks there have been a series of damaging revelations about how conclusions drawn by the IPCC’s 2007 report were based on speculation and anecdotes. So claims made about disappearing mountain ice were cobbled together from information drawn from a student’s dissertation and an article published in a mountaineering magazine. Other claims were based on information from newsletters, press releases and reports produced by environmentalist advocacy groups.

There is a powerful double standard at work here: the IPCC attacks its critics for relying on ‘grey literature’ – that is, non-peer-reviewed literature – and yet it has relied on anecdotes and speculation in its reports. We shouldn’t be too surprised about this double standard, because, fundamentally, the IPCC is not simply concerned with presenting the facts but with interpreting them, giving them meaning, giving them momentum. It continually makes conceptual leaps from facts to meaning, from findings to politics. Of course there is nothing wrong with being in the meaning business, just so long as you are honest about it and do not present yourself as the pure, impartial voice of science.

It shouldn’t be surprising that those involved in the corruption of peer review should also be happy to use anecdotes and speculation as the moral equivalent of hard scientific data. However, it is important to understand that these people fervently believe in their cause and are convinced that, far from deceiving the public, they are preserving and protecting a higher truth. Like the authors of the British government’s dodgy dossier on Iraq, they are convinced they are absolutely right. And it is this sense of righteousness that allows them not to let the absence of a few facts stand in the way of promoting their arguments as either hard intelligence or peer-reviewed science. It was the moral conviction of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld that allowed him to respond to a question about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by stating that ‘the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. And in a similar manner, the absence of evidence does not deter climate alarmists from practising their art.

The philosophy of the Noble Lie – revealing a ‘higher truth’ with little regard for meaningful facts – allows people to stretch the truth in good conscience. One apologist for the sordid Climategate affair has reminded the public to ‘not forget the context in which many of these emails were sent’. Apparently, ‘this is a saga that goes back to a time before the current political and media concern about climate change’. He reminds us that this was before Al Gore got his Nobel Prize and when ‘well-funded climate sceptics routinely spread disinformation’ . From this perspective, the ‘context’ lightens the burden of moral reproach. Climategate is an understandable if not 100 per cent justified response to the ‘context’. Which is precisely how Noble Lies are hatched.

Today, many people can count on the authority enjoyed by climate science to avoid having to engage with the criticisms or concerns of the public. That is why, even when the emperor, that is the IPCC, is caught without his proper peer reviews, it can still carry on by blaming the little boy for being too sceptical.

This is a longer version of an article first published in The Australian on 20 February.

First published by spiked, 23 February 2010

Rescuing adult authority in the twenty-first century
Parental determinism – the idea that parenting skills shape the future – makes Stalin’s economic determinism seem almost subtle by comparison.

At a conference on parenting at the British Library in London on 16 February, Professor Frank Furedi will outline how the politicisation of parenting is damaging family relations and the education system. Here he gives a preview of his comments, and his five-point programme for rescuing education from today’s meddling policymakers.

One of the most disturbing developments in British society over the past two decades has been the politicisation of parenting. Politicised parenting might be presented as a long overdue, child- and parent-friendly development, which will put right many of the problems families face. But in reality, the turn towards colonising people’s private lives is underpinned by the prejudice that virtually all of society’s problems are caused either directly or indirectly by poor parenting. All the major British political parties now hold this prejudice and have signed up to the new dogma of the ‘politics of behaviour’.

In Britain, it was Tony Blair’s regime, elected in 1997, which first promoted the fantasy that the government could fix society’s problems by getting its hands on the nation’s toddlers before their parents had a chance to ruin them. One of New Labour’s key focuses was on ‘early intervention’ – and for Blair, intervention could never be early enough. He believed it was possible to spot tomorrow’s ‘problem people’ even before they were born. Weeding out ‘unfit parents’ by imposing a kind of quality control in the arena of parenting has been a key plank of the early-intervention movement.

The agenda was has rarely been questioned. When Blair said in September 2006 that the state should spot potential problem people before birth – by intervening in problem families looking to have more children – the media and the political elite appeared to agree with him. Only a handful of politicians, labelled ‘out-of touch’ and ‘old-fashioned’, raised doubts. ‘This one about identifying troublesome children in the fetus – this is eugenics, the sort of thing Hitler talked about’, argued Tony Benn, former leader of the Labour Left.

Sadly, the myth of parental determinism has been institutionalised in Whitehall. New Labour policymakers seem to believe that the quality of parenting can determine just about everything in a child’s future; they even believe that parenting, when done well, can help to overcome society’s own structural inequalities. ‘Good parenting is crucial for children and can help them to overcome disadvantages’, argues a Green Paper published by the government last month. It is testament to the failure of the political imagination in Whitehall that parenting has become the new social policy arena.

And it isn’t only New Labour. It is becoming clear that no matter which party wins the UK General Election this year, the politicisation of parenting will triumph. Last month, Tory leader David Cameron said politicians ought to participate in a national crusade to develop parenting skills in order to build a ‘responsible society’. He said that what really determined a child’s chances in life was ‘not the wealth of their upbringing, but the warmth of their parenting’.

The idea of a one-dimensional, causal relationship between parenting and socioeconomic outcomes, dreamt up by British think-tanks and policymakers, threatens to take public discourse to a new low. In comparison with parental determinism, the economic determinism of Stalinism or the racial determinism of the old eugenics lobby seem positively subtle. The idea of parental determinism allows policymakers to promote the most absurd prejudices. Over the weekend, Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, argued that children from broken homes and dysfunctional families have underdeveloped brains and start school with the mental capacity of one-year-olds. He said that certain babies’ brains fail to grow because their parents do not offer them ‘nurture and support’.

Back in the nineteenth century, the now discredited science of phrenology linked the size of people’s brains to their personality and character. Were he around today, the idiosyncratic founder of that science, the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, would be the toast of the Westminster think-tank scene.

The devastating impact on education

It is in the sphere of education that we can most clearly see the destructive impact of parental determinism. As I argued in my recent book, Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating, one of the most significant causes of the problems facing our schools is the erosion of adult responsibility and authority.

Unfortunately, today the term ‘adult responsibility’ can come across as a meaningless platitude. After all, most grown-ups have little involvement in the education of the young. Children are perceived to be the responsibility of their parents or carers at home and of their teachers at school. Indeed, adults are encouraged to keep their distance from other people’s children, and understandably draw the conclusion that what happens to young people is not really their business. But grown-ups are not just individuals: they are members of a wider world of adults. By their very existence they represent adulthood to the younger generation, and through their behaviour they send out clear signals about what we expect from children. In a very real sense, adult authority is indivisible.

The way grown-ups behave in everyday life does not go unnoticed by children as they head to school or walk to the park. If adults behave authoritatively towards youngsters at home and in their communities, it is likely that teachers will feel comfortable in exercising authority in the classroom. But if adults in general are reluctant or confused about giving guidance to the younger generation, then the challenge facing the teacher in the classroom can sometimes become overwhelming. It is hard to be the last bastion of authority in a society where adult authority seems to be crumbling.

Adults no longer take meaningful responsibility for younger generations. In March 2009, Bob Lightman, president of the UK Association of Teachers and Lecturers, complained that teachers were expected to teach children who ‘seem never to have the opportunity to have a conversation outside school with an adult’. The implication of this statement is far-reaching, because intergenerational conversations are an essential part of education. When grown-ups become disconnected from the young, they cease to play an adult role. Adults are not simply biologically mature individuals. Although the state and quality of being an adult can vary greatly from one individual and one society to another, a real sense of adulthood is developed and clarified through adults’ relationships with the young.

When it comes to education, ideas about adult responsibility tend to be expressed in a one-sided and negative way today. In the many heated debates about schooling, both sides are happy to criticise parents or teachers, or both, for their ‘irresponsible’ behaviour. But such criticisms are often motivated by a desire to score some political points and avoid blame. Typically parents are called upon to ‘get involved’ and to help the school to do its job of educating the next generation, and such exhortations often express a sense of disdain for parents. ‘It’s no good blaming schools for deteriorating behaviour among young people when parents all too often set such an appalling example themselves’, says Tim Collins, a former Tory spokesman on education. Here, censuring parents is a way of avoiding the larger problem of failing schools or our ill-thought-through education system. Ed Balls, the New Labour secretary of state for children, schools and families, takes a similar view to Collins, arguing that ‘parents should face up to their responsibilities’ and possibly be penalised if they don’t.

While some cast parents as the villains of the education drama, others look at them as the saviours of education. In August 2008, when he was a UK education minister, Lord Adonis said we need more ‘pushy parents’ to help to force poor state schools to improve. In March 2009, the New Labour government unveiled a scheme that would allow parents and pupils to use ‘satisfaction ratings’ to grade their schools. The call for more parental intervention in education is likely to exacerbate the tendency for parents to vent their frustration on their children’s schools, thus deepening some of the tensions in adult society without doing anything to improve the quality of schooling.

Education is a generational responsibility that cannot, and should not, be outsourced to a particular group of individuals. Of course, the ideal of a generational transaction of knowledge has never been fully realised. In previous times it was often undermined by conflicts of culture, religion, class and social interests. Today, matters are made far worse by policies promoting parental determinism. Parents are encouraged to live through their children’s education and become emotionally engaged with the minutiae of what takes place in the classroom.

What we end up with is a highly individualised free-for-all, where parents are effectively encouraged to fend for themselves and their own children’s education and to pursue their private interests. Indeed, political parties are at the forefront of demanding a greater role for parental pressure in education – without being in the slightest bit aware of the damage they are doing when they try to compensate for the weaknesses of schooling by mobilising parental anxieties.

The involvement of mothers and fathers in the business of schools intensifies petty squabbles and conflict between parents and between parents and teachers. It empties the ideal of adult responsibility of real meaning, and actually damages the institution of education. The five-point programme outlined below is my attempt to alter the relationship between parents and the classroom, to counter the damaging impact of parental determinism on schooling, and to confront the real problems facing education today.

A five-point programme on education

Education is considered one of the key issues in the pre-General Election debate. Parents, teachers and members of the public are deeply concerned with the problems afflicting our schools. Lack of clarity about standards, problems of classroom discipline, continuous changes to the curriculum and system of examination are just some of the issues raised in public debates. Unfortunately, however, some of the really big questions facing schools are seldom considered. We only rarely discuss issues such as the role of adult authority and policymakers, and what education should mean. If schools are to prosper, we need to alter the relationship between policymaking and education, teacher and parent, and adults and children. So, what needs to be done?

1. Take politics out of education

Policymakers should stop fiddling with the curriculum if they want to improve schooling. In fact, schools should be insulated from the influence of policymakers. Ceaseless interference in the curriculum has encouraged an atmosphere of instability in the classroom. Education needs more stability and classrooms must be freed from bureaucratic micro- management. Education should be ‘de-politicised’, with teachers freed from government initiatives in order that they can focus on educating.

2. Rethink the relationship between parents and teachers

At present, the line between home and school and parent and teacher is drawn poorly. Parents are expected to behave as amateur tutors and to involve themselves in their children’s schooling. In turn, teachers spend far too much time acting as social workers or psychologists, trying to deal with issues that are best confronted in the home. This is not only a waste of time – it encourages tension and conflict between parents and teachers. There is a difference between raising children and educating them, and this distinction must be re-established to allow for a clearer and more constructive relationship between parents and teachers.

3. Stand up for adult authority

Adult authority, in and out of the classroom, must be affirmed in order to provide a sturdy foundation for education. At present, the authority of parents and teachers over children receives little cultural affirmation. Yet to teach effectively in schools, teachers must exercise authority in a manner that is unambiguous and clearly understood by their pupils. Parents need to understand this, and support it.

4. Education must be independent and diverse

Although schools are part of a community, they must be left to teach what must be taught, without the distractions of outside pressures. We need a tolerant and open-minded ethos towards education, not a prescriptive approach towards schooling that restrains teachers’ initiative and ambition. Within a national curriculum, schools can flourish if their teachers and heads have sufficient independence to exercise professional judgment and to work out strategies appropriate to their circumstances. It is legitimate for central government to outline a basic common curriculum through which children gain access to their rightful intellectual inheritance – but how that curriculum is taught is best decided by local schools and communities.

5. Value education for its own sake

Sadly, education tends to be seen as ‘a means to an end’ these days, an instrument for the realisation of an objective that is external to itself. Yet education cannot flourish if it is not valued for its own sake. A principal characteristic of education is its lack of interest in an ulterior purpose. For example, abstract philosophical thought, literary comprehension and an understanding of numerical principles are part of our human legacy and not just skills to help us function in the world. Teachers who understand and embrace this are more likely to inspire their pupils and address their individual specific educational needs. Education works when we see it as important in its own right, and when children are taught to value learning for its own sake.

First published by spiked, 15 February 2010

Music for the masses: could it work here?
It would be brilliant if El Sistema, Venezuela’s social movement for classical music education, came to Britain. But there are obstacles.

Last night, in London, I participated in a very stimulating discussion titled ‘El Sistema: Will it Translate into English?’

El Sistema is a genuine social movement and publicly funded music-education programme in Venezuela. It is made up of 30 symphony orchestras, and most spectacularly it has got more than 250,000 Venezuelan children involved in learning serious music. A great number of these children – around 90 per cent – come from poor communities.

Last night’s discussion, organised by the Worshipful Company of Musicians and held at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, was designed to examine whether such a programme could ever take off in Britain – would it ‘translate’? It attracted a lively audience of musicians, music educators and individuals from the music industry. One of the speakers, Gloria Carnevali, former cultural attaché at the Venezuelan Embassy in London, said it is difficult not to be inspired by the huge impact that El Sistema has had on people’s lives. And she is right.

Other speakers, including Kathy Whitaker, manager of the Big Noise Project in Raploch, Scotland, and the well-known cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, who is chairman of the UK ‘In Harmony’ scheme that aims to get more young people playing musical instruments, expressed their hopes that the principles of El Sistema could work in Britain. Another panellist, however, Richard Morris, a well-known advocate of sustained progressive education, raised concerns about the potential for El Sistema to succeed in Britain, given the short-termist attitude we have to public funding here and the differences between children’s lives in Venezuela and children’s lives in Britain.

So, as a sociologist, how would I answer the question ‘El Sistema: Will it Translate into English?’

In a world where we have become accustomed to pointless government social engineering and to well-meaning projects that invariably fail to make the slightest bit of difference to people’s lives, it is reassuring to know that we still possess the imagination to develop inspiring projects that do improve people’s lives. El Sistema is one of those rare examples of contemporary social activism that aims to transform people’s existences. It is definitely working in Venezuela, but could such a system of music education succeed in Britain?

It would be wrong simply to write off the possibility of something like El Sistema taking off here. After all, there are millions of parents who wish their children had more opportunities to improve their lives and get a better education. Throughout Britain, it is clear there is a real desire to participate in community-focused activities. Indeed, many children in Britain are actively looking for a community they can belong to, and would welcome participating in the ‘musical home’ provided by a British version of El Sistema. Also, the appetite for success, especially in the world of music, is widespread, as shown by the popularity of reality TV shows such as The X Factor.

However, it would be foolhardy to overlook the formidable cultural and social barriers that could make it difficult for El Sistema to work in Britain. I believe that there are at least four obstacles potentially standing in the way of translating El Sistema into English.

The first is the institutionalisation of low expectations in British education. As I understand it, the Venezuelan scheme demands serious commitment from the children, who are taught to play their instruments to a very high standard. In an average week, children receive many hours of tuition and they are expected to practice during weekends. In other words, they have to organise their schooling, social and family lives around the music.

In Britain, education in general, and music education in particular, works to a far less exacting standard of commitment. The contrast between El Sistema and the UK government’s Music Manifesto is striking. The Music Manifesto is about giving children a ‘musical experience’ and it lacks the challenging and transformative potential of El Sistema. In an educational environment where pushing children and demanding serious commitment is often decried as ‘authoritarian’, it would be very difficult to gain support for an El Sistema-style initiative from anything more than a small minority of self-selected and highly motivated families.

The second obstacle is linked to the wider cultural mood of low expectations. Poverty and a lack of economic opportunities are, of course, a problem for some communities. And unfortunately, in Britain, disadvantaged communities are also afflicted by cultural influences that undermine people’s ambitions and belief in themselves. In my travels around the world, I have often encountered real, absolute poverty. But often that poverty stimulates people and makes them hungry for a different way of life; they will jump at any opportunity that promises to improve their circumstances.

Sadly, such a sense of ambition is often weak in disadvantaged communities in Britain. Instead of the hunger for success that one sees amongst the poor of southern Asia or Latin America, people on very low incomes in the UK often have a strong consciousness of entitlement and have become distracted, by many factors, from understanding how their own efforts might lead to positive outcomes.

The third obstacle is the ascendancy of celebrity culture. There are many influences behind such cultural phenomena as the reality TV show The X-Factor. One thing that fuels such things, unfortunately, is the aforementioned culture of low expectations, which distracts people from understanding the relationship between effort and success. Sadly, many young people want to become celebrities, and they focus on this objective without being encouraged to educate, train and improve themselves to realise their ‘dream’. Young people have always been drawn to ‘dreams’, but contemporary celebrity culture merely flatters their fantasies rather than instilling in them a true love for, or commitment to, music.

The fourth obstacle is the highly individuated culture of British childhood. For a variety of reasons, children’s lives are highly fragmented and individuated today. El Sistema provides an education that has a strong community focus. The children don’t practice on their own, but rather learn from the very start how to work and play together in an orchestra. There is little doubt that such a joint effort helps to encourage both a community dynamic and individual creativity. Such an approach goes against the grain of Britain’s atomised culture of childhood, where success is measured in a one-sidedly individualised manner.

The four obstacles I have outlined do not constitute an argument against the introduction of something like El Sistema in Britain. But hopefully they demonstrate, to those who are serious about introducing a Venezuelan-style system of music education here, that we must self-consciously challenge the culture of low expectations that afflicts schooling and children’s lives throughout British society. There is little point in introducing a modified Music Manifesto-friendly scheme that would require little commitment from children. It has got to be the real thing.

One reason why El Sistema has succeeded in Venezuela is because it was the product of a genuine movement. In other words, it is not a project of music education. Projects – even when well-funded – are just that: projects. They seldom transform into long-term durable institutions that materially improve people’s lives. Yes, pilot projects can work, because of the concentration of resources and the highly motivated personnel that they attract – but they rarely spread and become embedded in communities, which is why the bureaucratic attempt to generalise ‘best practice’ in ‘project creation’ turns into an exercise in ticking boxes.

For El Sistema to work here, it needs to be led by a movement of committed music educationalists. Hopefully that is one Venezuelan lesson that can translate directly into English.

First published by spiked, 28 January 2010

Hulp is geen zaak voor angsthazen
Reddingswerkers en hulporganisaties bekommeren zich te veel om de eigen veiligheid.

De neiging om risico’s te mijden is in de huidige samenleving zo sterk geworden dat deze ons in de weg staat als altruïsme voorop moet staan, meent Frank Furedi.

Na de aardbeving op Haïti is er in de hele wereld een grote stroom van altruïstische gevoelens op gang gekomen. Mensen willen graag de slachtoffers van deze natuurramp helpen. Maar helaas halen rampen soms ook het slechtste in ons naar boven – en er bestaat een reëel gevaar dat het huidige altruïsme tenietgedaan zal worden door de desoriëntatie en het gebrek aan zelfvertrouwen van de westerse samenleving. Wat uitsluitend zou moeten worden gezien als een humanitaire crisis, wordt steeds vaker tot een ‘law-and-order’-probleem gereduceerd, waarbij veel reddingswerkers klagen dat ze niets kunnen doen door ‘het geweld en de instabiliteit’.

Het van een crisis een drama maken is nu de gebruikelijke culturele reactie op een natuurramp geworden. Na de orkaan Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 bleek het overgrote deel van de verhalen over moordzuchtige bendes, wijdverbreide verkrachtingen en nietsontziend geweld niets meer te zijn dan dat: louter verhalen. Toch wordt de westerse cultuur gefascineerd door het drama van een ramp.

De afgelopen jaren hebben de media en de entertainmentindustrie een narratief kader voor rampen ontwikkeld, dat mensen ertoe aanzet rampzalige gebeurtenissen op een bepaalde manier te interpreteren. In die zin is het vrij gebruikelijk dat echte tragedies worden vergeleken met films over menselijke verdorvenheid: een Australische hulpverlener die de aardbeving op Haïti ‘overleefde’, zei dat ze „zich voelde alsof ze meespeelde in een nachtmerrie-achtige film over het einde der tijden”.

Net als in de nasleep van de orkaan Katrina verspreiden veel overheidsfunctionarissen, gesteund door de media, alarmerende verhalen over de ineenstorting van de beschaving en de rechtsorde op Haïti. In de woorden van een verslaggever van de Amerikaanse televisiezender ABC: „We zien plunderingen, we zien bendes, we zien daklozen die voor eigen rechter spelen en afrekenen met mensen die ze als een bedreiging beschouwen.”

Amerikaanse militaire functionarissen waarschuwen dat de plunderingen en het geweld de hulp dreigen te ondermijnen. „We zullen ons met het veiligheidsprobleem moeten bezighouden”, aldus de Amerikaanse generaal Ken Keen. De militarisering van deze hulpoperatie is gelegitimeerd door de Verenigde Naties, die aankondigden dat de VN-vredestroepen zouden worden aangevuld met duizenden Amerikaanse soldaten om ervoor te zorgen dat de hulpverleners hun werk konden blijven doen.

Ongetwijfeld zijn er veel wanhopige mensen op Haïti, die het gevoel hebben dat ze niets te verliezen hebben als ze het recht in eigen hand nemen. Maar waarom worden deze daden van de machtelozen afgeschilderd als een serieuze bedreiging voor de VN, het Amerikaanse leger en talloze andere internationale spelers op Haïti? Jazeker, de situatie is zeer moeilijk, en iedereen die betrokken is bij de hulpinspanningen mag niet verwachten op de thee te zijn uitgenodigd. Maar het is tragisch om te beseffen dat wat de hulp werkelijk belemmert, niet zozeer het geweld en de plunderingen van de Haïtianen zijn, maar de angst en de ongerustheid van de hulpverleners.

Uit veel verslagen blijkt dat het merendeel van de hulpverleners en reddingswerkers niet naar de arme gebieden buiten Port-au-Prince durft af te reizen, omdat hun organisaties bang zijn voor hun veiligheid. Veel artsen en reddingswerkers worden beschermd door gewapende lijfwachten, en sommigen lijken zich eerder druk te maken over hun eigen veiligheid dan over het verstrekken van hulp. Het lijkt er zelfs op dat een krachtige weerzin tegen het nemen van risico’s de overhand heeft gekregen.

Dezer dagen is het niet een of ander agressief buitenlands beleid dat de tendens voedt om humanitaire hulpoperaties te transformeren in militaire oefeningen. Deze neiging om een land dat is getroffen door een aardbeving, voor te stellen als een oorlogszone, en het idee dat de reddingswerkers zelf waarschijnlijk gered zullen moeten worden, zijn de logische gevolgen van de cultuur van risicomijding die onze westerse samenlevingen is gaan overheersen. Zelfs als het gaat om de nobele missie van het redden van mensenlevens prevaleert het ethos van het banale risicobeheer.

De westerse samenlevingen zijn zo geobsedeerd geraakt door veiligheid, dat vrijwel iedere menselijke ervaring vergezeld gaat van een gezondheidswaarschuwing. Het zijn niet alleen speeltuinen en scholen die nu worden gedomineerd door het ethos van veiligheid om de veiligheid zelf – ook organisaties als de nooddiensten, politie en leger zijn nu onderworpen aan het dictaat van gezondheid en veiligheid. Bill Rammell, de Britse minister van Defensie, zei vorig week: „Mijn angst is dat we als natie zó afkerig van risico’s, zó cynisch en zó naar binnen gekeerd worden, dat we ons als vanzelf op weinig glorieuze wijze zullen isoleren.”

Volgens een Britse journalist komen Britse politieagenten tegenwoordig nauwelijks nog op straat. En als ze dat wél doen en met een ernstige situatie worden geconfronteerd, nemen ze zelden risico’s. In één geval belegerden gewapende agenten vijftien dagen lang een huis in Londen, om daar pas binnen te vallen nadat de gegijzelde op eigen kracht was ontsnapt en de gijzelnemer omkwam als gevolg van een door hemzelf aangestoken vuur. Het veiligheidsethos is ook in het leger geïnstitutionaliseerd geraakt. Legercommandanten moeten risico-inschattingen maken voor ieder aspect van de training van hun soldaten. Sommigen hebben het opgegeven het uiterste van hun ondergeschikten te vergen, omdat ze bang zijn de gezondheids- en veiligheidsvoorschriften te overtreden.

Generaal Sir Michael Rose, het vroegere hoofd van de Britse elitestrijdkrachten SAS, heeft zich uitgesproken over de verwoestende gevolgen van risicovermijding en het veiligheidsethos voor de moraal van het leger. Hij heeft de „morele lafheid” veroordeeld, die volgens hem de „meest rampzalige ineenstorting van het militaire ethos in de recente geschiedenis” heeft teweeggebracht. En de teloorgang van het ‘krijgersethos’ is nog schrijnender in het Amerikaanse leger.

Een analist gelooft dat risicomijdend gedrag de effectiviteit van het Amerikaanse leger heeft ondermijnd: „Naarmate de nadruk op het belang van het uit de weg gaan van risico’s in de commandoketen omlaag sijpelt, worden jongere commandanten en hun soldaten zich er steeds meer van bewust dat risicomijdend gedrag gewenst is en gaan ze dienovereenkomstig handelen.”

Anders dan andere organisaties in de samenleving kunnen het leger, de nooddiensten en rampenteams eenvoudigweg niet goed functioneren als ze geen risico’s mogen nemen: ze moeten zich begeven naar instabiele plekken en verder gaan dan wat hun letterlijke mandaat dicteert. Als het gedrag van reddingsteams wordt bepaald door de zorg om hun eigen veiligheid, zoals nu op Haïti lijkt te gebeuren, worden ze onvermijdelijk afgeleid van de humanitaire missie waarvoor ze op pad zijn. In zulke omstandigheden wint de zorg om de veiligheid het van de noodzaak van de hulp. Erger nog: het dreigt de nobele daden van de mensheid te veranderen in smakeloze pogingen om op veilig te spelen. 

First published by NRC Handelsblad, 26 January 2010

War Gott Grün?
Beim Versuch, mithilfe der Religion die Menschen zu einem umweltfreundlichen Verhalten zu zwingen, degradieren grüne Denker sowohl den Glauben als auch die Wissenschaft. Von Frank Furedi.

Download the article [.pdf] here.

First published by Die Furche Feuilleton, 22 January 2010

To rescue Haitians, we need to take risks
The slow delivery of aid to Haitians suggests that even the noble mission of saving lives has been subordinated to the dictates of risk-aversion.

Since the beginning of time, catastrophes have represented a major challenge to our humanity. And history suggests that, most of the time, disasters bring out the best in us. People tend to come together and demonstrate kindness and solidarity to their fellow man.

During the past week, following the terrible earthquake in Haiti, there has been an outpouring of altruistic sentiment around the world and a great desire to help the victims of that disaster. But unfortunately, sometimes disasters also bring out the very worst in us – and there is a real danger that today’s altruism will be negated by contemporary Western society’s disorientation and failure of nerve. Increasingly, what should be seen exclusively as a humanitarian crisis in Haiti is being turned into a law-and-order problem, with many rescuers claiming they can’t venture out because of ‘violence and instability’.

Turning a crisis into a drama is now the routine cultural response to catastrophe. Following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, the vast majority of the stories about murderous gangs, widespread raping and mindless violence turned out to be just that: stories. Yet Western culture is fascinated by the drama of disaster. In recent years, the media and the entertainment industry have constructed a narrative of disaster through which people are encouraged to interpret disastrous events. So it is quite typical for real-world tragedies to be compared with movies about human depravity: an Australian aid worker who ‘survived’ the earthquake in Haiti said ‘she felt as if she was part of a nightmarish end-of-days movie’ (1).

As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many officials, backed up by the media, are spreading alarmist stories about the breakdown of civilisation and law-and-order in Haiti. As one ABC reporter said: ‘We’re seeing some looting, we are seeing gangs, we are seeing the homeless taking matters into their own hands and dealing with people that they believe represent a threat.’ (2)

American military officials warn that looting and violence threaten to undermine relief efforts. ‘We are going to have to address the situation of security’, said General Ken Keen of the US Southern Command (3). The militarisation of this relief operation was legitimised by the United Nations, which announced that its peacekeepers will be joined by thousands of US soldiers to ensure that aid workers can get on with the job at hand.

No doubt there are many desperate people in Haiti who feel they have nothing to lose by taking matters into their own hands. But why on earth are the actions of the powerless being construed as a serious challenge to the UN, the American military and the numerous other international actors in Haiti? Yes, the situation is very difficult, and anyone involved in the rescue operation should not expect the niceties of an afternoon tea party. But, tragically, what is really hampering the rescue effort is not so much the violence and looting of Haitians as the fear and anxiety of aid workers and rescuers.

Numerous reports indicate that many aid workers and first responders are not going out to the poor and outlying areas of Port-au-Prince and beyond because their organisations are worried about their safety. Many doctors and aid workers are protected by armed guards, and some of them appear to be more concerned about their own individual security than the provision of relief. It seems that even when it comes to the challenge of saving lives, a powerful mood of aversion to risk has the upper hand.

These days, it is not any kind of aggressive foreign policy that fuels the tendency to transform humanitarian relief operations into military exercises. Rather, this trend for imagining that a country afflicted by an earthquake is a war zone, and that the rescuers are likely to need rescuing, is the logical outcome of the culture of risk-aversion that dominates Western societies. Even when it comes to the noble mission of saving lives, the ethos of banal risk management prevails.

Western societies have become so obsessed with safety that virtually every human experience comes with a health warning. It is not simply children’s playgrounds and schools that are now dominated by the ethos of safety for its own sake – even organisations like the emergency services, the police and the army are now subject to the dictates of health and safety. As Bill Rammell, the UK’s armed forces minister warned last week, ‘my fear is that we as a nation will become so risk-averse, cynical and introverted that we will find ourselves in inglorious and important isolation by default’ (4).

Even those two once-risky institutions of the police and the army have become increasingly risk-averse. One British journalist has noted that the British police rarely venture out these days, and even when they are confronted with a serious situation they rarely take risks. In one case, armed police stood for 15 days besieging a London home, only venturing in after the hostage had escaped by his own efforts and the lone gunman perished in a fire which he had started (5). The ethos of safety has become institutionalised within the military, too. Army commanders have to draw up risk assessments for every aspect of their soldiers’ training. Some have given up testing soldiers to the limit, lest they inadvertently contravene health-and-safety rules (6).

General Sir Michael Rose, former head of Britain’s elite special-forces regiment the SAS, has spoken out about the destructive consequences of risk-aversion and the ethos of safety for the morale of the military. He has denounced the ‘moral cowardice’ that brought about what he describes as the ‘most catastrophic collapse of military ethos in recent history’ (7). And if anything, the decline of the warrior ethos is even more comprehensive in the US military. One analyst believes that risk-aversion has undermined the effectiveness of the US military: ‘As emphasis on risk-avoidance filters down the chain of command, junior commanders and their soldiers become aware that low-risk behaviour is expected and act accordingly.’ (8)

Unlike some institutions in society, the military, emergency services and disaster-response teams simply cannot function without taking risks: they have to go to unstable places and go beyond the call of duty. When the behaviour of rescue teams is determined by a concern for their own security, as it seems to be in Haiti right now, then they inevitably become distracted from the humanitarian mission at hand. In such circumstances, the imperative of security, rather than of aid, wins out, and as a result the effectiveness of the mission is diminished. Worse still, it demoralises those involved in the job of saving lives, and threatens to turn humanity’s noble gestures into tawdry exercises in playing it very safe.

(1) ‘Mothers were trying to shake alive their children’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 January 2010

(2) Chaos and lawlessness in Haiti, ABC (Australia), 18 January 2010

(3) Haitian violence hinders aid…crippled Haiti smells of death…al-Qaida group denies death of top Yemeni leader, 9&10News

(4) Risk-averse Britain may lose stomach for war, warns minister, The Times (London), 14 January 2010

(5) See A police state, without any police, by Mick Hume

(6) See the Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2004

(7) J’Accuse! Top General lambasts ‘moral cowardice’ of government and military chiefs, Daily Mail 12 April 2007

(8) R. Lacquement (2004) ‘The casualty-aversion myth’, Naval War College Review, vol.57, no.1,p.46.

First published by spiked, 18 January 2010

There’s still hope for the good guys
In a cultural landscape dominated by simplistic nihilism, Cormac McCarthy's tale of survival stands apart.

In an era when worst-case thinking has displaced any kind of open-minded approach to the future, it is not surprising that popular culture is awash with the themes and symbols of planetary catastrophe and of a depraved humanity.

Going to the movies has become an exercise in revelling in human self-loathing. Sci-fi flics such as Avatar waste their superb special effects moralising about the evils of the human species. All too often the human race is cast in the role of the villain and good guys are conspicuous by their absence.

In public life, there is now a studied casualness to proclamations about “the end of the world” and the “final days of humanity”. In comparison to this contemporary misanthropic loathing for the legacy of human achievement, 19th-century and interwar manifestations of cultural pessimism appear almost as celebrations of the future.

When we go to the cinema these days, we are invited to wallow in the spectacle of the destruction of the world. You don’t need to have a sophisticated grasp of contemporary aesthetic forms, or even to have seen the film, to recognise that The Day After Tomorrow is likely to be one that is inhospitable to human beings. It is becoming difficult to work out if film directors prefer to cast human beings as zombies or regard zombies as people; either way, scenes of mindless, predatory humans wreaking havoc on their communities and their environment are now presented as the brave new edgy and agenda-setting face of modern cinema.

So I wasn’t surprised when, last year, a Spanish journalist asked if he could interview me on the present appetite for frightening end-of the-world movies. After mentioning the cruel future depicted in The Book of Eli, the ruined world portrayed in 9, and human life being haunted by a deathly virus in The Carriers, he added “and of course Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road”.

Until he mentioned The Road we were in agreement about decrying the widespread nihilistic aesthetic which manipulates, in a one-dimensional way, the anxiety people have towards the future. However, I felt that The Road could not be dismissed as simply a product of today’s dehumanised scaremongering project that masquerades as an exciting public service designed “to raise awareness” about humanity’s behaviour.

My interviewer was taken aback when I said that, although I knew nothing about the film (then in production), I considered McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as something of a 21st-century literary masterpiece.

Outwardly McCarthy’s novel, which has been described as dark, frightening, scary, depressing, heartbreaking and even apocalyptic, resonates with the culture of fear that dominates the Western imagination. I have to confess that before I read The Road, I had convinced myself that I would probably hate it. I am usually turned off by works of fiction that are loved and celebrated by our cultural elites. The Road is said to be one of Oprah Winfrey’s favourite books. And the fashionable British scaremonger writer George Monbiot described it as “the most important environmental book ever written”.

But of course it is not at all surprising that these days the darkness that surrounds the human experience is invariably interpreted in a naturalised and environmentalist way. No doubt if T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land was published today it would be hailed as yet another testimony to that horrible “inconvenient truth”; all that our fashionable critics would be able to recall from Eliot’s poem is the line: “This is the way the world ends.”

But despite my concerns, the novel The Road is not actually about the world ending either with a bang or a whimper. Yes, it is a very bleak book about a world where human survival is continually put to question. McCarthy’s story about the journey of an unnamed father and son in the aftermath of a mysterious unnamed global catastrophe can be read as a cautionary tale about human wickedness and depravity. Their pilgrimage takes them through a lifeless world where food can no longer be grown. But what is even more disturbing than the physical and environmental destruction unleashed by the unspecified apocalyptic catastrophe is the moral disintegration of a human species that is now totally focused on biological survival.

As the father and son continue their journey, the survivors they encounter often appear as the personification of evil. Cannibalism is rife and people have been turned into slaves, and yet there is hope. Although the father is worn down by the devastation that surrounds him, and his fear that he will not be able to protect his son, he refuses to give up the struggle for survival. Though brutalised by his experiences, he retains an emotional warmth and gentleness towards his child. It is almost as if the desperate circumstances bring out an idealised version of father as protector.

But it is the son who reminds us that, even in the worst-case situation, human beings can keep hold of their moral sensibilities. Throughout the journey the young boy is continually concerned that his father will be so overwhelmed by the struggle to survive that his humanity will perish. When he asks his father, “Are we still the good guys?”, he is reminding the reader that there is more to life than physical survival. Intuitively, the boy grasps something very profound about our moral capacity to make significant choices.

There are many ways of reading and interpreting a story. I have no wish to begrudge or invalidate the experience of readers who were transfixed by McCarthy’s images of an Earth denuded of life. But if you pay attention to his simple, direct and unambiguous prose, it becomes evident that this is much more than a tale of environmental catastrophe and survivalism. It is what its title suggests: a variation on the age-old fable of the human journey into the unknown. It can also be read as a story about the relationship between father and son and about the triumph of decency over evil and of hope over despair. This is a book that only a father could have written. It is his legacy for the generation that still has a future.

That’s the book but what about the movie?

Typically some reviewers have greeted the film, which will be released in Australia on January 28, as yet another simple exercise in climate alarmism. One British reviewer said that “when we see The Road, we can’t discard the fears provoked by the film once the lights come up”; he adds that we take these fears “home with us and, if we’re smart, act on them”. In other words, the film works as climate-change propaganda. From this perspective if it terrorises you into changing your behaviour it becomes great cinema.

Fortunately for cinemagoers, the film is actually more than a vehicle for environmentalist agitprop. Yes it is a product of the contemporary cultural imagination, and therefore cannot help but transmit the well-worn cliches of eco-politics. But although the film lacks the aesthetic depth of the novel, it remains partially true to the spirit of the book, and what it offers in essence is an old-fashioned Hollywood road movie. The film is a bit too miserabilist for my tastes, and is far too devoted to the mission of making its viewers feel awful and depressed, but it holds on to some of the elements of McCarthy’s novel.

I really wanted this film to be the contemporary version of Ingmar Bergman’s brilliant The Seventh Seal. Sadly its dialogue is too unmediated and sometimes it lacks tension and intensity. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the filmmakers feel uncomfortable with relying on McCarthy’s sensitively crafted dialogue. As a result, the subtlety of the book’s language is lost and sometimes the dialogue comes across as unmediated and unnecessarily self-conscious.

The acting is competent but lacks the kind of chemistry required for a memorable performance. (The father is played by American Viggo Mortensen and the son by Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee with Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and Charlize Theron helping round out the cast.) The film irritatingly relies far too much on the technique of the voiceover. But for me, maybe the real problem with the film is that throughout it I kept thinking of the book. I am still not sure whether the film is a wasted opportunity, or a project which, in the cultural climate, simply could not live up to its promise, the promise of McCarthy’s novel.

To return to the novel. McCarthy has been said to describe The Road as a story about “the limits of our humanity”: a theme that haunts so much of his work. But nowhere more than here does he reveal the compassion and moral worth that stretches the limits of humanity so high. My sharpest memories of the novel are of the boy’s and his father’s selfless love for each other, of the boy’s compassion, empathy and concern for those encountered on their journey and of his need for purpose and to be one of the good guys.

This sums up for me what humanity is. McCarthy shows us hope in that we are more than animals, with an innate capacity to do more than just survive physically. We have a moral compass. This is where the hope lies. And this is why many readers find a hint of hope at the end of the novel.

It’s encouraging that despite the tendency to see all that is dark in our species and designate humans as the destroyers of life, in this film humanity still shines a light despite the limits the world places on it.

First published by The Australian, 16 January 2010

It’s 15 below zero as weathermen go witch-hunting
It is snowing big time in my town in Kent. The family sits in front of the television to discover whether there is more of the white stuff to come. However, instead of an informative weather forecast we are offered a political broadcast.

A dramatic sounding voiceover informs us that David Shukman, who is the BBC’s environment and science correspondent, will report “on how one of the longest cold snaps for a generation fits in with theories of a warming planet and global climate change”.

Adopting a solemn tone that hints at catastrophes to come, Shukman announces that it is minus 15C in the Pennines and five cars are stranded before stating, “No wonder many are asking, `What about global warming?’ “

Just in case the cold temperature encourages the British public to assume a degree of scepticism towards climate change alarmism, Shukman reassuringly informs us that the big freeze is not inconsistent with theories of global warming. A swift cut to a chap from Kew Gardens who insists that “snowdrops are already blooming” . Apparently flowering is starting much earlier than previously, which must mean that the world is getting very, very warm.

Concern that the present episode of cold weather might encourage public scepticism towards apocalyptic climate change scenarios is not confined to the BBC.

“Britain’s cold snap does not prove climate science wrong,” argue two climate alarmist journalists in The Guardian.

Leo Hickman and George Monbiot helpfully inform their readers that “weather is not the same as climate and single events are not the same as trends”.

They are, of course, absolutely right, but rather selective in the way they minimise the significance of a single weather event. A few years ago when the temperature was relatively high and there was little rainfall across southeast England, weather forecasters and campaigning journalists ignored the distinction between climate and weather and insisted it was all a symptom of global warming. Indeed, an unexpected rise in temperature is presented as yet more evidence of the disaster to come.

Just in case you are a complacent sceptic, Hickman and Monbiot seize on an announcement made by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology that claims that the past 10 years are officially the hottest since records began. Apparently a rise in temperature in Australia may have direct significance for making sense of harsh wintry conditions in Britain. They speculate that the cold of the north and the warmth of the south “could be related”. It could be, and no doubt their alarmist imagination will have no problems in linking the two as different forms of extreme weather.

The term extreme weather speaks for itself and has become the new normal. “Extreme weather on the rise,” warns the website of the Australian Weather Channel. It communicates a sense of helplessness: “But our emergency response teams are under stress” so “who is going to help you”? This is a rhetorical question.

Extreme weather is not so much a scientific as a cultural metaphor that expresses the anxieties of our time. The conceptual linkage of weather with extreme symbolises a growing tendency to endow natural phenomena with moral meaning.

We can no longer accept that sometimes harsh climatic conditions just happen. As in ancient

times when superstition reigned, we interpret bad weather as a symptom of divine displeasure.

Today unexpected weather conditions are blamed on the impact of human beings on the environment. In medieval times unusual climatic episodes were seen as the handiwork of wicked demonic forces. Witchcraft was used to account for virtually every misfortune and unpleasant act. It was the climatic change brought by the so-called Little Ice Age in the 16th century that led to a resurgence of witch-hunting in Europe. From 1380 onwards, accusations of magic and weather-making increased dramatically in inquisitorial trials.

The resurgence of witch-hunting in the late 16th century was influenced by the belief that witches possessed demonic powers that could manipulate the climate in order to undermine the welfare and health of the communities in which they lived.

Throughout history people have sought to blame unusual climatic conditions on demonic forces. What the association of witchcraft with weather-making accomplished was to mobilise people’s fears against the evil forces of heretics and non-believers. Scaremongering about witchcraft promoted the idea that its demonic powers could literally dominate nature. Father Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit critic of witch-hunting, noted sarcastically that “God and nature no longer do anything; witches, everything”. But such beliefs were no joke. A late winter in the province of Treves in the 15th century led to more than 100 people being burned at the stake.

Since burning witches leaves a big carbon footprint, we are likely to find more environmentally friendly ways of punishing those who transgress society’s confusing moral boundaries.

First published by The Australian, 13 January 2010

The Road: there’s more to life than biological survival
Those who welcome the film version of The Road as eco-propaganda for the masses have missed the point of McCarthy’s literary masterpiece.

In an era when worst-case thinking has displaced any kind of open-minded approach to the future, it is not surprising that popular culture is awash with the themes and symbols of planetary catastrophe and of a depraved humanity.

In public life, there is now a studied casualness to proclamations about ‘the end of the world’ and the ‘final days of humanity’. In comparison to this contemporary misanthropic loathing for the legacy of human achievement, nineteenth-century and interwar manifestations of cultural pessimism appear almost as celebrations of the future.

When we go to the cinema these days, we are invited to wallow in the spectacle of the destruction of the world. You don’t need to have a sophisticated grasp of contemporary aesthetic forms, or even to have seen the film, to recognise that ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is likely to be one that is inhospitable to human beings. It is becoming difficult to work out if film directors prefer to cast human beings as zombies or regard zombies as people… either way, scenes of mindless, predatory humans wreaking havoc on their communities and their environment are now presented as the brave new edgy and agenda-setting face of modern cinema.

So I wasn’t surprised when, last summer, a Spanish journalist asked if he could interview me on the current appetite for frightening end-of the-world movies.  After mentioning the cruel future depicted in The Book of Eli, the ruined world portrayed in 9, and human life being haunted by a deathly virus in The Carriers, he added ‘and of course Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road’.

Until he mentioned The Road we were in full agreement about decrying the widespread nihilistic aesthetic which manipulates, in a very one-dimensional way, people’s anxiety towards the future. However, I felt that The Road could not be dismissed as simply a product of today’s dehumanised scaremongering project that masquerades as an exciting public service designed to ‘raise awareness’ about humanity’s behaviour. My interviewer was taken aback when I said that, although I knew nothing about the film (then in production), I considered McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as something of a twenty-first-century literary masterpiece.

Outwardly McCarthy’s novel, which has been described as dark, frightening, scary, depressing, heartbreaking and even apocalyptic, resonates with the culture of fear that dominates the Western imagination. I have to confess that before I read The Road, I had convinced myself that I would probably hate it. I am usually turned off by works of fiction that are loved and celebrated by our cultural elites. The Road is said to be one of Oprah Winfrey’s favourite books. And the fashionable scaremonger George Monbiot described it as ‘the most important environmental book ever written’ (1).

But of course it is not at all surprising that these days the darkness that surrounds the human experience is invariably interpreted in a naturalised and environmentalist way. No doubt if TS Eliot’s The Waste Land was published today it would be hailed as yet another testimony to that horrible ‘inconvenient truth’; all that our fashionable critics would be able to recall from Eliot’s poem is the line: ‘This is the way the world ends.’

But despite my concerns, the novel The Road is not actually about the world ending – either with a bang or a whimper. Yes, it is a very bleak book about a world where human survival is continually put to question. McCarthy’s story about the journey of an unnamed father and son in the aftermath of a mysterious unnamed global catastrophe can be read as a cautionary tale about human wickedness and depravity. Their pilgrimage takes them through a lifeless world where food can no longer be grown. But what is even more disturbing than the physical and environmental destruction unleashed by the unspecified apocalyptic catastrophe is the moral disintegration of a human species that is now totally focused on biological survival.

As the father and son continue their journey, the survivors they encounter often appear as the personification of evil. Cannibalism is rife and people have been turned into slaves… and yet there is hope. Although the father is worn down by the devastation that surrounds him, and his fear that he will not be able to protect his son, he refuses to give up the struggle for survival. Though thoroughly brutalised by his experiences, he retains an emotional warmth and gentleness towards his child.  It is almost as if the desperate circumstances bring out an idealised version of father as protector.

But it is the son who reminds us that, even in the worst-case situation, human beings can keep hold of their moral sensibilities. Throughout the journey the young boy is continually concerned that his father will be so overwhelmed by the struggle to survive that his humanity will perish. When he asks his father ‘Are we still the good guys?’, he is reminding the reader that there is more to life than physical survival.

There are many ways of reading and interpreting a story. I have no wish to begrudge or invalidate the experience of readers who were transfixed by McCarthy’s images of an Earth denuded of life. But if you pay attention to his simple, direct and unambiguous prose, it becomes evident that this is much more than a tale of environmental catastrophe and survivalism. It is what its title suggests: a variation on the age-old fable of the human journey into the unknown. It can also be read as a story about the relationship between father and son and about the triumph of decency over evil and of hope over despair. This is a book that only a father could have written. It is his legacy for the generation that still has a future.

That’s the book – but what about the movie?

Typically some reviewers have greeted the movie – which goes on release in Britain tomorrow – as yet another simple exercise in climate alarmism. One reviewer said that ‘when we see The Road, we can’t discard the fears provoked by the film once the lights come up’; he adds that we take these fears ‘home with us and, if we’re smart, act on them’ (2). In other words, the film works as climate-change propaganda.

Fortunately for cinemagoers, the film is actually more than a vehicle for environmentalist agitprop. Yes it is a product of the contemporary cultural imagination, and therefore cannot help but transmit the well-worn clichés of eco-politics. But although the film lacks the aesthetic depth of the novel, it remains partially true to the spirit of the book, and what it offers in essence is an old-fashioned Hollywood road movie. The film is a bit too miserabilist for my tastes, and is far too devoted to the mission of making its viewers feel awful and depressed, but it holds on to some of the elements of McCarthy’s novel.

I really wanted this film to be the contemporary version of Bergman’s brilliant Seventh Seal. Sadly its dialogue is too unmediated and sometimes it lacks tension and intensity. The acting is competent but lacks the kind of chemistry required for a memorable performance. The film irritatingly relies far too much on the technique of the voiceover. But for me, maybe the real problem with the film is that throughout it I kept thinking of the book. I am still not sure whether the film is a wasted opportunity, or a project which, in the current cultural climate, simply could not live up to its promise, the promise of McCarthy’s novel.

Apparently McCarthy has described The Road as a story about ‘the limits of our humanity’. Nevertheless, it gives meaning to humanity’s capacity for hope and our striving to transcend those limits. Sadly little is transcended in the film, and that’s the big difference between it and the book.

(1) The Road Well Travelled, Monbiot.com, 30 October 2007

(2) Climate change is inspiring the ultimate scary movies, Guardian, 1 January 2010

First published by spiked, 7 January 2010

Een dieet van paniekverhalen: Hoe onze kinderen eco-verklikkers worden
Klimaatactivisten misbruiken de angst van kinderen steeds vaker om het gedrag van volwassenen te veranderen.

Het is een oude en jammerlijke gewoonte om kinderen te socialiseren door hen bang te maken. Het doel van die socialisatie-door-angst is tweeledig. Ten eerste: ervoor zorgen dat kinderen zich conformeren aan de waarden van de angstzaaiers. Ten tweede: de kinderen gebruiken om het gedrag van hun ouders te beïnvloeden of althans in te perken.

Toen ik in Hongarije op school zat werden we om de haverklap gewaarschuwd voor de vele bedreigingen waaraan ons glorieuze regime blootstond. Ik herinner me ook dat we werden aangemoedigd onze dwalende ouders te onderhouden over de mooie waarden die onze dappere, wijze leiders uitdroegen. De Grote Broers van de jaren veertig beschouwden kinderen als hulpmiddelen voor morele chantage en sociale controle. Nu, in de 21ste eeuw, denken angstzaaiers op dezelfde manier over kinderen en misbruiken ze hun natuurlijke belangstelling voor de wonderen des levens om een boodschap van schril klimaatalarmisme uit te dragen.

Als je wilt weten hoe dat werkt, bekijk dan de officiële openingsvideo van de Kopenhaagse top over klimaatverandering. Het vierminutenfilmpje getiteld ‘Help alstublieft de wereld’ opent met vrolijk lachende en schommelende kinderen. Een plotselinge regenbui dwingt hen om te schuilen. De boodschap is helder: het klimaat bedreigt onze levenswijze. Dan wordt er gesneden naar een jong meisje dat met angst om het hart ziet hoe de ene tv-omroeper na de andere melding maakt van aanstaande milieurampen. Daarna zien we hoe het meisje ingestopt in bed zoetjes ligt te slapen met haar teddybeer in de armen. Het volgende moment stappen we in haar nachtmerrie. Ze staat in een akelig verschroeid landschap, ze kijkt bang en wanhopig; de verdorde aarde scheurt opeens open, in doodsnood zoekt ze beschutting bij een verre, eenzame boom. Ze laat haar speelgoedbeer vallen in een pas ontstane kloof en klampt zich gillend en schreeuwend vast aan de boom. De video eindigt met groepen kinderen die ons toeroepen: ‘Help alstublieft de wereld.’ De conclusie trekt zichzelf.

Hoewel deze video een product is van de bijeenkomst in Kopenhagen, is hij typerend voor het soort propaganda dat vandaag bij voortduring op kinderen wordt losgelaten. In een wereld waarin morele opvoeding uitgeput lijkt, waarin onderwijzers aarzelen om onderscheid tussen goed en kwaad te zien en dat uit te leggen, is milieuactivisme een van de weinige waarden waarbij opvoeders zich op hun gemak voelen. Om die reden is het lesprogramma in Groot-Brittannië en in sommige andere landen nu doordrenkt van het milieuactivisme en zijn waarden.

In de Middeleeuwen stond religie bij het onderwijs in praktisch elk vak centraal. Leerlingen kregen precies te horen hoe de kerk dacht over zelfs de kleinste details van elk onderwerp dat aan de orde kwam. Tegenwoordig zijn milieuaspecten zo diep in het curriculum doorgedrongen dat ze vakken als aardrijkskunde, natuurwetenschap en gezondheid en sociale opvoeding geheel overheersen en ook al in geschiedenis en literatuur binnendringen. Het groeiende aandeel van het milieu in het lesprogramma is rechtevenredig aan de morele ongeletterdheid en het betekenisverlies in onze samenleving. Vandaag de dag lijkt zelfs de studie van de godsdienst een onderafdeling van het dogma van milieualarmisme.

Door hun waarden aan kinderen over te dragen hopen de angstzaaiers de kinderlijke verontwaardiging te richten tegen de oudere generaties die ogenschijnlijk de planeet verwoesten. In de Kopenhagen-video horen we een kind over haar ‘woede’ praten. Wanneer ze zegt: ‘Ik ben nog maar een kind’, is de implicatie duidelijk: volwassenen hebben kinderen in de steek gelaten. Anderen gaan nog verder en beschuldigen oudere generaties ervan het milieu zozeer te hebben aangetast dat het overleven van toekomstige generaties gevaar loopt. De boodschap is dat volwassenen hebzuchtig of dom zijn, of allebei. Die negatieve kijk op het gedrag van volwassenen is omgeslagen in openlijke vijandigheid jegens de morele status van de oudere generaties en hun zogenaamde ‘wijsheid’. ‘De volwassenen hebben onze wereld verwoest’, zegt de kop van een onlinetijdschrift gericht op kinderen. Het waarschuwt dat ‘volwassenen de wereld waarin we leven kapot maken’ en stelt de vraag: ‘Wat gaat klimaatverandering voor ons als komende generatie betekenen?’

Een soortgelijke boodschap wordt overgebracht door een toonaangevende Britse groene kruisvaarder, die onlangs kinderen vertelde dat ‘jullie ouders en grootouders een rotzooitje hebben gemaakt van de zorg voor de aarde’ en eraan toevoegde: ‘Ze zullen het ontkennen, maar ze zijn jullie toekomst aan het stelen.’ In plaats van als rolmodel te worden voorgesteld worden ouders vaak berispt omdat ze een verkeerd voorbeeld voor kinderen zijn. Is het nog een verrassing dat een schoolhoofd dat onderzoek moest doen naar gedrag op Engelse scholen anno 2008 de beschuldigende vinger richtte naar volwassenen die ‘jonge mensen het slechte voorbeeld hadden gegeven’? Hij constateerde dat we ‘in een cultuur van hebzucht leven’ waarin we ‘ruw met elkaar omgaan’ en dat ‘kinderen dat nadoen’. En als volwassenen inderdaad zo’n beroerd voorbeeld geven, hoe kunnen we hun dan de taak toevertrouwen om hun kinderen voor te bereiden op de wereld waarin ze leven?

Een rechtstreeks gevolg van de devaluatie van het gezag van volwassenen is de heiligverklaring van de kinderstatus. Steeds vaker krijgen kinderen de rol van opvoeders toegewezen, worden ze belast met het voorlichten van die misleide, hebzuchtige, stompzinnige ouderen. Dit heeft geresulteerd in een proces van omgekeerde socialisatie. Het plan om ‘treitermacht’ in te zetten teneinde volwassenen te socialiseren wordt het hardnekkigst toegepast in de sfeer van het milieuactivisme. Heel wat milieuvoorlichters pleiten voor treitermacht als effectieve manier om het gedrag van volwassenen naar hun hand te zetten.

David Uzzell, hoogleraar milieupsychologie aan de universiteit van Surrey, herinnert zich hoe hij enige jaren geleden een onderwijsconferentie bijwoonde waar ‘iedereen volkomen overtuigd was’ dat treitermacht ‘het antwoord’ was op het probleem van klimaatverandering. Uzzells eigen onderzoek is gericht op wat hij noemt ‘intergenerationeel leren door middel van de overdracht van persoonlijke ervaring in het bijzonder van het kind op de ouder/andere volwassene/thuissituatie’. Deze achteloze verwijzing naar de ervaringsoverdracht van kind op ouder illustreert de normalisatie van omgekeerde socialisatie. In de Verenigde Staten heeft het milieuonderwijs op scholen al langer dan een decennium aan kinderen het gezag verleend over bepaalde volwassenen. The New York Times bericht dat ‘eco-kids’ die voor groene waarden staan ‘hun ouders thuis ter verantwoording roepen’ en stelt vast dat ouders zich geïntimideerd voelen door het ‘toeziend oog van de miniatuur-ecopolitie’. In de hele VS hebben schooldistricten getracht het idealisme van eco-kids te gebruiken door milieuwaarden te betrekken in bijna alle schoolvakken.

Politici en regeringen hebben het milieuonderwijs omhelsd als een potentieel effectief instrument om het gedrag van het publiek te beïnvloeden en te sturen. Een Brits parlementslid voor Labour, Malcolm Wicks, meent dat milieuwaarden ‘uitstekende aanvullende onderwijsmiddelen zijn in lessen natuurwetenschap, maatschappijleer en aardrijkskunde’ en dat door het opnemen van die kennis ‘kinderen hun ouders zullen willen gaan opvoeden’. ‘Langs die weg’, zegt hij, ‘kunnen we gedrag gaan veranderen.’ Eenzelfde ambitie werd uitgesproken door minister David Miliband, die stelde dat ‘kinderen de sleutel zijn tot het veranderen van het langetermijngedrag van de samenleving met betrekking tot het milieu’. Miliband zegt dat kinderen ‘niet alleen gemotiveerd zijn om de planeet te redden’ maar ‘ook grote invloed hebben op de levensstijl en het gedrag van hun gezinnen’. De voormalige staatssecretaris van Onderwijs Alan Johnson schreef dat ‘kinderen een dubbelrol hebben van consumenten en beïnvloeders’ zodat ‘hen voorlichten over de gevolgen van de aanschaf van een extra paar gymschoenen uit mode-overwegingen even belangrijk is als de druk die ze op hun ouders uitoefenen om geen benzineslurpende auto te nemen’.

Een recent rapport, The Role of Education and Schools in Shaping Energy-Related Consumer Behaviour, gaf een raamwerk aan voor het bevorderen van onderwijsinitiatieven die ouderlijk gedrag beïnvloeden. Andrew Sutter, die aan zo’n initiatief - het vijfduizend scholen omvattende Eco-Schools-plan - leiding geeft, denkt dat het kinderen de kans geeft ‘om de onderwijzers te worden en voor de verandering hun ouders te vertellen wat ze moeten doen’. Dit punt wordt onderstreept in een Brits regeringsrapport inzake energie dat stelt dat de ‘invoering van duurzame technologieën in scholen de les tot leven kan wekken op een manier zoals schoolboeken niet kunnen’. Bovendien, zo meldt het rapport, ‘zijn scholen vaak het brandpunt van plaatselijke gemeenschappen, zodat de introductie van duurzaamheid de attitudes in de bredere gemeenschap kan helpen veranderen’.

Niet zelden neemt de mobilisatie van treitermacht om volwassen gedrag te beïnvloeden het karakter van een fanatieke kruistocht aan. Het boek How to Turn Your Parents Green van James Russell zet kinderen aan tot het ‘lastigvallen, treiteren, dwarszitten, kwellen en straffen van mensen die ongegeneerd onze wereld vernielen’. Russell roept kinderen op om ‘hun treitermacht te kanaliseren en boetes uit te schrijven aan hun ouders en andere overtreders’.

In vroeger tijden mobiliseerden alleen totalitaire samenlevingen kinderen om het gedrag van hun ouders te bewaken. Het waren de orwelliaanse Grote Broer-staten die de simplistische kijk op goed en kwaad van kinderen inzetten om de zienswijze van volwassenen om te vormen. Maar wie heeft Big Brother nodig als de voormalige premier Tony Blair openlijk verklaart dat ‘als het gaat om klimaatverandering ouders naar hun kinderen moeten luisteren’. Het lijkt erop dat zinspelen op kinderlijke angsten en misbruiken van hun onvrede tegenwoordig wordt gezien als een vorm van verlicht onderwijs. Maar de toekomst van onze kinderen vereist dat we hun existentiële en morele zekerheid verschaffen. In plaats van hen op een dieet van paniekverhalen te zetten, moeten we hun het vertrouwen geven dat we aan een betere wereld kunnen werken.

First published by De Groene Amsterdammer, 6 January 2010

Rethinking education – the new crisis of adult authority in the classroom
Audio recording of Frank Furedi's opening lecture at the Battle of Ideas on 31 October 2009.

Endless disputes about everything from the role of assessments, exams and inspections to the content of the curriculum seem to add up to a crisis in schooling. In his new book, Wasted – Why education isn’t educating, Professor Frank Furedi argues these controversies are symptoms of a more fundamental problem: confusion about adult authority.

Since education requires the conscious and regular imposition of that authority, it is here that the crisis is most pronounced. The insecurity experienced by a significant section of the teaching profession in dealing with pupils’ misbehaviour suggests they often feel powerless, but apprehensions about discipline are only the starkest expression of unease about adult authority. Teaching inevitably involves an unequal relationship between adults and children. It presupposes that the older generation has something important to impart. And in order to learn, children have to accept of the authority of the teacher who embodies knowledge of a subject. But today, teachers and parents alike often try to avoid acting authoritatively because they feel uncomfortable with this hierarchical role.

Listen to the session here.

First published by Battle of Ideas, 22 December 2009

Much ado about nothing in Denmark
I have a few hours to kill in Copenhagen before I catch a train to Sweden. Maybe it is the sculptures of emaciated humans outside the conference venue but as I walk around I cannot avoid the feeling that I am in the middle of a medieval passion play.

I keep bumping into earnest pilgrims who take every opportunity to remind passers-by that the situation is desperate and the end is nigh. They may describe themselves as protesters or observers at the climate change conference, but in a different era they would have been characterised as camp-followers. There is clearly a symbiotic relationship between the official delegates and the activists hanging around the outskirts of the Bella Centre.

The role of the protesters may be confined to that of extras, but they add colour and drama to the spectacle. They were even given permission to protest inside the Bella Centre and their ability to bring the proceedings to standstill helped to inject dramatic tension into an otherwise tedious event.

The protesters take their activities very seriously. A communique by Greenpeace informs the world that while heads of state were dining, “Greenpeace volunteers were out on the streets of Copenhagen, climbing lampposts to carry our theme of the day: politicians talk, leaders act”.

In this comic drama, climbing lampposts is presented as an initiative that is morally superior to the diplomatic negotiations. The organisers of this spectacle appear to agree, which is why lamppost climbers are treated as if they are the voice of the people, whose job it is to keep the proceedings real. Outwardly, world leaders defer to their moral authority. That is what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown means when he praises protesters for propelling world leaders.

The Copenhagen conference was self-consciously promoted as an open and transparent event. This openness is clearly modelled on a reality television format, with the Bella Centre as the Big Brother house, where everything appears unscripted and spontaneous. Here, the audience’s interest is sustained through theatrical revelations about secret draft communiques and constant rumours about behind-the-scenes deals by nefarious world leaders who are happy to see small Pacific islands disappear under the ocean while they pollute the planet.

Throughout the week there were ominous hints of hidden conspiracies and stitch-ups by the villainous developed nations. Only in this spectacle, there is no behind-the-scenes drama. Everything is self-consciously public. Regular updates by media organisations and blogs help create the impression that there actually is a drama to unfold.

Like the contestant on the X Factor, the participants in Copenhagen are quizzed about what their participation means to them; and respond with the scripted answer, “everything”. Regularly, politicians such as Kevin Rudd of Australia or Ed Balls of Britain are prompted to confess their disappointment at the lack of progress to the proceedings. All that’s missing is a phone number that viewers can dial to dismiss their least favoured political leader from the show.

By the time the show is over almost everyone appears deflated and disenchanted.

Delegates leave murmuring about a sell-out. A few argue that at least a start has been made and that the world is more conscious about the threat posed by climate change after Copenhagen than before. However, few of the participants are prepared to acknowledge that this was all much ado about nothing.

Striking a portentous note, Naomi Klein stated, “on the ninth day of the Copenhagen climate summit, Africa was sacrificed”.

That’s another way of saying that something really important was taking place at this event. What so many of the commentaries overlook is that international conferences have a solid track record of achieving next to nothing. Global jamborees are essentially talking shops that provide political leaders with an opportunity to strike a statesman-like pose. These are essentially photo opportunities for politicians who want to be seen to be doing something. As for the ever growing industry of international non-governmental organisations, summits are important public relations events that help demonstrate their importance. That is why both political leaders and the protesters have a common interest in maintaining the illusion that something really important may occur in Copenhagen. And if not here and now, then there will be a chance at Copenhagen + 5, and Copenhagen + 10.

If the organisers and sponsors are really lucky The Copenhagen Conference will run to as many series as the Beijing franchise on “the status of women”.

Throughout history serious negotiations that yield significant results take place in private. In a different era the idea that 15,000 people hanging out in the Bella Centre could make history and cobble together an agreement that could save the planet would have been dismissed as naive if not ludicrous. Whatever the problems with old-fashioned secret diplomacy, reality negotiations are far worse. Negotiations carried out in public invariably turn into a routine of play-acting and posturing. The adoption of the reality TV format for an apparently momentous international proceeding guaranteed that the Copenhagen conference would have little substantive meaning. After all, it was meant to work as a spectacle rather than as a venue for the conduct of global diplomacy.

First published by The Australian, 21 December 2009

Conversational gambit
'High-quality feedback' is an ongoing, interactive process. By Frank Furedi.

By all accounts, academics are not very good at giving feedback to students. Recently, an MP complained to me about slothful lecturers who apparently take months to return corrected essays. This criticism is echoed in national student surveys, where universities often receive their lowest scores in the area of feedback and assessment.

At first sight, this appears to be straightforward - provide students with clear and timely feedback and all will be well. Unfortunately, the issue of what students want and what they need in terms of feedback is far from clear.

For a start, there is considerable evidence that a significant proportion of undergraduates are not really interested in tutors’ comments on their work. It appears that students are very alert to seeing their grades online, but fairly casual about reading their teachers’ comments. In some social science departments, almost 40 per cent of essays are not picked up by their authors. One department administrator has become so fed up with piles of neglected marked essays that she shoves them into the hands of unsuspecting students.

In a recent research article on humanities students’ attitudes to feedback, Kate Brooks, co-ordinator of student experience, teaching and learning at the University of the West of England, notes that although they wanted “more feedback”, a “significant number of students did not pick up their essays at all”. The paradox of demanding more feedback in theory but not being interested in it in practice has confused many colleagues. For example, one social policy lecturer organised a one-off seminar to discuss essays after complaints about the lack of feedback, but only three students out of a class of 12 showed up. Her conclusion was that “they’re only interested in their marks and not in my comments”.

So what do students want? No doubt there are instances when they are let down by disorganised teachers who are far from punctual about returning work. Sometimes the comments written by staff are illegible and even incoherent. Students are often at a loss to grasp the relationship between their marks and the critical comments made by tutors. And from time to time I have seen comments that are unhelpful, vague and even self-indulgent. Good feedback explains and justifies the mark. It points out the work’s strengths and weaknesses and offers suggestions that help students learn from their experience.

Yet the idea that undergraduates crave high-quality feedback is a misleading one. When students complain about poor feedback, what they often express is their confusion about the purpose of a university education. In many institutions, progression is experienced as a process that is formally and not intellectually linked. As in secondary education, students often go from one module to the next without a sense of cumulative development. From this standpoint, the work completed for a course is done - it is the past. All that’s relevant for the future is the mark.

What’s missing is the idea that studying and learning is an interactive process - part of a conversation that takes place between scholars and students. Unfortunately, we do not always educate our students to understand that we are interested in continuing this discussion, even after their work has been submitted. Nevertheless, we offer comments that assume an unfolding and interactive engagement with the subject. Inadvertently, we are often miscommunicating with one another.

Outside an academic conversation, critical feedback has little meaning for students. If they see little point in continuing a dialogue, our comments often appear to have an exhortative or perfunctory character. Worse still, critical is often seen as “negative”. Outside academic engagement, good feedback can mean that which is motivating and identity affirming. Unfortunately, academics can only provide this if they marginalise content and focus on motivation. That would make for “high-quality” feedback but lousy education.

The solution lies in providing more personal contact and interaction, so that the ideal of an academic relationship becomes more of a reality. That way we would not be giving feedback, but having a conversation.

First published by Times Higher Education, 17 December 2009

Turning children into Orwellian eco-spies
Frank Furedi recalls being educated through fear in Stalinist Hungary, and is disturbed that the same tactics are now used by environmentalists.

There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to socialise children by scaring them. The aim of such socialisation-through-fear is twofold: firstly, to get children to conform to the scaremongers’ values; secondly, to use children to influence, or at least to contain, their parents’ behaviour.

When I was a schoolchild in Stalinist Hungary, we were frequently warned about the numerous threats facing our glorious regime. I also recall that we were encouraged to lecture our errant parents about the new wonderful values being promoted by our brave, wise leaders. The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism.

If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change. Titled ‘Please Help The World’, the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we’re drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.’ You get the picture.

Although this video is a product of the gathering at Copenhagen, it is typical of the kind of propaganda that is constantly directed at children these days. In a world where moral education seems to be exhausted, where teachers are reluctant to judge or to explain the difference between right and wrong, environmentalism has become one of the few values that educators feel comfortable with. Which is why environmentalism and its values now saturate the school curriculum in Britain and some other countries, too.

In medieval times, religion was central to the teaching of virtually every subject. Students were left in no doubt where the church stood on the smallest details of every topic they were learning about. Today, environmental concerns have been integrated into the curriculum, to the point where they often dominate subjects like geography, science and Personal Health and Social Education and intrude into history and literature, too. The growing significance of environmental issues in the school curriculum is directly proportionate to society’s broader moral illiteracy and loss of purpose. Today, even religious studies often appears as a sub-branch of the dogma of environmental alarmism.

Socialisation-in-reverse

By transmitting their values to children, the scaremongers hope to channel children’s indignation into hostility towards older generations that are apparently destroying the planet. In the Copenhagen video we hear a child talking about her ‘anger’. When she says ‘I am only a child’, the implication is clear: adults have let children down.

Others go a step further and blame older generations for destroying the environment to such an extent that the survival of future generations is put in jeopardy. The message is that adults are greedy or stupid, or both. This downbeat assessment of adults’ behaviour has mutated into outright hostility towards the moral status of the older generations and their so-called ‘wisdom’. ‘Adults have ruined our world’, says the headline to an article in an online magazine targeting children. It warns that ‘adults are ruining the world we are growing up in’ and asks ‘how is climate change going to affect us as the next generation?’ (1)

A similar message is communicated by one of Britain’s leading green crusaders, who recently informed children that ‘your parents and grandparents have made a mess of looking after the Earth’, adding: ‘They may deny it, but they are stealing your future.’ (2) Instead of serving as role models, adults are often castigated for setting a bad example to children. Is it any surprise that one headteacher who was charged with carrying out a review of behaviour in English schools in 2008 pointed the finger of blame for bad behaviour at adults who had ‘set a bad example to young people’? He observed that we ‘live in a greedy culture’ in which ‘we are rude to each other’, and ‘children follow that’ (3). And if adults really do set such a negative example, how can they be entrusted with the task of preparing their children for the world they live in?

The flipside of the devaluation of adult authority is the sacralisation of the status of the child. Increasingly, children are assigned the role of educators, charged with enlightening their misguided, greedy, stupid elders. This has led to a process of socialisation-in-reverse. The project of using ‘pester power’ to socialise adults is most systematically pursued in the realm of environmentalism. Many environmental educators self-consciously advocate pester power as a useful way of changing the behaviour of adults.

David Uzell, a professor of environmental psychology at the University of Surrey in England, 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 (4). Uzell’s own research has focused on what he calls ‘intergenerational learning through the transference of personal experience typically from the child to the parent/other adults/home’ (5). This casual reference to the transference of experience from child to parent illustrates the normalisation of socialisation-in-reverse. In the US, environmental education in schools has, for more than a decade, been systematically providing children with authority over certain adults. The New York Times reports that ‘eco-kids’ devoted to green values ‘try to hold their parents accountable at home’, and notes that adults become defensive under the ‘watchful eye of the pint-sized eco-police’ (6). School districts across the US have sought to capitalise on the idealism of ‘eco-kids’ by integrating environmental values into almost every school subject.

Politicians and governments have embraced environmental education as a potentially effective instrument for influencing and managing the behaviour of the public. One UK Labour MP, Malcolm Wicks, argues that environmental values ‘can act as vivid teaching aids in science lessons, civics lessons, geography lessons’, and in absorbing these lessons ‘children will then begin to educate the parents’. ‘In this way’, he says, ‘we can start to shift behaviour’ (7). A similar aspiration was expressed by UK Cabinet minister David Miliband, who argued that ‘children are the key to changing society’s long-term attitudes to the environment’. Miliband says that children are ‘not only passionate about saving the planet’; they ‘also have a big influence over their families’ lifestyles and behaviour’ (8). Former UK 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’ (9).

A recent report, The Role of Schools in Shaping Energy-Related Consumer Behaviour, outlined a framework for promoting educational initiatives that might impact on parental behaviour (10). Andrew Sutter, who runs one such initiative – the Eco-Schools scheme involving 5,500 schools – believes that it provides an opportunity for children ‘to be the teachers and tell their parents what to do for a change’ (11). This point is underlined in a UK government report on energy, which states that the ‘installation of renewable technologies in schools can bring the curriculum to life in ways that textbooks cannot’. Moreover, the report observes, ‘with schools often being the focal point of communities, the installation of renewables could help to shape attitudes in the wider community’ (12).

Not infrequently, the mobilisation of pester power to alter the behaviour of adults takes on 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’ (13).

In previous times, it was only totalitarian societies that mobilised children to police their parents’ behaviour. It was Orwellian, Big Brother-style states that tried to harness youngsters’ simplistic views of good and evil to reshape the outlook of adults. But who needs Big Brother when the former prime minister of Britain, Tony Blair, can openly assert that ‘on climate change, it is parents who should listen to their children’ (14)? It appears that preying on children’s fears and exploiting their anxiety is now considered to be a form of enlightened education. Yet the future of our children demands that we provide them with existential and moral security. Instead of feeding them on a steady diet of scaremongering, we need to inspire them about our potential to improve the future of our world.

(1) See ‘Adults Have Ruined Our World’, Headliners, October 2007

(2) Jonathan Porritt cited in Enemies of Progress, Austin Williams, Societas 2008, p82

(3) Adults give young ‘bad example’, BBC News, 11 July 2008

(4) Pester Power, Guardian, 1 February 2007

(5) The role of education and schools in shaping energy-related consumer behaviour, Energy Saving Trust, October 2007

(6) Pint-Size Eco-Police, Making Parents Proud and Sometimes Crazy, New York Times, 10 October 2008

(7) See speech by Malcolm Wicks MP, June 2006

(8) ‘So, how many trees have you planted, Daddy?’, Guardian, 1 February 2007

(9) Children must think differently, Independent, 2 February 2007

(10) The role of education and schools in shaping energy-related consumer behaviour, Energy Saving Trust, October 2007

(11) Pester Power, Guardian, 1 February 2007

(12) Our energy challenge: power from the people – microgeneration strategy, DTI, March 2006

(13) How To Turn Your Parents Green, James Russell, Tangent Books, 2007

(14) PM speech on climate change, Number10.gov.uk, 14 September 2004

First published by spiked, 15 December 2009

Treating human beings as little more than carbon
As the Copenhagen summit starts, the rise of eco-Malthusianism shows the anti-human, future-fearing essence of climate-change alarmism.

Below a picture of 12 black babies, the caption warns: ‘Babies in Dakar, Senegal.’ Then, with a literary sigh of relief, the subtitle to the caption points out that a ‘cost analysis commissioned by [the Optimum Population Trust] claims that family planning is the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions’ (1). In other words, the destructiveness of such babies, these carbon emitters, can be counteracted if we prevent them from being born in the first place.

The odious Optimum Population Trust (OPT) is a zombie-like Malthusian organisation devoted to the cause of human depletion. Looking at the article by John Vidal in the Guardian, which contained that photo of 12 black babies and reported on the OPT’s new initiative inviting people in the West to offset their CO2 emissions by sponsoring ‘family planning’ in the developing world, I am not sure what I found most shocking: the message conveyed through the photograph, or the absence of any anger over the OPT and its supporters’ casual devaluation of human life.

There was a time when people who measured the value of human life through sombre calculations based on cost-benefit analyses were regarded with suspicion and contempt. Throughout most of history human life has been valued in and of itself; it has been seen as possessing a special quality that could not be reduced to quantities to be measured by misanthropic accountants. Yes, the human body also has a physical dimension, and it can be reduced to its chemical constituents. But isn’t there also something very special about life?

Sadly we live in a world where, for many climate crusaders, a photo of 12 beaming babies is somehow a bad thing, a symbol of the problems we face. Why? Because the OPT has discovered that ‘every £4 spent on contraception’ saves ‘one tonne of CO2 being added to global warming’. It claims that the most effective way to fight climate change is to get rich Western people to offset their own carbon emissions by paying for birth control programmes in poor nations.

What is truly disturbing about this, from a humanist perspective, is not simply that there is a silent crusade against the unique quality of human life, but that there is an almost complete absence of anger about it, a lack of any critical reaction against it. In modern times, there have always been small coteries of Malthusians, eugenic fantasists and bitter misanthropists who were estranged from children and who regarded babies as an imposition on their existences. Thankfully, these people tended to be consigned to the margins of society. Not any more.

Why is it that, today, the provision of contraception can be promoted as a sensible way of reducing carbon emissions? How do we account for the silence of religious movements whose theology still upholds the unique status of human life? And why are prominent so-called humanists so uninterested in countering this lethal Malthusian challenge to some of the most important ideals that emerged during the Renaissance and later developed through the Enlightenment?

Throughout history, outbursts of fear for newborns have been associated with society’s own anxiety about the future. Today, such a sense of dread towards the future is palpable. But we do not simply fear for the newborn; we are also uneasy with the act of birth and with the process of human renewal. What was once unambiguously celebrated as a joyous affirmation of our humanity is increasingly stigmatised as an act of arrogance and selfishness. From this perspective, the newly born baby does not so much put a smile on our faces and make us feel warm and affectionate as alert us to the presence of yet another polluter. Once newborn babies are dehumanised and recast as little pollution machines it becomes possible to advocate their elimination as an exercise in the reduction of carbon emissions.

A world that can place an equals sign between a baby and carbon is one that has lost its faith in humanity. This profound sense of malaise about the human condition is most systematically expressed around the extravagant, quasi-religious, time-is-running-out rhetoric that surrounds the Copenhagen conference on climate change, which started this morning. But it is important to recognise that the current anxiety about the destructive potential of human life is not a direct consequence of the issue of climate change. The campaign against climate change merely provides a vehicle through which a pre-existing sense of human self-loathing can be articulated. If climate change did not exist, the very same misanthropic sentiment would find expression through other issues.

The good news, however, is that the attempt to blame population growth for environmental degradation and for potentially harming future generations is a Malthusian fantasy that has been constantly discredited by real-world experiences. Dire predictions about the destructive impact of polluting newborn babies are based on the simplistic model where resources are a priori fixed relative to people. In such circumstances, population becomes the only variable that can make any difference, since it is the only one that is not fixed – and from this perspective more babies can only mean fewer resources and a greater destructive impact on the planet.

This model was expressed through Paul Ehrlich’s well-known Malthusian formula IPAT:

Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology

According to this formula, the impact of a population on the environment is the product of the size of the population (P), its level of affluence (A), and the impact of the technologies (T) that sustain the level of affluence. The implication of this formula is obvious: the more people there are, the more they consume; and the more technology they use, the greater the damage to the environment will be.

But what is ‘impact’? The term, as used by Malthusians, suggests that human impact brings about changes to the environment that are harmful and destructive to life. So impact means the erosion of land, for example. But do more people using more technology really lead to soil erosion? Not necessarily. Indeed, it often leads to the better management of land. Some of the regions of the world that suffer most from land erosion, like the Sahel, have relatively low population densities. There is no simple causal relationship between population size and the environment.

But doesn’t population growth lead to more carbon emissions, which will lead to planetary destruction? Again this model only makes sense if we accept some variant of the IPAT formula. If everything remains the same and nothing changes except the numbers of babies emitting carbon, then the worst-case scenarios imagined by climate-change alarmists become plausible. But the good news is that human beings do not simply emit carbon and pollute the world; people do not merely consume resources, they also produce them. They innovate, create and alter the very foundation of their existence. On balance, we should not so much worry about human impact as we should direct it along a constructive path. The obsessing with simply limiting this impact will distract society from creatively searching for solutions to the problems that we face.

The OPT’s trade-off between birth control and energy-saving technology – where a simple condom is said to be a better investment for ‘saving the planet’ than hi-tech inventions – is testimony to today’s disturbing mood of estrangement from human life. It is not surprising that offsetting carbon emissions through funding birth control is preferred to technological innovation. Because where technological innovation relies on investing in human potential, Malthusianism is focused on preventing the realisation of human potential. And this, on the day that Copenhagen starts, is the stark choice that confronts us all: whether we will nurture and encourage humanity’s potential, or watch as it is demonised and thwarted.

(1) Rich nations to offset emissions with birth control, Guardian, 3 December 2009

First published by spiked, 7 December 2009

Anything ‘sustainable’ is not worth having
A challenge to the cult of sustainability and restraint that is growing in response to the economic recession.

At the Battle of Ideas in London on 31 October and 1 November, Frank Furedi spoke about the ideologies that might arise in a ‘post-recession world’. His speech is published below.

The current economic crisis is very interesting because, while it may have a fiscal dimension and a banking dimension, at the level of ideas it does not have a production dimension. The capitalist system of production is not at issue here; it is not a part of a debate. It is very striking that there is widespread silence on the fundamental structure of contemporary global society, a silence that takes the system as given. And what is even more interesting to me, as a sociologist, is not simply the fact that capitalism itself is unquestioned, but the paradox where, today, even the defenders of capitalism are conspicuously silent about the legitimacy of their own system.

All of this puts me in the minority of those people who do not take neo-liberalism too seriously, because there are very few celebrations of neo-liberalism at this particular time. What we have instead is a kind of bad faith, where the system is defended and validated almost indirectly; it is very rarely celebrated in its own terms. This is a very interesting paradox. There’s a lack of critique of what exists, but also a lack of a defence of what exists, and these positions both exist at the same time. This is what makes the contemporary ideology of the crisis so interesting, while also making it difficult to unearth its precise ideological features.

As it happens, many ideas in relation to the crisis are evolving and emerging. Some are very powerful ideas which appear to be at odds with one another, but they are actually mutually reinforcing. And these ideas tell us something about the world we are moving towards, in moral, spiritual, intellectual and ideological terms.

First, it does sometimes appear as if there is a critique of the system. But it’s a very superficial critique, centring around a cynical, populist critique of bankers’ greed. Everyone has strong views on bankers’ bonuses and parlimentarians’ wage packets. It’s very similar to the early twentieth-century populist critique of Jewish people, financiers or fat capitalists, but we have an even more caricatured version of that ‘radical critique’ today.

In particular, this critique targets rich consumers. It’s a kind of negative cultural script that attaches itself to various forms of conspicuous consumption, a self-reflected austerity ideology. In Britain, the Guardian newspaper expresses this in the most systematic way. You will read lots of articles about how good it is to eat brown rice and how bad it is to drive round in flash cars.

This ideology goes hand-in-hand with a powerful anti-modernist, misanthropic sentiment. It is telling that the works of the eighteenth-century doom-mongering demographer Thomas Malthus are more popular today than ever before. Malthus is back at the centre of public discussion. The whole hierarchical notion of inequality, and most importantly the whole notion of limits, which Malthus so forcefully promoted, is palpable in public debate today. It is best summed up by the widespread idea that having too many babies is a bad thing, that we should slap a ‘carbon tax’ on children, and that one can demonstrate one’s maturity and sense of responsibility by not procreating because human beings are polluters with huge carbon footprints.

That ideology is very important and is underlined by a quasi-religious, almost medieval idea that ‘we are getting what we deserve’. It’s an interesting idea because, in previous times, when it was said that ‘we got what we deserved’, that was usually another way of saying ‘it’s the fault of the rich’. We all got what we deserved because of the conspicuous consumption of those rich bankers, gurgling their champagne and eating their caviar. These days, however, when people say we got what we deserved, they mean ‘we all got what we deserved’; everyone played a role in this debacle; we’re all consuming a little bit too much, and we would all be better off if we didn’t fly on aeroplanes, didn’t use Ryanair, and all the rest.

So what we have is a moralising narrative of excess, where the emphasis is one-sidedly on consumption and almost never on production, and where the principal variable becomes the degree to which one consumes. In that sense, the theoretical underpinnings of the current ideology surrounding the recession is a kind of old-fashioned, pre-modern, depletion story of economic life. It is a depletion story in which the world is seen as containing a certain amount of resources, and apparently the more of those resources we use up then the less there is for future generations and the less there is for other people.

As a result, the ideal of egalitarianism today is an entirely reactionary, pre-medieval, old-fashioned, Catholic-like sentiment, where ‘equality’ means we can share misery and problems in ‘an equal kind of a way’. So we have this depletion story of economic life and, at the same time, a quasi-religious call to make amends. The recession is now commonly used to try to make amends for the past; there is a sense that recent generations had a very good time – for example, those baby boomers who spent lots of money, had flash cars, travelled the world and destroyed the environment – and now the poor kids of the future are going to have nothing left.

One peculiar consequence of this ideological story is that we now have actual scientists, and other chief proponents of this quasi-religious standpoint, calling for everyone to take up vegetarianism. Unless we all go vegetarian, we are not doing the right thing - apparently that is the only way to save resources, live sustainably, and stop being so environmentally destructive. This is the logic of the whole climate-change discourse, which, again, is a kind of quasi-relgious argument about redemption, where we will apparently be redeemed by these various acts of austerity.

What I find most objectionable as an intellectual – or maybe a pretend intellectual, since we never know we’re intellectuals until about 200 years after the event – is the very dishonest, self-deceiving element in contemporary economic discourse, particularly in the domain of policymaking.

In countries like Britain or France, there is an active and conscious attempt to redefine economic indicators, to move them away from production and material reality, towards things like happiness or wellbeing. People are deadly serious about this. On both sides of the political spectrum, both Labour and Conservatives ask why we are so hung up about gross domestic product - why not focus on gross domestic wellbeing, they ask? Or why not have a happiness index which defines what a good life really is? I don’t necessarily want to go into a critique of a happiness index, except to make one historical point: if you look at the way in which happiness was discussed and used by economists over the past 100 to 150 years, in almost every passage that you read you will see that happiness is linked to prosperity.

There you have it. Happiness and prosperity. That’s the way these things are generally framed in the grammar of everyday life. The idea is that the more prosperous we are, the happier we are. There is some kind of link there. It’s obviously not a straightforward link, but the assumption is that if you are starving to death, if you are living in the dark, then it is difficult to walk around with a smile on your face. Today, however, we have the paradox of a happiness argument that says the richer we are, the more prosperous we are, then the more sad and ‘mentally damaged’ we become. And therefore we should all go to Himalayan states like Bhutan, which apparently have a higher level of happiness, and aspire to that kind of model society.

This is the thing I find saddest about the current ideological understanding of the recession: the way in which society and thinkers have reacted to the recession actually makes neo-liberalism look almost progressive by comparison, and it makes conservative thought look positively radical.

We live in a world in which the one idea that everyone can sign up to as a way of dealing with the recession is ‘sustainability’. Now, I’m old-fashioned about this – maybe it’s my classical economist, Marxist background – but basically I would say that sustainability is not a good thing. Anything that is sustainable is not worth having, and that has always been the main principle of human development. That is, it’s precisely because we recognise the transient, fluid character of our existence that we don’t simply want things to be sustainable - we want things to move forward, to progress, to develop. It seems to me that what is really lacking today is some kind of progress-related, progressive ideology, which we might use to deal with today’s many troublesome ideas and issues.

First published by spiked, 1 December 2009

We don’t need another conspiracy theory
The sceptics poring over those ‘Climategate’ emails are indulging in easy conspiracy-mongering rather than having a tough, grown-up debate.

For a long time, I have been concerned about the confusions and anxieties sown by alarmist climate-change crusaders. So why do I now feel uncomfortable with the publication of hundreds of emails that appear to confirm my concerns, and which reveal some of the deceptions practiced by climate-change crusaders who masquerade as disinterested climate researchers?

‘Climategate’ is being widely discussed in the British and international media. It has involved the publication of private emails sent by employees of the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit – emails which appear to show scientists colluding to ensure that facts do not stand in the way of their ‘science’.

Of course there is little doubt that ‘advocacy research’ – research that is driven, and thus hugely influenced, by an already desired policy goal – plays a key role in framing the discussion of climate change. However, whatever one thinks of the morality of climate-change alarmism, it is important to understand that the people actively involved in this campaign honestly believe in their cause. This is not a movement that consciously seeks to deceive or which conspires to fiddle the figures. It is a lobby driven by powerful beliefs and convictions, which need to be taken seriously if the issues at stake are to be clarified and understood.

Like any crusade, this movement has many people in its ranks who believe that their cause must be promoted by any means necessary. However, it is far easier to discredit acts of conscious manipulation and dishonesty – as seem to appear in the ‘Climategate’ emails – than it is to challenge the powerful convictions and fears that drive the green movement. Indeed, focusing on episodic acts of dishonesty distracts from the far more difficult task of challenging the broader cultural insecurities and mood of misanthropy that fuels climate-change alarmism today.

There’s another reason not to get too excited about ‘Climategate’: in the interests of intellectual integrity. As matters stand today, it is climate-change alarmists who live on a diet of conspiracy theories. They continually tell stories of hidden forces that are sinisterly subverting the real science. They use the language of the Inquisition to stigmatise their opponents, labelling them ‘deniers’, suggesting that they are lying about something that they actually know to be true. Climate-change alarmists always allude to the ‘story behind the story’, and to the hidden agenda of allegedly oil-funded ‘deniers’, rather than face up to substantive arguments about the politics of climate change.

In such circumstances, focusing on the behind-the-scenes emailing and manoeuvring of crusading climate scientists – where now anti-greens accuse greens of being involved in a vast, top-secret conspiracy – may inadvertently reinforce the conspiratorial outlook that dominates the discussion of climate change. And such an outlook is inhospitable to intellectual clarification and the search for the truth. Those who are genuinely interested in furthering humanity’s understanding of the workings of the Earth’s climate should resist the temptation to play the conspiracy card.

In any case, no objective observer should really be surprised by what the emails reveal. However, the emails do remind us, quite forcefully, of one deeply regrettable development in recent years: the politicisation of the institution of ‘peer review’. The emails reveal scientists having quite cynical and political discussions about whose work should get the peer-review stamp and whose should not.

In an ideal world, the system of peer review – where scholarly work is subjected to the scrutiny of other experts in the field – would ensure that disinterested science informed public discussion and debate. Through peer review, the authority of science might help to clarify disputes and inject public discussion with some useful ideas and facts. Unfortunately, however, this ideal is rarely realised in practice. Even at the best of times the system of peer review is not entirely free from vested interests. As many of my colleagues in academia know, peer-reviewing is often conducted through a kind of mates’ club, between friends and acquaintances, and all too often the matter of who gets published and who gets rejected is determined by who you know and where you stand in a particular academic debate.

Nevertheless, for all its imperfections, peer reviewing worked for many years as a more or less adequate system of quality control. In the end, the damage caused by cliquishness and self-serving academic interest tended to be overcome through debate and the triumph of scientific integrity. But the situation has now changed. Unfortunately, in some disciplines in recent decades, peer reviewing has become enormously politicised. And as a result, peer reviewing is often more of a cultural than a scientific accomplishment. Indeed, the way that peer review is now used in public debate as a form of divine revelation – where we are told that ‘the peer-reviewed science’ shows that we must believe and do certain things – indicates how this institution risks being corrupted by advocacy researchers.

The politicisation of peer review in the climate-change debate raises fundamental issues that are of direct concern to all scientists. Indeed, the very possibility of having a scientifically informed public conversation requires a rethink about how the quality of evidence is assessed. To realise that objective, we must depoliticise the system of peer review and encourage scientists to think of themselves as disinterested researchers. That does not mean that scientists can’t have opinions or must not participate in political campaigns. What it means is that they do not confuse their science with their ideology. That way, they would not have to worry every time they pressed the ‘Send’ button on their email.

First published by spiked, 24 November 2009

The Forum
Frank Furedi, Sabrina Maniscalco and Tahmima Anam on education, entanglement and epiphany.

Listen to this episode of ‘The Forum’ here. 

First published by BBC World Service, 22 November 2009

Elevating environmentalism over ‘less worthy’ lifestyles
The legal ruling that a belief in climate change is similar to a religious conviction seriously damages science, philosophy and democracy.

Some scientists are bemused that a British judge has decided that a strong belief in alarmist climate-change scenarios ought to be awarded the status of religious faith.

Following a judge’s decision at a UK employment tribunal that Tim Nicholson, a sustainability officer who was sacked from a property firm, was entitled to legal protection for his ‘philosophical belief’ in climate change, scientists have been expressing their shock. ‘As a scientist who works on climate change, I find it deeply alarming’, said Myles Allen, who heads the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford (1).

Allen’s concerns are entirely understandable. Since the rise of the modern era, science has prided itself on its capacity to explain the world on the basis of experimentation, research and, above all, hard evidence. Science emerged, self-consciously, as an alternative to worldviews based on faith, moral conviction and other forms of a priori thought. So it is natural that a genuine scientist would feel insulted by the judge Sir Michael Burton’s ruling that Nicholson’s concern with climate change qualified as a ‘philosophical belief’ under the Religion and Belief Regulations 2003.

One reason why Allen and some of his colleagues are concerned about this decision is that it actually serves to undermine the pre-eminent authority of science today. In the twenty-first century, science has a near monopoly on authorising claims about virtually every aspect of human experience. We are far more interested in what ‘science says’ than in what ‘God says’. Consequently, even those who are sceptical about science and the scientific method will nevertheless mobilise these things to support their arguments. Not long ago, in the 1970s and 80s, leading environmentalists insisted that science was undemocratic, that it was responsible for many of the problems facing the planet. Now, in public at least, their hostility towards science has given way to their embrace and endorsement of science. The global warming lobby depends on the legitimation provided by scientific evidence and expertise.

However, if science is recast by a legal ruling as simply a moral or religious worldview, then its pre-eminent authority is likely to be compromised. What is to distinguish science from quacks with strongly held principles?

The erosion of the line between science and moralising has not simply been brought about by one eccentric judge. In recent times more than a few scientists have found it difficult to resist the temptation to cross the line into domain of public moralising. Take the case of Professor David Nutt, the expert recently sacked from the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. As a scientist, he is entitled to point to evidence which unequivocally calls into question the government’s policy on drugs. But Nutt is not prepared to confine his role to that of a disinterested scientist; he also wants to be a moral crusader fighting against the scourge of alcohol.

‘I want parents to know alcohol will kill your kids, not ecstasy’, said Nutt last week, before insisting that the minimum drinking age should be increased to 21 (2). Nutt obviously has strong views on the subject of the minimum age of drinking, but these views are based on his personal moral attitude, not on science. The way in which Nutt can quite easily make a conceptual leap from scientific evidence to the domain of moral and political decision-making is symptomatic of a powerful trend today: the transformation of science into an ideology, if not a dogma.

Indeed, science often has the quality of a quasi-religious dogma these days, especially in the arena of climate-change alarmism. ‘The scientists have spoken’, says one British-based green campaign group, in an updated version of the religious phrase: ‘This is the Word of the Lord.’ ‘This is what the science says we must do’, many greens claim, before adding that the debate about global warming is ‘finished’.

As I have argued previously on spiked, campaigners against climate change frequently prefix the term science with the definite article, ‘the’. So Sir David Read, a former vice president of the prestigious scientific institution the Royal Society, stated: ‘The science very clearly points towards the need for us all – nations, businesses and individuals – to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.’ (3) Unlike ‘science’, this new term – ‘The Science’ – is a deeply moralised and politicised category. Today, those who claim to wield the authority of The Science are really demanding unquestioning submission. The legal ruling that someone’s belief in the behaviour modification demanded by climate-change activists should have the status of a religious conviction shows how much The Science now influences Britain’s legal culture.

Although some scientists feel insulted that their views on climate change have been equated with a religion, there are many green activists who are more than happy to recruit the support of God to their cause. One blogger says ‘thinking about environmentalism as if it were a religion is an interesting way to go’. Why? Because religion ‘looks a lot more successful at achieving its aim worldwide than the environmental movement’ (4). Tim Nicholson wants to have both God and Science on his team. After the judgement he noted that ‘my moral and ethical values are similar to those promoted by many of the world’s religions’. However, he also added that ‘the difference is mine are not faith-based or spiritual, but grounded in overwhelming scientific evidence’.

Whether this ‘philosophy’ presents itself as science with a bit of religion, or as a religion based on science, appears to be a matter of personal opinion amongst campaigners, all of whom seem to believe that their cause is far too important for them to worry about opportunistic inconsistencies in argumentation.

Giving philosophy a bad name

When the law was changed to protect people from discrimination at work on the basis of their beliefs, many humanist and secular commentators believed this was a positive step forward. And some argued that philosophical beliefs ought to be accorded the same rights as religious beliefs. Unfortunately, what many supporters of the change in the law did not grasp was that if secular views were also transformed into ‘weighty and substantial’ beliefs, they would in effect become a form of pseudo-religion. This development is particularly striking in the way in which philosophy has been recast as religion-lite.

From the standpoint of Mr Justice Burton, adherence to climate-change theory is a philosophical belief because it is a view that is genuinely and deeply held. But where is the philosophy in all this? It is possible to argue that climate-change theory is inspired by a distinct epistemology and teleology and influenced by ethical and moral concerns. But in and of itself the belief in recycling and reducing consumption is not a philosophy.

Philosophy raises fundamental questions about the meaning of human existence. It engages with fundamental issues that underpin the sciences and public debate. Strictly speaking, the term ‘philosophical belief’ makes little sense, because philosophy is principally devoted to the task of asking questions and speculating about things, rather than providing answers. Philosophy is devoted to the quest for the truth in its quest for wisdom. It is not a secular form of religion. It does not rely on religious revelation for guidance, nor does it thrive when its search for answers is compromised by an adherence to a priori beliefs.

Such beliefs may arise out of a philosophical inquiry, but these beliefs do not constitute a philosophy as such. The term that Mr Justice Burton is really looking for to describe the beliefs and behaviour of climate-change crusaders is not philosophy or religion, but lifestyle.

The sacralisation of lifestyle

The decision to provide environmentalist arguments with the protection of the law, in a manner akin to that afforded to religion, demonstrates that the legal and political elites have lost their way. But it is important not to take too seriously the arguments used to support this decision. Strongly held moral views about the conduct of life have never been the essence of religions alone. In previous times, such sentiments informed political ideals and cultural movements. Today, the beliefs and practices advocated by Nicholson are part of his lifestyle. Yes, we take our lifestyles very seriously: what we eat, how we look or travel and whom we sleep with define many people’s identities. But in a world where there are a multitude of lifestyles, all of which have assumed great significance, it is not possible to treat them all as quasi-religions.

To qualify for protection under the Equality and Employment (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, a philosophical belief must be ‘genuinely held’, be about a ‘weighty and substantial’ aspect of human experience, possess ‘seriousness, cohesion and importance’, and be ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’. This last point is most significant. Who decides which strongly held view is ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’? Certainly our legal and cultural elites have clear assumptions about which views are worthy of respect, and which are not. So last week we discovered that, under new proposals from the New Labour government, parents who are hostile to the provision of sex education in schools are not ‘worthy of respect’ despite the fact that their views are informed by genuine and deeply held convictions – their ability to withdraw their children from sex-education classes will be restricted.

Some forms of lifestyles are protected, or at least sacralised, by law, while others are stigmatised. So Christians who, in keeping with their beliefs, refuse to perform same-sex marriages are unlikely to gain legal protection, even though they express traditionally recognised religious convictions. However, those whose conscience does not allow them fly on Ryanair will now enjoy legal privileges and dispensation that are not accorded to their morally inferior colleagues. The sacralisation of elite-approved lifestyles creates a double standard that directly contradicts democratic norms.

Those who hold strongly held environmentalist views even have a semi-official mandate to break the law these days. Protesters against genetically modified (GM) food or nuclear power are often represented as idealist young people who are acting on ‘everyone’s behalf’. In truth, being part of the British political oligarchy, they have the kind of freedom to protest that is usually denied to ordinary mortals. That is why such protesters who break the law often face a sympathetic court hearing and win ‘not guilty’ verdicts (see State-sanctioned radicalism, by Brendan O’Neill).

So when Lord Melchett, the aristocratic former leader of Greenpeace, was arrested for criminal damage and theft after taking part in a protest against GM crops, he was genuinely shocked by his treatment. As far as he was concerned, his action was a ‘direct expression of “people’s power”’. Greenpeace, the self-appointed voice of the British people, described its action as an exercise in ‘active citizenship’ which ‘keeps democracy healthy and responsive’.

Melchett, like many other leading lobbyists, has an elitist notion of democracy, one driven by a conviction that, if they believe that something is wrong, then waiting for an unresponsive political system to do something about it is a luxury that society cannot afford. Professional environmental protesters assume that they have the moral authority to take matters into their own hands, since they are acting on behalf of The People. They believe that their unique philosophical insights entitle them to special dispensation. Now, Mr Justice Burton has effectively agreed with them, elevating environmentalism over other, inferior, less ‘worthy’ beliefs – and democracy is all the more impoverished for it.

(1) It isn’t godly being green, Guardian, 6 November 2009

(2) Alcohol gravest threat to society, claims sacked scientist, Daily Telegraph, 5 November 2009

(3) Really Bad Ideas: Politicising science, by Frank Furedi

(4) Environmentalism is the new religion? So what if it is?, RSA Arts&Ecology, 10 September 2009

First published by spiked, 9 November 2009

Older generation of bad faith
Education in the West is no longer working because it has become about the new rather than renewal. By Frank Furedi.

In virtually every Western society education is in trouble. Unfortunately policy-makers tend to obsess only about the symptoms of the problem—unsatisfactory standards in core subjects, growth of a cohort of poorly schooled underachievers or erosion of classroom discipline—and not the cause.

Yet the main reason education often is not educating is because it finds it difficult to give meaning to human experience.

Time and again curriculum specialists inform us that because we live in a world of rapid change the conventions and practices of the past have become outmoded, outdated or irrelevant.

Present educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children.

The implicit assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit. But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting their values are more enlightened than those of their elders because they are more tuned in to the present. So children are often represented as digital natives who are way ahead of their text-bound and backward-looking parents.

Although education is celebrated as one of the most important institutions of society, there is a casual disrespect for the content of what children are taught. Curriculum engineers often display indifference, if not contempt, for abstract thought and the knowledge developed in the past.

Both are criticised for being irrelevant or outdated; only new information that can be applied and acted on is seen as suitable for the training—and it is training and not teaching—of digital natives.
In policy deliberations about education, the acquisition of subject-based knowledge is often dismissed as old-fashioned. Typically, an emphasis on the intellectual content of classroom subjects is labelled an outdated form of scholasticism that has little significance in our era.

Policy-makers often represent change as an omnipotent force that renders prevailing forms of knowledge and schooling redundant. In such circumstances education must transform itself to keep up with the times. From this perspective educational policies can be justified only if they can adapt to change.

Since they are likely to be overtaken by events, classroom innovations by definition have a short term and provisional status. The instability that afflicts the education system is turned into the normal state of an institution that needs to be responsive to the uncertain flow of events.

Although fads come and go, the constant feature of today’s throwaway pedagogy is a deep-seated hostility to teaching academic subjects to young people, especially to those who come from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. So-called modernisers regard the subject-based curriculum as far too rigid for a school system that must adapt to a constantly changing world.

The dramatisation of change in Anglo-American education-speak renders the past irrelevant. If indeed we continually move from one new age to another, then the practices of the past have little relevance for today.

Sadly, the ceaseless repetition of the proposition that the past is irrelevant desensitises people from understanding the influence of the legacy of human development on their lives. The constant repetition of the idea of ceaseless change tends to naturalise it and turn it into an omnipotent autonomous force that subjects human beings to its will.

This is a force that annihilates the past and demands that people learn to adapt and readapt to new experiences. From this standpoint humans do not so much determine their future as adapt to forces beyond their control.

In the world view of the educational establishment change has acquired a sacred character that determines what is taught. It creates new requirements and introduces new ideas about learning. And it encourages the mass production of a disposable pedagogy.

Educationalists adopt the rhetoric of breaks and ruptures and maintain that nothing is as it was and that the present has been decoupled from the past.

Their outlook is shaped by an imagination that is so overwhelmed by the displacement of the old by the new that it often overlooks historical experience that may continue to be relevant.

The discussion of the relationship between education and change is frequently overwhelmed by the fad of the moment and with the relatively superficial symptoms of new developments. It is often distracted from acknowledging the fact the fundamental educational needs of students do not alter every time a new technologyinfluences people’s lives. And certainly the questions raised by Greek philosophy, Renaissance poetry, Enlightenment science or the novels of George Eliot continue to be relevant for students in our time and not just to the period that preceded the digital age.

Often change and social transformation is represented as if it is unique to our time. Innovation guru Bill Law makes this pronouncement: “We may not know precisely what shape the future will take but we do know that the futures of our current students will not much resemble those of our past ones.’’ But when did we last think the future of our children will resemble our own? Not in 1969, or in 1939 or even 1909.

The idea that we live in a qualitatively different world serves as a premise for the claim that the knowledge and insights of the past have only minor historical significance. In education it is claimed old ways of teaching are outdated precisely because they are old.

Knowledge itself is called into question because in a world of constant flux it must be continually overtaken by events. Policy has become so focused on keeping up with change that it has become distracted from the task of giving meaning to education.

The fetishisation of change is symptomatic of a mood of intellectual malaise where notions of truth, knowledge and meaning have acquired a provisional character. Perversely, the transformation of change into a metaphysical force haunting humanity actually desensitises society from distinguishing between a passing novelty and qualitative change.

That is why lessons learned through the experience of the past are so important for helping society face the future. When change is objectified, it turns into spectacle that distracts society from valuing the truths and insights it has acquired throughout the best moments of human history.

Yet these are truths that have emerged through attempts to find answers to the deepest and most durable questions facing us, and the more the world changes the more we need to draw on our cultural and intellectual inheritance.

If the legacy of past achievements has ceased to have relevance for the schooling of young people, what can education mean? Thinkers from across the left-right divide have always realised education represents a transaction between the generations.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist thinker, wrote “in reality each generation educates the new generation’’. Writing from a conservative perspective, English philosopher Michael Oakeshott concluded “education in its most general significance may be recognised as a specific transaction which may go on between the generations of human beings in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world they inhabit’’. Liberal political philosopher Hannah Arendt said education provided an opportunity for society to preserve and to renew its intellectual inheritance through an intergenerational conversation.

One of the key tasks of education is to teach children about the world as it is. Although society is subject to the forces of change, education needs to acquaint young people with the legacy of its past. The term “learning from the past’’ is often used as a platitude.

Yet it is impossible to engage with the future unless people draw on the centuries of human experience. Individuals gain an understanding of themselves through familiarity with the unfolding of the human world.

The transition from one generation to another requires education to transmit an understanding of the lessons learned by humanity through the ages. Consequently, the main mission of education is to preserve the past so young people have the cultural and intellectual resources to deal with the challenges they face. This understanding of education as renewal stands in direct contrast to the present predilection to focus the curriculum on the future.

In Anglo-American societies curriculum planning is devoted to cultivating an ethos of flexibility towards the future. Of course the capacity to adapt is a valuable asset. But the exercise of this capacity requires a grounding in an understanding of the world in which we live.

The question of the balance that education should strike between orienting towards the past and towards a changing world should be a source of debate. However, today when policy-makers tend to be so fixated on the present that they attempt to distance education from the past it is essential to reaffirm the importance of a traditional humanist education.

The impulse to free education from the past is influenced by a prejudice that regards ideas that are not of the moment as old-fashioned and irrelevant.

Yet the project of preserving the past through education does not mean an uncritical acceptance of the world as it; it means the assumption of adult responsibility for the world into which the young are integrated.

The aim of this act is to acquaint the young with the world as it is so that they have the intellectual resources necessary for renewing it. Through education, all the important old questions are re-raised with the young, leading to a dialogue that moves humanity’s conversation forward.

Education needs to conserve the past. As Arendt argued, conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of education. Her objective was not to conserve for the sake of nostalgia but because she recognised that the conservation of the old provided the foundation for renewal and innovation.

The characterisation of conservation as the essence of education can be easily misunderstood as a call inspired by a backward or reactionary political agenda. However, the argument for conservation is based on the understanding that, in a generational transaction, adults must assume responsibility for the world as it is and pass on its cultural and intellectual legacy to young people.

An attitude of conservation is called for specifically in the context of intergenerational transmission of this legacy. Until recently, leading thinkers from across the ideological divide understood the significance of transmitting the knowledge of the past to young people.

Conservative thinker Matthew Arnold’s formulation of passing on “the best that has been thought and said in the world’’ is virtually identical to Lenin’s insistence that education needs to transmit the “store of human knowledge’’.

A liberal humanist education is underpinned by the assumption that children are rightful heirs to the legacy of the past. It takes responsibility for ensuring this inheritance is handed over to the young. It is because education gives meaning to human experience that it needs to be valued in its own right. One of the key characteristics of education is its lack of interest in an ulterior purpose.

That does not mean it is uninterested in developments affecting children and society; it means that it regards the transmission of cultural and intellectual achievements of humanity to children as its defining mission.

Once society is able to affirm an education system that values itself and the acquisition of knowledge, policy-makers and the public can begin to envisage the steps required to deal with the practical challenges facing the classroom.

This is an abridged version of Frank Furedi’s opening festival lecture at the Battle of Ideas conference at the Royal College of Art in London, 31 October 2009. The article has also been re-published on spiked.

First published by Weekend Australian, 7 November 2009

Rethinking education – the new crisis of adult authority in the classroom
Lecture: What are the consequences when teachers flounder and accommodate to the inclinations and feelings of children?

Listen to an audio recording of Frank Furedi’s opening lecture at the 2009 Battle of Ideas here. 

First published by Battle of Ideas, 4 November 2009

Whatever happened to adults?
Essay of the week: Children are winning the power struggle between generations. By Frank Furedi.

“I hate to say this,” says Claire, a Lanarkshire secondary teacher, “but some of my kids make me feel really nervous.” Her colleague Jim nods in agreement and tells me that some of his fellow teachers struggle to maintain control over their disruptive pupils. The problem is not confined to secondary education. Some teachers even find it difficult to manage the behaviour of very young schoolchildren. Last year there were 400 exclusions from Scottish primary schools.

The maintenance of classroom discipline has taxed teachers since the beginning of formal schooling. In recent times, however, the issue has not simply been about disruptive behaviour or conflict between children. Increasingly, teachers perceive the bad behaviour as a direct threat to themselves. During a single academic year, 2007-2008, one primary school in Lochgelly, Fife recorded 29 cases of assaults by children – a third of which were against staff members.

Research reveals that significant numbers of staff have been teased, abused or physically attacked by pupils. Jim believes the numbers may be higher because male teachers are often too embarrassed to report such incidents for fear of looking weak, or undermining their school’s reputation. For many teachers, it is not the threatening behaviour in itself that is a worry, but the realisation that they do not possess the authority to effectively manage children in the classroom.

Recently, in one Lanarkshire school, a teenage boy refused to reveal to teachers the names of fellow students who had beaten him up. Staff were at a loss as to how to deal with this case, eventually warning the victim that he may be excluded because the school could “no longer guarantee his safety”. This may have been just a threat to get the boy to talk, but it was also an acknowledgement of the limits of adult influence in the school setting.

Talk to teachers, and it soon becomes evident that many feel powerless to exercise their authority. Recent research by the Society of Occupational Medicine found that secondary school teachers experience stress rates that are significantly higher than others of working age in Scotland. Male teachers seem to be especially affected, with 28% of respondents reporting psychological distress. But women suffer too. One teacher underlined her sense of powerlessness when she described an incident where she felt that she was “emotionally bullied” by two girl pupils.

The very idea of children bullying their teachers signifies an important reversal in the relationship between generations. Adults no longer feel comfortable about laying down the law and insisting on young people’s respect. Teachers, instead of feeling that they are in control of the classroom, are often intimidated by their students’ behaviour.

Concern about classroom discipline raises fundamental questions about the capacity of teachers and adults to interact authoritatively with children. Education as a generational transaction presupposes the fact that the older generation has something important to impart that children need to learn. Pupils rely on their teachers to guide them to comprehend new forms of knowledge; this involves a leap of faith which people only undertake if they accept the authority of the educator. And while parents and teachers have always had a hard time gaining the respect of recalcitrant teenagers, these days matters are further complicated by the absence of any serious valuation of adult authority.

One of the most striking manifestations of this is the current tendency to question the wisdom of the older generation, and even to condemn their moral status. “Adults have ruined our world” is the headline of an article published by an online magazine targeting children. It sets out to explain “how climate change is going to affect us as the next generation”. A similar message is communicated by the green crusader Jonathan Porritt, who informed children that “your parents and grandparents have made a mess of looking after the Earth”. He added: “They may deny it, but they are stealing your future.” Instead of being presented as role models, adults are being castigated for setting a bad example to the young.

This is paralleled by a tendency to flatter children by suggesting that their values are more enlightened than those of their elders. Marc Prensky, a leading American advocate of digital learning, argues that, unlike adults, children are used to the “instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets ... and instant messaging”. As a result they have “little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic and ‘tell-test’ instruction”. Prensky believes that children are not interested in the traditional curriculum, for good reasons, and concludes that adults will have to change and become more like the young “digital natives”. This advice is congruent with the development of what can be most accurately described as socialisation-in-reverse.

Socialisation, the process through which children are prepared for the world ahead of them, has traditionally been a responsibility carried out by adults at home, in their communities and – increasingly – within the formal setting of the school. The devaluation of adult authority has complicated this task, to the extent that children are now being entrusted with the mission of socialising their elders. And while the view that the young know better than their elders has been a constant theme in the modern era, today, this sentiment is often legitimised implicitly by the way educational institutions work.

Socialisation-in-reverse works by communicating the idea that children possess knowledge and competence about certain issues that is way ahead of their parents’. This idea has some basis in reality: young people are far more knowledgeable about the latest music, fashion and digital technology than their elders, who often complain that they can’t understand the bizarre language that youngsters use when texting or messaging one another. However, when this generation gap is interpreted in a way that encourages adults to defer to the young, the issue of whose influence carries most weight is open to question.

“Parents ‘ignorant’ on five-a-day” was the headline of a BBC News story last year, reporting on a Department of Health poll that claimed that one in three parents said their children knew more than they did about healthy eating campaigns. In one sense, this was an everyday non-news story. The poll was based on a sample of 100 people and, in typical market research fashion, encouraged the respondents to give the answers that it sought. Close inspection revealed that the alleged parental ignorance was specifically about the “eat five proportions of fruit and veg a day” campaign and not about the general principles of healthy eating. Nevertheless, the poll aimed to validate the idea that children could be mobilised to help their parents overcome their ignorance. This message was reinforced by the then Health Minister, Dawn Primarolo MP, who said: “We welcome the fact that children ... can teach their parents – and peers – to eat more healthily”. Azmina Govindji of the British Dietetic Association added: “[Children] have a lot of power in the home, and can ask their parents for the kind of food they need to be eating.”

Policies oriented towards using children to teach their elders are presented as a sensible way of harnessing youngsters’ natural curiosity for the good of the community. So who could possibly object to a Scottish Executive campaign to provide fire safety education to 5,000 primary school pupils in the Falkirk, Stirling and Clackmannanshire areas? In line with the temper of our times, the campaign was promoted as an opportunity for children to educate their parents, and quoted a firefighter who pointed out that primary six pupils are “just the right age to get the message across ... through pester power”.

For years, pester power was depicted as a scourge of consumer society, with advertisers accused of manipulating children to nag their parents into purchasing the latest toy or trainers. Now, however, the practice has been rehabilitated, as demonstrated by the Home Office in 2007 when it organised a neighbourhood clean-up competition which was designed to encourage ­children to embarrass badly-behaved adults and “to use their pester power in a positive way” by “reminding grown-ups how to behave”.

“School council teach parents a lesson” is the title of an article published by the website of School Councils UK, which states that “pupils at St Nicholas’ Primary School, Lincolnshire, have had enough of naughty parents parking illegally in the yellow zigzag zones”. The article praises members of the school council for leafleting and petitioning parents as they dropped off children. At first sight this is a heart-warming illustration of how idealistic children take action against irresponsible adult behaviour.

However, it is also a story about role-reversal in inter-generational relations. The parents are infantalised – “naughty parents” – and brought up short by their morally superior youngsters who “teach them a lesson”.

Officials, advocacy groups and educational experts are increasingly harnessing young people’s well-meaning idealism in order to chastise their elders, yet there is nothing natural or spontaneous about children educating their parents. In previous times, the practice of mobilising children to police their parents’ behaviour was confined to totalitarian societies. But who needs Big Brother? The UK Government has no inhibition about using children’s anxiety to manipulate adult behaviour, as demonstrated recently by Department of Energy and Climate Change’s controversial £6 million television campaign, which features a father recounting a scary bedtime story about the “horrible consequence” of climate change, but whose real intent is to make adults feel embarrassed and guilty.

The effect of all this is to weaken the authority that parents can exert over their children, and this has knock-on effects for teachers. In a fundamental sense, adult authority is indivisible and if the moral status of parents is undermined, so is that of other grown-ups, including teachers. The institution of education can only work if parents are able to exercise a measure of influence over their children. So whatever private reservations educationalists have about the competence of parents, they still rely on the influence of the home to manage children’s behaviour.

Education itself requires the conscious and regular imposition of adult authority. T he teacher needs to initiate, direct and set the terms of the relationship with their pupils, often making demands that go against the children’s inclination and insisting that they study topics which don’t interest them, but which are fundamentally important to their ­development. The devaluation of grown-ups’ moral authority is ­responsible for many of the problems afflicting our schools. By failing to respect the wisdom of adults, we deprive parents and teachers of the self-belief they need to engage confidently with the younger generation. As a result, teachers, conscious of the difficulty of acting authoritatively, are often distracted from providing the leadership required in the classroom. In turn, this undermines the capacity of our schools to develop young people’s potential.

If we are to have any hope of tackling the problems confronting educationalists like Jim and Claire, we need to start by allowing teachers to teach. That means affirming once again the authority of the teacher, and the process must begin with a serious debate about how to put grown-ups back in charge: in short, how to reverse the process of socialisation-in-reverse.

Perhaps it has already begun. More than 350 people complained about the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s “bedtime stories” campaign – evidence, perhaps, that grown-ups have had enough of being ticked-off like naughty children.

Society cannot avoid confronting the problem of school discipline. Learning how to keep time, how to divide, multiply, spell or assume the habit of responsible behaviour require the application of discipline. Discipline is not just about managing behaviour – it has a creative dimension in the cultivation of young people’s tastes and sensibilities. The internalisation of the habit of discipline encourages habits and attitudes that help children gain a sense of independence and self-mastery. It prepares them for a world where they can exercise their freedom – and that is one of the principal goals of education.

First published by Sunday Herald, 1 November 2009

Give teachers authority or betray our children
As a society, we are obsessed with education. But we seem to have given up on the idea that the person who knows best in the classroom is the teacher.

I was talking to a group of 12-year-olds about their life at school. One of them gazed at me with a puzzled demeanour and asked: “Why do teachers call thick children gifted?” The entire group looked at me knowingly.

What is going on here? These children grasped that their teachers were self-consciously obscuring the truth.

This is not because teachers are fibbers. Most are hard-working, honest, committed and do an excellent job.

But the self-evident nervousness of teachers - which those boys picked up on - about defining and asserting objective academic standards in the classroom goes to the heart of the educational crisis we face today.

As a society, we are obsessed with education. But as a society we seem to have given up on adult authority and the idea that the person who knows best in the classroom is the teacher.

The crisis of education is intimately linked to that of authority.

What is happening in our classrooms today reflects a far more fundamental problem about the confusion adults have with exercising authority inside and outside of schools.

Teachers are not immune to this confusion. Education requires the conscious and regular imposition of adult authority.

Yet teachers often attempt to avoid acting authoritatively because they feel uncomfortable with this hierarchical role.

Consequently, teachers often adopt the affectation of a friend or a mate in their dealings with children. It is now common for teachers to call themselves “learners” - some heads even refer to themselves as lead-learners.

Although this tendency to redefine the relationship between adult and child appears progressive and enlightened, it represents an evasion of the responsibility grown-ups have to the younger generation.

Disastrously, with the reluctance of teachers to be the grown-up at the head of the class comes a mood of casual disrespect for what our children are taught. The assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit.

But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting that their values are more enlightened than that of their elders because they are more tuned in to the current moment.

The result is a throwaway “relevant” pedagogy coupled with a deep-seated hostility to the teaching of traditional academic subjects to young people.

As we head into the 2010 election we have been warned of “Curriculum Wars”, with the Conservatives hinting at curricular reforms. But tinkering with the curriculum will not fix the problem of adult authority at the heart of our education system.

Wherever we are on the political compass, we need not only to back teachers’ authority in the classroom but to recognise that authority is gained through a firm commitment to transmitting knowledge - a task that new “learner” teachers shy away from.

Any education system worth its salt is underpinned by the assumption that children are the rightful heirs to the achievement of the past.

Society needs teachers with the authority and confidence to, as Alan Bennett’s Hector in The History Boys would say, “pass it on”.

First published by London Evening Standard, 29 October 2009

The teachers who can do no right
A report claims that a third of teachers have been falsely accused of wrongdoing. It's time parents recognised their responsibilities. By Frank Furedi.

Who would be a teacher in Britain today? The public may be surprised by a new poll that reveals 28 per cent of school staff have been falsely accused of wrongdoing by pupils, but most professionals who work in schools will not be. Living with parents’ criticism, complaints and false allegations from pupils has become part of a teachers’ lives. They work in a world where pupils feel they can make accusations because their parents will automatically back them, often with far-reaching results.

The poll by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers found that school staff who have been the subject of an unfounded allegation of misconduct by pupils, often have their careers blighted and their private lives damaged.

So how have we got to this situation where the adults involved in education, from parents to teachers, are in a not- so-civil civil war. And how does this affect the children they are trying to serve?

In my view, the first problem is that we now live in a culture where many of us no longer think twice before making a disparaging comment about any grown-ups in front of children. And as parents’ frustration with their children’s schools performance grows, it is the often hard-working teachers on whom they take it out.

Geraldine, for example, is an angry parent. This 39-year-old office administrator intends to sue her daughter’s Portsmouth primary school for failing to get Trish through the 11-plus. When I ask her: “Was it really the teachers’ fault?” she dismisses my question with a look of incomprehen- sion. She is, she says, “totally geared up” to “take on” her daughter’s “useless teachers”. But what example does this set Trish?

Tiff, a 41-year-old stay-at-home mum in Kent, is also a confident and seasoned advocate of her three children’s interest. Her latest triumph was to face down her 14-year-old daughter’s headmaster and force him to revoke the detention that she was given for texting in the middle of her science lessons. Tiff is so contemptuous towards her daughter’s headmaster that she calls him a “waste of space”. Her daughter, meanwhile, feels vindicated for her behaviour.

These mothers are just two of many examples of parental misbehaviour. Researching my new book Wasted: Why Education isn’t Educating, during which I spoke to scores of parents, it struck me how quickly they turned into vociferous critics of their children’s school. Often, they responded to a teacher’s criticism of their offspring as if it were a slight on themselves.

And the way grown-ups behave in everyday life does not go unnoticed by children. I have met kids as young as 8 or 9 who feel that they have permission to make fun of and attack their teachers. One group of 14-year-old boys whom I met in Canterbury routinely described their teachers to me as “losers”, “random” and “morons”.

On the other side, many teachers say that they now dread meeting their pupils’ parents. Parents’ evenings have become a battleground where the father or mother is the enemy. Greg, an experienced science teacher who works in a Manchester comprehensive, told me of his well-rehearsed routine for managing the “pushy parent”. “If you take their whining seriously they can turn your world upside-down,” he says. His solution is to “smile, switch off, look agreeable and move on as fast as possible”.

But not all teachers possess Greg’s confidence. Sue has been teaching drama in a Surrey school for two years. During that time she has had several rows with parents. She recalls that the low point of her career so far occurred when she had a shouting match with an angry parent in front of her class. A furious mother stormed into the school hall in the middle of a play rehearsal demanding to know why her son was not offered a more important part.

Another public face-off with an aggressive parent may prompt Sue to sign up for one of the many assertiveness-training courses for teachers that are now a growing strand of in-service instruction. They offer conflict management, mediation and communication skills for teachers requiring support to deal with difficult parents. It is a sign of the times that teachers’ organisations even now have leaflets on topics such as “fear of parents’ evenings”. One leaflet titled, Meet the Parents, published by the Teachers Support Network, cautions that it “can be a daunting experience”. It warns that sometimes parents will “support their child against the school — no matter what”, that they can turn “hostile, defensive and confrontational” and in rare cases even become “aggressive or violent”.

Predictably, sections of the teaching profession have responded to displays of parental disrespect by returning the favour. Educators blame parents for the low achievement and poor behaviour of their children. Without thinking of the damaging consequences for parental authority, many educators too have no inhibitions about ticking off irresponsible parents in front of their kids.

It is difficult to unravel the origins of the divisive feuds among grown-ups that afflict institutions of education. But it is evident to me that these squabbles have been exacerbated by recent government policies. A few months ago, a report published by the MP Alan Milburn argued for harnessing the energy of “pushy parents” to improve standards of education. He echoed the suggestion of the former Education Minister, Lord Adonis, that more pushy parents were needed to force schools to improve. In March, the Government announced a scheme that would allow parents and pupils to use “satisfaction ratings” to grade their school. Such measures risk reinforcing the tendency for parents to vent their frustration on their children’s schools, while failing to provide any constructive measures to improve the quality of education.

Mobilising parents’ instinctive love for their children to shore up the institution of education does not solve deep-seated problems. It simply encourages parents to become their children’s advocates, leading to the widespread adoption of the “my child, right or wrong” attitude. Once such attitudes gain momentum, parents can easily lose sight of what is in the best interest of their child and his or her classmates. One father told me that having challenged the mark that his daughter got for her geography project and questioned the teacher’s judgment, he knew that he had gone too far. “It got to be bigger than a dispute about the grade and it felt wrong,” he says.

It’s not hard to see how parents have got here. With increasing pressure on state schools and growing anxiety about standards, schooling has become a focus of intense competition for parents. Many devote considerable resources to get their children into a “good” school, some paying as much as £2,000 to get legal help with their appeal if children don’t win a place. Rob, 43, a businessman from Birmingham, was appalled when told that his 11-year-old son was refused a place in his school of choice. He appealed and showed up to a panel hearing with a solicitor, who specialised in education law. He says: “I made sure they knew that I meant business.”

Paying for legal advice, moving house to live in the catchment area of a desirable school, or even joining the congregation of a church with an attached school, is now not unusual. Studies indicate that a fifth of secondary pupils in England and Wales receive private tuition. In some middle-class secondary schools more than half of students had used a private tutor. Once the children are in the “right” school, their parents play an active role in helping them with their homework and projects. According to a report by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, two thirds of parents help their children with GCSE coursework — and many do far more than “help”: it is often parents, not the students, who are busy looking for information on the internet or at the library.

Despite all these efforts, petty and divisive bickering between parents and teachers will undermine all the good that parents try to do. If adults behave authoritatively towards youngsters at home and in their communities, teachers will feel comfortable in exercising authority in the classroom. However, if grown-ups point the finger at one another for a school’s alleged failing they undermine not only the authority of the teacher, but of all adults.

Education works best when it is underpinned by a genuine intergenerational conversation. Ideally, through such a conversation, the experience and wisdom of the adult world is transmitted to children. But when grown-ups find it difficult to speak with one voice and education becomes a battlefield on which pointless conflicts between grown-ups are fought, those intergenerational transactions are lost. Teachers and parents need to be on the same side — for the sake of education. Our children and our futures depend on it.

Mark Ellwood, 46

‘There is a climate of fear in the classroom’

Ellwood was forced to leave his family home and prohibited from contact with his daughters while false allegations against him were investigated.

The former kick-boxing champion helped to look after children removed from class for bad behaviour at David Lister School in Hull. When he asked a 15-year-old boy to put away his mobile phone and take off his coat the pupil threatened to stab him and said: “I will have you killed.”

He marched the teenager out of the classroom but the boy kicked him in the shin. Ellwood “gently” swept the boy to the floor, but did not injure him. The boy’s mother accused Ellwood of assault against her son and within weeks he had been arrested, fingerprinted, held for 22 hours and charged with common assault.

Social services forced him to move out of his home, leaving his wife Julie and two teenage daughters. He slept on the floor of a gym and was banned from contact with them before he was allowed to return two weeks later.

He has just been cleared after nine months by a judge, who said the “nightmare” was now over and Ellwood could rebuild his life.

Ellwood said after the case that there was a such a “climate of fear” in the classroom that teachers are scared to act when threats of stabbing and murder are daily events in schools all over the country.

Jane Watts, 52

‘I felt like a criminal. I couldn’t cope with what happened to me’

Watts had been a primary school teacher for 30 years when the mother of a five-year-old pupil accused her of hitting her daughter on the hand during a lesson.

The next day Watts was suspended from Duke Street Primary School in Chorley, Lancashire, pending an investigation. There had been no witnesses and a teaching assistant in the class at the time did not report anything until the girl’s mother complained, Watts said. “I felt dirty and like a criminal. I’ve always loved teaching and I couldn’t cope with the thought that this had happened to me.”

A month later Watts was arrested for assault. She was interviewed and was released on bail. The police found no case to answer. But the school wanted its own investigation. She took a lie-detector test, which she passed, but the school did not appear to take the results into account.

Watts was sacked in March 2008 for gross misconduct after an internal inquiry, but reinstated on appeal when the punishment was downgraded to a final warning.

The distress caused by the accusation and the investigation meant that Watts was unable to return to school because of ill health and a fear that she would be constantly under suspicion. She was sacked again in June this year for non-attendance.

“The effect it had was that I went from someone who would happily take 220 children for hymn practice and meetings for parents and Inset training, to someone who was afraid to walk around Chorley and didn’t want to go to the local supermarket.”

Judi Sunderland, 60

‘It’s hard to believe it took seconds for this boy to wreck my life’

Sunderland was found innocent by a court after allegations that she had assaulted a pupil. The investigation by the police and then the school took three years after a 13-year-old pupil at Immanuel College school, in Bradford, said that she had attacked him at the end of 2003.

Sunderland had worked at the school for only three months when she heard raised voices in the corridor outside her office and saw a teaching assistant trying to deal with a pupil. She went over and told the boy he should do as he was told.

The pupil slid down the wall and started kicking out so Sunderland, who was in teaching for 33 years, repeated her request for him to behave. He started swearing at her and swiping his legs towards her. Sunderland stood back and the boy got up and she put her arms around him from the back to restrain him. The boy complained and she was accused of using excessive force. The court was told that the case had put her through a “living hell”.

The prosecution gave no evidence against her and she walked free from Bradford Magistrates’ Court. But an internal disciplinary before the school governors decided that she had committed an “unlawful act — but invited her back to teach at the school. As a result, she appealed to the governors about the ruling, but lost the case and then decided to resign. Because of this ruling she was prevented from chaperoning her own grandchildren to drama lessons.

“The whole incident lasted seconds. It’s hard to believe it took less than a minute for this boy to wreck my life.”

Shakil Akhter, 42

‘The past two years for me have been a nightmare’

Science teacher Akhter was sacked from the International School & Community College, Birmingham, after a 12-year-old boy with a history of trouble making told the headmistress that the teacher had hit him.

The father of four, denied the allegations — made in December 2005 — and the police and social services did not pursue the claims after a two-year investigation.

But the school suspended Akhter, who has a PhD in forestry, and after an internal inquiry later sacked him six months after he joined the staff.

The GTC, the profession’s watchdog, ruled that there was not enough evidence that the teacher had thrown a punch and said that a teaching assistant in the classroom had not seen him do so.

Akhter could not take the local education authority — Birmingham City Council — to an employment tribunal because he had not been at the school long enough to bring proceedings against it.

Akhter said after he was cleared:

“It’s hard to think that they chose to believe this boy over me. I’m very relieved. The past two years for me have been a nightmare because I took on a lot of debt to train as a teacher, but now I can try and rebuild my life.”

First published by The Times (London), 27 October 2009

Terrorised by toddlers
Schools now expel pupils as young as three. Are children so bad? No – it’s adults’ fault.

I first became disturbed about children’s education when my wife and I were looking for a school for our son, then four years old. What surprised me was the passion that the subject of schooling provoked. Some of our friends treated us to horror stories about classrooms in which bullying and violence were the norm and teachers struggled to keep control.

My initial response was scepticism. My research indicated that, while teenagers could threaten the wellbeing of others, the management of primary-school pupils was a largely straightforward challenge. I was taken aback when, during the course of conducting interviews with nursery and primary teachers, I discovered that some of them actually did feel intimidated by the violent behaviour of pupils.

There was a time when the expulsion of children from school was a measure of last resort against hardened troublemakers and recalcitrant teenagers. Today it is not simply the violent antisocial behaviour of secondary-school rebels that represents a serious challenge to classroom authority but also, apparently, the conduct of toddlers and children in primary education.

Government figures show that more than 1,000 children aged four or younger were suspended from state schools and nurseries in England last year. Children as young as two have been suspended for physical assault or threatening behaviour towards an adult, and three- and four-year-olds have been expelled for “racism, sexual misconduct and theft”.

I was so intrigued, I asked a researcher to dig deeper into the statistics. Across English primary schools 390 children were sent home in 2007 for a racist offence, 240 were suspended for sexual misconduct and 40 young pupils got into trouble for drugs and alcohol-related incidents.

A freedom of information survey of 100 local authorities threw up some worrying cases. For example, in Birmingham in 2007 a five-year-old reception-class pupil was suspended for sexual misconduct; in west London a child of the same age was expelled for attacking a classmate. In the same year four girls from primary schools in Leicestershire were suspended for sexual misconduct and a 10-year-old pupil was suspended in East Sussex for sexually assaulting an adult.

Some young children are being suspended for acts labelled racist, too. In Wolverhampton, we found, an eight-year-old child was suspended for a racist offence. So what is really going on here? Have six-year-old pupils suddenly turned into sexual predators or racist zealots?

I just don’t believe it. These figures say more about the mindset of teachers and education experts than about the moral decline of young children. Today some schools regard kiss-chase as a form of sexually inappropriate behaviour. Yet my inquiries suggest that the current obsession with the sexual and other behaviour of youngsters is driven by a need to find a way to control children, other than by exercising child authority. Instead of simply telling youngsters off, or explaining to them why their remark or action was wrong, teachers crank up the machinery of warning-letters to parents, followed by a suspension from school.

There is little doubt that in Britain’s schools adult authority is in trouble: many professionals find it difficult to gain the respect of even very young children. According to the school census, far more primary-school children are expelled for verbal abuse or threatening adults than for threatening their fellow pupils.

Sam Harris has been a reception teacher in a primary school in Manchester since 1996. She is scathing about some of her colleagues, who, instead of openly challenging bad behaviour and telling children off for childish misdemeanours, “hide behind” petty rules. She fears that her old-school style of hands-on management has alienated her from her colleagues. In her opinion they are “scared to do what they know in their heart of hearts is right”.

Why are teachers so worried about exercising authority over their charges? Many complain that they are reluctant to punish misbehaviour in case their action is misinterpreted. Sarah Poole packed in her job as an assistant at a nursery in west London after she was reprimanded for raising her voice and pointing her finger at a child who had just bitten her. She felt she was not trusted to do her job and resented being treated as a “powerless servant”. She tells me that “I couldn’t even tell them off without writing a report about the incident”. Her colleagues in primary education share her sense of powerlessness.

As part of my research, I analysed the language that teachers use to describe the behavioural problems of young children. I found that it said more about the confusion and defensiveness of adults than about the children’s conduct. For example, when a four-year-old calls a classmate gay, is it right for his teacher to call that homophobia? One result of this confusion is that nurseries are not sure where to draw the line that divides adulthood from childhood. As a result, educators treat toddlers and primary school children according to the moral standards of adult society. In this topsy-turvy world, it should not be a surprise to find that three- and four-year-olds have been expelled for racism, sexual misconduct and theft. It’s a sign of adult failings that the childish exploration of one another’s bodies is being interpreted according to adult standards of sexual behaviour and that a government-sponsored agency warns nursery staff to be alert for racist remarks among toddlers.

The kids are all right. It’s their teachers who aren’t. Suspending toddlers represents an irresponsible example of how those who should know better evade confronting the real issue of classroom discipline.

First published by Sunday Times, 25 October 2009

Make children embrace the boredom
Forget gimmicks and 'motivational techniques' - it's time to resurrect the lost art of serious schooling. By Frank Furedi.

Earlier this year, I gave a lecture on the problem of socialisation at the University of Amsterdam. Afterwards, a group of Dutch teachers confronted me and insisted that “we had become obsessed with motivating children” and have unthinkingly adopted a “worksheet culture” that alienates children from the world of books and education.

As far as they were concerned, the constant reliance on worksheets symbolised their schools’ confusion of motivating children with educating them.

Sadly, the relevance of their observation is not confined to Holland. In Britain, too, motivating students is often represented as the principal mission of education.

Deliberations on the curriculum are far more preoccupied with the question of how to motivate than what to teach. Frequently, policy-makers declare that the curriculum for maths or science or history must change because children are bored and switched-off by it. This leads to a situation where pedagogic innovation is frequently associated with the invention of motivational fads and gimmicks designed to keep children awake. All too often, the intellectual content of what pupils learn is subordinated to the imperative of motivation.

The motivation of students has always been a matter of concern to educators. What has changed is that the focus on motivation is now often at the expense of the intellectual content of the curriculum. Many motivational and behaviour-management techniques used in schools foster an anti-intellectual climate in the classroom.

Today, an elusive quest for a boredom-free classroom leads to a one-sided reliance on techniques and gimmicks that distract children from engaging with a challenging curriculum. So earlier this year, a Government-commissioned report suggested that teachers could hold their students’ attention through adopting techniques from popular contemporary television quiz shows.

Pedagogues should always promote forms of teaching that enhance the appeal of a subject and stimulate the aspiration to learn. A subject should always be open to new innovative forms of teaching. But what should be taught needs to be evaluated according to very different criteria. The content of a syllabus needs to provide students with an understanding of the subject. And often there are elements of an academic curriculum that cannot be recycled as a directly relevant and enjoyable experience.

Motivational techniques are useful tools for encouraging students, but on their own are rarely successful in fostering an effective learning environment. More worryingly, the current obsession with motivation often contributes to the deterioration of the academic ethos of a school, as well as to its standards of discipline.

It encourages a culture where the question of how to keep children interested overrides the issue of what the content of education that must be taught is. That’s why some curriculum engineers take the view that since it is not possible to motivate children to read books it is preferable to show them DVDs or give them more worksheets.

Michael Rosen, England’s Children’s Laureate, noted that many pupils are going through their formative years in school without reading a single novel. He denounced the practice of giving children short extracts on worksheets as “absurd” and “pathetic”.

My own discussions with children aged seven to 11 confirms these concerns. Many schools have in all but name given up on the idea that children - especially boys - can acquire the love of reading.

The imperative of motivation also has a corrosive influence on teacher-pupil relations. So-called “boring teachers” have become the target of Ofsted’s ire. The school regulator’s claims that the deterioration in pupil’s behaviour is due to their lack of stimulation in class. All of us have encountered a “boring” teacher in our school years and we understand that a state of tedium is not a desirable feature of education. However, Ofsted’s preoccupation with boring teachers threatens to undermine the authority of the educator.

Unfortunately, the idea that a boring classroom environment is responsible for the ills that afflict education has gained influence over the public imagination. In a recent conversation on the radio, one teaching union leader was told by the interviewer that boring classrooms were responsible for high truancy rates.

Whether we like it or not, it is not always possible to motivate every student, and episodes of boredom are a normal feature of children’s lives. When responsible adults hear a child complain that “I am bored”, they will not respond by transforming themselves into clowns. Nor should teachers avoid engaging with more complicated and challenging issues in order to spare their pupils a difficult challenge that might be interpreted as boring.

It is worth noting that the impulse to motivate is often based on a disturbing loss of belief in children’s capacity to engage with intellectual challenges. The assumption that children need constant motivation has encouraged the institutionalisation of a pedagogy that tends to infantalise them.

Nor can real motivation be the outcome of a clever technique. Historically, children become motivated to learn through a combination of different factors. Experience of life and the desire to improve one’s life chances has often served to motivate children to take their education seriously. Within the school it is the authoritative guidance and the inspiration provided by teachers that has helped to motivate young people.

The aspiration to learn and the motivation to study are outcomes of family and community influences, and the authoritative leadership provided by schools and teachers. Real motivation is not the outcome of a clever technique but of a school culture that takes children’s education seriously.

First published by TES, 23 October 2009

Working mums are now seen as suspect
Every sensible adult can see there is something terribly wrong when two working mothers are targeted by ­officialdom for failing to register with Ofsted to complete a criminal record check.

Their crime: they have a regular arrangement to look after each other’s children. Welcome to a world where the disoriented imagination of the child protection industry forces parents to register their babysitting arrangements with government-anointed busybodies.

The case of the two policewomen, Leanne Shepherd and Lucy Jarrett, who have been warned by Ofsted either to register or end their informal child arrangement, is far from rare. Working mums who regularly babysit for one another are now regarded as lawbreakers unless they sign up with Ofsted and complete a criminal record check. They are not trusted to make their own decisions about organising their childcare!

Most people do not realise that under the Children Act of 2006, all informal reciprocal childcare arrangements between friends, family members and neighbours must be officially registered with the faceless bureaucracy.

That’s why even two policewomen, who are presumably well versed in the law, did not realise they did not enjoy the right to come to a personal arrangement over joint childcare.

It’s one of those rules that was dreamt up by people who are devoted to making parents’ already complicated lives even more difficult. As far as these officials are concerned, if it moves regulate it. Under existing rules more than 11 million adults in England need a police check before they can work or volunteer in jobs that might bring them in contact with children. Why not add a few more?

Last year I published my study of the workings of the Criminal Records Bureau, titled Licensed To Hug. The study reported that the system of child-protection policies was poisoning the relationship between generations and that it was totally out of control. It suggested that child protection had been transformed into a dogma that treated all adults as if they were abusers-in-denial. The report predicted that the practice of vetting will inexorably lead to more vetting since bureaucratic institutions cannot resist the temptation of expanding their remit.

Why stop with registering carers and teachers? Friends, colleagues and family members are also objects of suspicion. The Government does not believe that childcare arrangements can be a private affair. It has not yet demanded that your 15-year-old babysitter should be registered with the CRB – unless she looks after your child on a regular basis. But don’t hold your breath. There are reports that some ideologically driven child advocates are targeting grandmothers and grandfathers as the next group to require a licence.

Taken aback by the public’s reaction to this latest case, Children’s Minister Vernon Coaker has ordered the review of Oftsed’s threat to prosecute the two police officers. His promise to talk to Ofsted about this particular case of bureaucratic stupidity does not call into question Ofsted’s right to intrude into parents’ private affairs. It merely represents an exercise in public relations, meant to reassure the public that he is not completely out of touch with the real world. Unfortunately this case is all too typical of a disturbing tendency to intervene in the private affairs of families.

Last week a manager of an under-14 football club complained to me that parents who regularly drive ­children other than their own to training and matches need to register. Some parents have even been asked if they have been CRB checked by mothers and fathers who believe no one should come near their child unless they hold an official licence.

Without doubt, children need to be protected from those who may prey upon them. But registering every informal childcare arrangement will do nothing to protect children from harm. It simply erodes normal everyday co-operation between friends and family members, thus diminishing the capacity of adults to look after the interests of children. Such vetting will estrange children from all adults – the very people who are likely to protect them from paedophiles and other dangers. Does Ofsted ever pause to ask: “What kind of message are we sending to our children”?

When even two police women are not trusted to behave as responsible mothers, what will our youngsters think of the meaning of adulthood?

The routine registering of grown-ups communicates a powerful ­negative signal about the moral status of adults. The belief that a friend needs to be registered before coming near your child fatally undermines relations between the generations. It makes no sense. Parents must have the right to decide how their child is cared for. That’s why we need to get Ofsted off the back of parents.

First published by Daily Express, 29 September 2009

It takes a village to raise a child? Not anymore
Officialdom’s demonisation of two women over their babysitting arrangements is symptomatic of today’s out-of-control child-protection industry.

Virtually everyone can see that there is something terribly wrong when two working mothers are targeted by officialdom for failing to register their informal childcare arrangements with Ofsted, the UK Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills.

At the weekend, it was revealed that Leanne Shepherd, from Milton Keynes in England, and Lucy Jarrett, from nearby Buckingham, were told that they had broken the law by failing to register as childminders with Ofsted, and therefore failing to undergo the criminal records check that every childminder must submit herself to. Shepherd and Jarrett’s ‘crime’ was that they had a regular arrangement to look after each other’s children; and according to Ofsted, because the arrangement involved more than two hours of childminding a day, it constituted a form of employment and thus the women should have registered as official, paid-up babysitters.

Welcome to a world where the feverish and disoriented outlook of the child-protection industry is tightening its grip over society. And as a result, in twenty-first century Britain informal childcare arrangements risk becoming criminalised. Last year, my report Licensed to Hug, on the police vetting of all British working adults who come into regular contact with children, argued that ‘vetting begets more vetting’ (1). Sadly, subsequent events have confirmed my diagnosis of child protection as a kind of restless moral crusade, which regards literally every adult as an abuser-in-denial.

Do not feel reassured by the revelation that Vernon Coaker, the UK children’s minister, has ordered a review of the latest case involving those two working mothers, who also happen to be police officers. Coaker’s promise to talk to Ofsted about this particular case of bureaucratic stupidity is not about calling into question Ofsted’s right to intrude into parents’ private affairs. It is merely an attempt to send a signal to the public that the children’s minister is not entirely cut off from the world of common sense. Typically, the occasional outcry over the more grotesque forms of intervention into people’s childcare practices serves only to legitimise the now normal routine of vetting every adult who comes into contact with kids.

Some have characterised the expansion of state regulation into the domain of informal babysitting arrangements as a further step towards the nationalisation of childcare. It is that, but it also represents the consolidation of what appears to be the opposite of that process of nationalisation: the total privatisation of childcare.

The paradox of the rise and rise of state intrusion into family life is that it further undermines a community’s potential to assume responsibility for the welfare of the younger generations. If literally every friend, family member and colleague needs to be cleared by Ofsted before they can babysit for your child for a certain period of time, then the message is that no grown-up can be trusted. And why confine suspicion to friends or colleagues? Surely grandmothers, and especially grandfathers, might represent a lethal threat to our children, too?

What Ofsted is really saying is that grown-up people living in the community cannot be trusted to make informal arrangements regarding childcare. The principal outcome of this suspicious, intrusive trend is the annihilation of adult responsibility for the welfare of the young. Adults who used to absorb some of the risks faced by children, who watched out for kids and helped or reprimanded them, are now not inclined to do so, in case their behaviour is misinterpreted. Is it any surprise that there is now a generation of adults who seem to have developed a habit of keeping their distance from other people’s children, and from young people in general?

The demand that informal childcare arrangements should be registered with the authorities communicates a dangerous message: that while you can just about trust your spouse with your child, you can trust no other adult. From this perspective, child rearing becomes an entirely private affair. Instead of regarding other grown-ups as potential allies in the joint enterprise of caring for the young, apparently we should regard them as candidates for the child-protection register. Parents are left on their own to pursue what is now deemed to be their very private responsibility: bringing up their children. But should they make a mistake, and indulge in some ‘bad parenting’, there is a seriously active nationalised industry ready to step in and take over.

One final point. The public is often told that instances of overzealous child protection, such as the current case involving the two working policewomen, are a ‘bit over the top’. Sometimes even child-protection zealots acknowledge that, in certain cases, vetting goes ‘too far’. Do not believe for one second that these cases are simply rare mistakes in an otherwise wonderful system of child regulation. The whole institution of child protection is driven by a deep mistrust of adults’ motives. It is a system that continually feeds on its own dogma and suspicion, and which is likely to lead to more, not less, intervention into family life in the years ahead.

(1) Licensed to Hug, by Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow. Civitas 2008. 

First published by spiked, 28 September 2009

Review: ‘The Least Worst Place’, by Karen Greenberg
So how did Guantanamo become “the world’s most notorious prison”? Principally as a result of a Washington-created public-relations own goal.

On 11 January 2002, the first group of 20 prisoners arrived at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray. Ten days later, the Pentagon decided to release the infamous picture showing distraught detainees in goggles and masks, shackled at the wrists and kneeling on the ground. The full-colour version of the photograph highlighted the fluorescent orange jumpsuits and caps and turquoise masks worn by the prisoners. Almost instantly the combination of eerie colours and high-tech instruments of physical restraint became, internationally, a symbol of human suffering and degradation. The Pentagon believed that its snapshot would show the world just “how effectively the United States was handling the world’s most dangerous prisoners”. But what it did was to turn Guantanamo into an immediate public relations disaster. As Karen Greenberg writes, “the most lasting legacy of the early Guantanamo is the image of the slight, dark-skinned men in orange jumpsuits, chained and bent over on their knees, goggled and deafened, dehydrated and soiled”.

The photograph apparently says it all. But does it? Historians of the future are far more likely to view the infamous picture as a symbol of the moral disorienta­tion of the Bush Administration rather than one of pure evil. Greenberg’s story of the first 100 days of the setting up of the prison camp reads like an early draft of a short story by Kafka. It indicates that Washington had little idea about what it was doing in Guantanamo. The most important concern that appeared to drive policymakers was to avoid being held responsible for potential future failures. Those setting up the camp on the ground received little direction from Washington and faced a policy void.

The reluctance to give the camp authorities unambiguous guidance was not simply a product of bureaucratic confusion; it was also motivated by the imperative of responsibility aversion. Washington wanted to manage its public-relations exercise in Guantanamo without being held to account by the Geneva Convention or inter­national agencies such as the Red Cross. So although the camp authorities knew that the Bush Administration did not want the detainees to enjoy prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conven­tion, they had no explicit guidance about how to treat them.

Greenberg’s interviews with those in charge of Guantanamo in its early phase indicate that they were confused about the objective of their missions. Initially they were not even sure whether they were running a detention camp or an interroga­tion centre. Although the Bush Administration claimed that the detainees were the “worst of the worst”, no one appeared to know very much about the prisoners. Those running the camp did not even know the names of the detainees, nor their country of origin, their age or their mother tongue.

More importantly, they had no idea what the prisoners had done to justify their detention in Guantanamo. So the policy void was complicated by an information void. In true Kafka­esque fashion, no one really knows to this day why the first cohort of prisoners was detained in Guantanamo. We now know that some of them were sold to the Americans by Afghan bounty hunters and that most of them simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most observers concede that the intelligence value of the detainees was practically nil. In many cases, the “high-value” detainees turned out to be infirm and elderly people caught up in a global bureaucratic nightmare.

There is considerable evidence that sections of the US military actually believed their own propaganda. The image of the photograph released by the Pentagon not only frightened the global media but also scared those guarding the prisoners. Greenberg reports that many of the camp guards were frightened by their prisoners. They endowed the detainees with omnipotence and global influence. Many guards were afraid to let the prisoners know who they were because they were worried that terrorists would seek revenge on their families. Consequently they sought permission to cover the name on their uniforms to preserve their anonymity. In one sense, their anxieties were well founded. Upon reading some the accounts of camp life written by released detainees, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the prisoners appeared to know more about their guards than vice versa.

In retrospect it is evident that Guantanamo was established to show the world that Washington meant business and that it had the capacity to capture and detain real terrorists. It is also evident that almost from the outset this show of force imploded and betrayed the incoherence and pointlessness of the War on Terror. Greenberg remarks that “there was to be no policy” before adding “that was the policy”. Read this book for an understanding of the fearsome banality of the workings of arbitrary power.

The Least Worst Place: How Guantánamo Became the World’s Most Notorious Prison. By Karen Greenberg. Oxford University Press, 288pp, £16.99. ISBN 9780199557677. Published 19 March 2009

First published by Times Higher Education, 17 September 2009

Getting God to do their dirty work
In seeking to use religion to force people to change their eco-unfriendly behaviour, greens are debasing both religious belief and scientific truth.

We live in world where the cynical manipulation of people’s fears and anxieties often overrides informed public debate. Principles and beliefs seem to have become negotiable commodities, and all too often the search for truth gives way to doing ‘whatever works’. In recent decades religious figures have, at various times, embraced the authority of science, therapy and the environment as a way of communicating their messages. Indeed, the old statement ‘our faith demands…’ has increasingly given way to the claim that ‘the research shows…’. If Christian fundamentalists can reinvent their dogma in the language of ‘creationist science’, how long before atheist scientists seek to justify their moral crusade in the language of religion?

Well, Lord May, president of the British Science Association, has risen to the occasion with his call last week to mobilise religion as part of the crusade against global warming. May said that mainstream religions should play a key role in convincing people to become more aware of environmental issues and to change their behaviour in order to ‘save the planet’. By making this opportunist demand for the effective rehabilitation of God, an atheist moral entrepreneur has shown that it is possible to debase both religion and science at the same time.

May’s call to use religion to promote the cause of climate change awareness is the logical conclusion to a project – environmentalism – which in every respect is a moral crusade. Back in September 2003, the late American writer Michael Crichton characterised environmentalism as a powerful new religion. He was possibly thinking of the Lord Mays of this world when he said that ‘environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists’.

Old-fashioned religious themes are continually recycled by greens. Some environmentalists may joke about ‘green sins’ but they are deadly serious when they denounce evil polluters and deniers. In this contemporary urban religion, the carbon footprint symbolises human transgression, though absolution can be gained through carbon offsets. Green judgements on our diets, our procreation habits and our everyday behaviour are possibly even more intrusive than the pronouncements of medieval religious figures. Old-fashioned prophecy and divination have given way to speculation and alarmist warnings based on computer models. And the medieval inquisition that targeted heretics and witches has got a new lease of life in the current crusade against sceptics and so-called deniers.

Many intelligent observers of today’s green theocracy argue that it represents an answer to humanity’s need for religion. No doubt we all need to believe in something, but the current embrace of religion by Lord May and other green-leaning atheists is driven by simple opportunism rather than a genuine crisis of belief. The attempt to recruit God to the anti-climate change campaign is driven by a desire to influence all those people who currently are not responding to the moral crusade to save the planet. The turn to God is underwritten by a strong feeling of contempt towards both religion and the public.

Many environmentalists believe that ordinary people are too selfish and too stupid to pay attention to the lofty message about saving the planet. Leading green commentators bemoan people’s short-termist and irrational behaviour. One British eco-columnist wrote about how ‘depressed’ he felt about ‘the epidemic of mass denial’ in Britain, where ordinary people simply refuse to take climate change seriously. ‘Up to a point, laws can be passed to combat climate change, and offenders who don’t conform can be punished’, he casually observed, before noting that, in the end, people will have to understand ‘the dangers and threats we face’ (1).

Activist-scientists like May seem to believe there are two ways of influencing the public: by making fear appeals or using a form of moral blackmail. Apocalyptic warnings about the future of the planet have become the bread and butter of the crusade against climate change. These alarmist messages are promoted in the most simplistic and emotive terms. ‘I liked it. It does emotionalise the debate, but it seems that it has to do that’ – that was the verdict of Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. American environmentalists often give a deeply contemptuous assessment of their audiences. According to one green activist, ‘the “issue” of climate change must be defined for Americans’ in ‘uncomplicated, black-and-white terms’ (2).

And what could be more black-and-white than a divine commandment? Religion is seen as the ideal tool with which to convey a simplistic, good-and-evil message to a public that is apparently made up of simpletons. Lord May may have been talking about fundamentalist religions when he said that ‘under stress you reduce complex doctrines to simple mantras’. But that also captures his own approach to public communication.

In a sense, what May and his fellow green religionists are trying to do is rehabilitate a caricatured version of God. They want to mobilise a God who can both influence and scare ordinary folk. From this standpoint, God is imagined to be some kind of classic bogeyman. ‘A supernatural punisher may be part of the solution [to tackling climate change]’, May is reported to have said. He is also quoted as saying: ‘Given that punishment is a useful mechanism, how much more effective it would be if you invested that power not in an individual you don’t like, but in an all-seeing, all-powerful deity that controls the world.’

May’s seeming desire to sanctify environmentalism and stigmatise transgressors was immediately taken up by Andrew Brown, editor of the ironically titled ‘Belief’ section of the UK Guardian. ‘I have argued before that greenery will only succeed if it takes on some of the characteristics of some religions’, noted Brown. One characteristic he alludes to is the coercive dynamic of moral pressure. In short, adopting the green religion is not an option that ‘adults freely choose’. ‘If you are a convinced green, you will certainly not bring your child up to believe that they can decide once they are 18 whether the environment needs saving’, argues Brown, before concluding that adults, also, should not have this choice (3). So, no room for any faint-hearted liberals in this new green religion.

Tolerance for other, competing views has never been the hallmark of the environmentalist crusade. Time and again, the critics of the politics of environmentalism are dismissed for daring to question the wisdom of ‘The Science’. Their questions are dismissed with the phrase: ‘The debate is now over.’ Or as David Miliband, in his former capacity as the UK secretary of state for the environment, said: ‘The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over.’ Now, intolerance of dissident views on the issue of climate change is underwritten by religious dogma. Religion promises to endow greens’ hostility towards critics, sceptics and deniers with the legitimacy of the sacred word.

Back in 2003, when Crichton characterised environmentalism as a religion, many greens regarded it as an insult to their cause. That was then. Today some environmentalists want their views to be officially recognised as a religion. Recently, Tim Nicholson, head of sustainability at the UK property investment company Grainger, appealed against his dismissal from his job on the grounds that his employers did not respect his strong environmentalist convictions. He sought protection under the law in the same way that other employees seek redress against discrimination on the basis of their religion. It can be only a matter of time before campaigns are launched to gain official recognition that sustainability is a holy doctrine.

The degradation of belief

Manipulating religious convictions in order to force people to alter their behaviour is not only disdainful of the public – it is disdainful of belief, too. It reveals a simplistic, functional understanding of how religion works. Since the nineteenth century some secular thinkers have regarded the decline of religion as a big problem from society. Although they themselves were not believers, they regarded religion as a force for stability and were concerned about how people would behave if they lacked faith. Such concern about moral confusion and the erosion of discipline often leads thinkers to conclude that society needs some kind of a religion. This outlook was clearly expressed by the well-known American cultural commentator Daniel Bell in the late 1970s:

‘What holds one to reality, if one’s secular system of meanings proves to be an illusion? I will risk an unfashionable answer – the return in Western society of some conception of religion.’ (4)

Bell used his words carefully. His phrase ‘some conception of religion’ suggests a pragmatic conceptualisation of the problem. Not this or that religion, but any religion is preferable to the secular uncertainties facing society, he argued. As far as Bell was concerned, it did not matter what people believed, just so long as they gained some meaning from it.

For Bell, religion had an important function: providing some kind of moral order in society. However, once religious belief is perceived from this narrow and simply functional perspective, it can be mobilised to serve a variety of ends, some of them honourable and many of them dishonourable. Using religion to try to change people’s attitudes towards the environment is only the latest attempt by mainstream activists to harness the power of God to realise their secular objectives.

The functional model of religion overlooks the historic process through which a system of belief emerges, the experiences and community interaction that belief systems are built on. Real religions – as opposed to artificially created ones – are organically linked to the lives of people. Religious beliefs are internalised through the customs and practices of everyday life. Such beliefs help people to make sense of their world and give meaning to life. The idea that religion and God can be invented because ‘we need it’, or because a moral crusade needs the authority of some supernatural being, fails to comprehend the historical, social and cultural contexts within which religion emerges. It also debases the idea of religious belief. Religious belief involves intuition, spirituality, faith and reason. For better or worse, the world’s religions need to be seen as some of the most important moral, intellectual and cultural accomplishments of human civilisation. To treat religious conviction as some kind of tool of public relations degrades this historic form of belief.

But the corruption of religion is not the only outcome of today’s cynical attempt to invent a new green God. When so-called atheists, scientists and secular thinkers demand that their views should be treated as sacred, they degrade the status of scientific reasoning, too. Science emerged through an intellectual struggle to free humanity from the tyranny of sacred dogma. Belief in science is unlike pre-scientific belief. A belief in the power of science to discover how the world works should not be taken to mean that science itself is a belief. On the contrary, science depends on an open-minded and open-ended attitude towards experimentation and the testing out of ideas. Indeed, science is an inherently sceptical enterprise, since it respects no authority, other than evidence. As Thomas Henry Huxley once declared: ‘The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority as such.’ ‘Scepticism is the highest of duties’, said Huxley, ‘blind faith the unpardonable sin’. That is why Britain’s oldest and most respectable scientific institution, the Royal Society, was founded on the motto: ‘On the word of no one.’ And that includes the green God.

The proposed marriage between phoney religion and phoney science represents the worst of both worlds. It both corrupts religion and gives rise to a new religion of corruption, where ideas are turned into sacred texts with which to hector and blackmail the public. Those of us with genuine convictions – whether scientific or religious – have a common interest in challenging this debasement of religious belief and scientific reasoning.

(1) If half the nation is in denial about the threats we face from climate change, what hope is there?, Guardian, 4 July 2007

(2) Power, program, and practical considerations: Objectives, Gristmill, 30 April 2007

(3) Will we establish a green religion?, Andrew Brown’s blog, Guardian

(4) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by Daniel Bell, Heineman (London), 1979

First published by spiked, 15 September 2009

Intensive parenting
In 21st century Britain parenting has become disassociated from childrearing.

Increasingly parenting is represented as a skill that is best understood by experts and policy makers and very rarely by mothers and fathers. Nevertheless parents are constantly informed that what they do not only matters but also determines just about every dimension of their children’s lives. The principle feature of Britain’s parenting culture is its embrace of parental determinism.

The idea that a child’s life is causally determined by the quality of parenting they receive is regularly communicated by politicians, child professionals and the media. ‘As a parent, you’re a very powerful person’ observes a government publication, Every Parent Matters, before reminding you that ‘how you raise your child will have a profound effect on their whole life.’ In case you missed the point, the report insists that children get better academic results and have fewer behavioural problems when their parents get involved in their schooling. Potentially errant fathers are told that a dad’s interest in his child’s schooling is strongly linked to academic success.

Advocates of parental determinism tend to overlook the influence of socio-economic and cultural factors on the well-being and life chances of children. From this perspective, good parenting mediates the effects of poverty and other difficult circumstances. And if recent policy documents are to be believed, parenting is, even causally, deterministically related to a variety of outcomes for children. There is a perceptible trend towards displacing socio-economic based explanations for people’s life-course by a highly individualised focus on parenting behaviour. So whereas previously differential educational outcomes were explained through pointing to the significance of class or differential access to social and cultural capital, the emphasis has shifted towards upholding the significance of the quality of parenting as the key variable.

So it is not being poor, but poor parenting that is held to account for why children are ill prepared for school. Take a study published last year by Professor Jane Waldfogel from Columbia University. The study accepts that children from poor families are less well prepared for school than those from better circumstances, but then goes on to conclude that up to half of these differences in the US and the UK was due to poor parenting and home environments. Waldfogel claimed that ‘what surprised her the most’ was the extent to which the quality of parenting had an impact on the ability to learn. It is worth noting that the displacement of socially linked causation by that of parental behaviour represents a fundamental shift from a sociological to a moralistic explanation of developments. Typically, the Waldfogel study was reported under the headline ‘Bad parents “widen ability gap”’ by BBC News.

The category of the ‘bad parent’ is invariably detached from any specific socially comprehensible context. Parental deficits are depicted as moral failures that are not confined to any particular class of adults. So a Cambmidge University study commissioned by the NUT discovered that ‘bad behaviour in schools is being fuelled by overindulgent” parents who don’t know how to say no to their children.’ The main accomplishment of this moralising imperative is the normalisation of the state of parenting deficit. A powerful illustration of the project to normalise the idea of parental incompetence is provided by ‘A Good Childhood; Searching for Values In A Competitive Age,’ a report commissioned by the Children’s Society and produced by the Good Childhood Inquiry earlier this year. This report offers a very dark representation of the state of childhood in contemporary Britain. It states that the ‘UK fares exceptionally badly in bringing about the wellbeing of its children’ and suggests that this has little to do with social and economic factors. ‘While elsewhere in Europe there seems to be some correlation between a nation’s wealth and the wellbeing of its children, the UK is a notable exception,’ it concludes.

Inevitably the finger of blame is pointed at the parent. Apparently parents are either too incompetent or too selfish to give children enough attention. The tendency to inflate the problem of the parenting deficit is the inevitable consequence of the dogma of parental determinism. Once parenting is conceptualised as unimaginably important and incalculably so significant that it requires special skills and qualities, it is unlikely that normal mothers and fathers could possiibly possess the resources to perform this job.

The ideology of parental determinism is actively promoted by both experts and policy makers and underpins one of the most disturbing developments in the realm of social policy – the politicisation of parenting. Parenting is no longer an activity that is informally practiced by mothers and fathers. It has become an issue for public deliberation and policy innovation. Judging by recent comments by politicians and policy initiatives announced by the New Labour Government virtually every social problem can be solved through the institutionalisation of good parenting. Government Ministers continually tell us that ‘parenting is no longer a no-go area for government’ and opposition party leaders echo this sentiment.

Parent blaming has become a popular pursuit of the political class. Their policy failures particularly in the domain of education are frequently blamed on the slothful parent. ‘It’s no good blaming schools for deteriorating behaviour among young people when parents all too often set such an appalling example themselves,’ stated Tim Collins, a former Conservative spokesman on education. In this case, censuring parents appears a sensible alternative to blaming schools. Ed Balls, the Labour Government’s Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, takes a similar view, stating that ‘parents should face up to their responsibilities’ and be penalised if they don’t.

The association of parenting with such omnipotent and grave consequences has the perverse consequence of disorienting family life. It breeds parental insecurity and leads to a situation where mothers and fathers lose faith in their ability to do what’s right for their children.

That parents exercise enormous influence over their children is not in doubt but they do so not simply through their so-called parenting skills but as members of a distinct cultural, social and ethnic community. The quality of children’s lives and their future prospects is influenced by many variables other than the behaviour of their parents.

The full article is available by ordering the September issue of the magazine here.

First published by Society Today, 15 September 2009

Afghanistan: the dangers of a risk-averse war
In continually advertising their fear of suffering casualties on the battlefield, Britain’s rulers are unwittingly strengthening their enemies’ hand.

Increasingly, the main protagonists in the debate about Britain’s war in Afghanistan seem to be competing to see who can occupy the moral low-ground.

The British political class has made no real effort to engage the public in a serious discussion about the rights and wrongs of the war. Instead, a major international conflict has been treated as a banal health-and-safety issue. The defensive manner in which the New Labour government presents its case for staying in Afghanistan invariably raises the question: ‘Is any of this worth the life of a single British soldier?’ It also invites an often-tawdry, defeatist response from the government’s political critics.

The resignation last week of New Labour’s parliamentary private secretary, Eric Joyce, represented only the latest opportunist call for an exit strategy. Joyce resigned because, he said, we cannot ‘continue with the present level of uncertainty about the future of our deployment in Afghanistan’. Adopting the tone of an earnest risk manager, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said: ‘Eric Joyce confirms what I have been saying for a long time: our approach in Afghanistan is over-ambitious and under-resourced.’ That’s another way of saying: ‘Let’s cut our losses and restrict the British involvement in Afghanistan to sending in election monitors and humanitarian aid packages.’

Of course, there are some honourable arguments that can be made against the war in Afghanistan. Legitimate questions can be asked about Britain’s decision to get involved in Afghanistan in the first place. But the current criticisms of the conduct of the conflict are not based on any principled political or moral disagreement with the government. They offer no alternative strategic vision. They simply appeal to war weariness and to the understandable public concern about the scale of British casualties.

What is really disturbing about these demoralised critics is not what they say about the conflict in Afghanistan, but what they implicitly say about war in general. The logical outcome of Joyce’s concern about ‘uncertainty’ is to call into question the viability of any protracted military engagement. Since there are no guarantees that a military venture will be risk-free and fought neatly within a clear schedule, the current criticisms of the engagement in Afghanistan really apply to all wars. Of course, the loss of a soldier’s life is always a terrible tragedy for his or her family, friends and comrades - but unless a community is prepared to countenance such terrible losses, or willing to experience some uncertainty and risk, then it implicitly invites others to trample on its freedom and liberties.

The attempt to abolish risk and uncertainty in military operations resonates with today’s powerful risk-averse culture. Risk aversion in the domain of childhood and everyday life is bad enough – but when it is extended to the battlefield, its consequences are potentially lethal.

The rise and rise of casualty-aversion

Western societies have become so obsessed with safety that virtually every human activity comes with a health warning these days. It is not simply children’s playgrounds and schools that are now dominated by the ethos of safety for it own sake. Even organisations such as the police and the army have become subject to the dictates of health and safety. As a result, both of these institutions are increasingly risk-averse.

In an article a few years back, Mick Hume noted that the police rarely venture out these days, and even when they are confronted with a serious situation they rarely take risks. In one case, armed police stood for 15 days besieging a London home, only venturing in after the hostage had escaped by his own efforts and the lone gunman had perished in a fire that he started (1).

The ethos of safety has also become institutionalised within the military. British Army commanders now have to draw up risk assessments for every aspect of their soldiers’ training. Some have given up testing soldiers to the limit lest they inadvertently contravene health-and-safety rules (2). General Sir Michael Rose, former head of the SAS, has spoken out about the destructive impact of risk-aversion and the ethos of safety on the morale of the military. He has denounced the ‘moral cowardice’ that has encouraged what he describes as the ‘most catastrophic collapse’ of military ethos in recent history (3).

If anything, the decline of the warrior ethos is even more comprehensive within the US military. One analyst believes that risk-aversion has undermined the very effectiveness of the American army: ‘As emphasis on risk avoidance filters down the chain of command, junior commanders and their soldiers become aware that low-risk behaviour is expected and act accordingly.’ (4)

Unlike some institutions in society, the military cannot survive without taking risks. And yet the military values associated with the warrior ethos are continually challenged by today’s potent cultural hostility to risk-taking behaviour. Despite the many Hollywood action-packed movies that celebrate heroism and bravery, there is little cultural validation of risky military behaviour these days. The military is not immune to the influence of the predominant precautionary culture. A culture that has a low threshold for coping with losses in everyday life is unlikely to be able to celebrate risk-taking behaviour within military institutions.

This is one important reason why the status and the authority of the military have declined in recent years. As the political and cultural elites have distanced themselves from military values, and as their participation in military institutions has diminished, so the military has tended to be seen as standing apart from society and culture, as something distant and inscrutable. Even mainstream sections of society have become estranged from military values. As two radical critics have noted: ‘The representative image of the US soldier is no longer that of a John Wayne, and more importantly the profiles of US soldiers do not resemble the profiles of the US citizenry.’ (5) In Britain, too, fighting wars is a task increasingly outsourced to private contractors, foreign mercenaries or the most economically disadvantaged sections of society: poorer people who still seem willing to sign up.

One of the most striking manifestations of society’s estrangement from military values is the rise and rise of casualty-aversion. The military is today concerned, more than anything else, with the ability of the public to tolerate casualties. Casualty-aversion appears to have influenced the 1989 decision of the US Department of Defense to prohibit media coverage of deceased military personnel returning from Dover Air Force Base, and also their more recent decision to restrict photographs of American coffins arriving back from Iraq (6). The military funerals of British casualties from Afghanistan are still shown on TV - but they tend to take place in a political and cultural vacuum, as our political leaders fail to give any meaning to these losses in the Afghan War.

A clash of cultural attitudes

The significance that Western society now attaches to health and safety stands in sharp contrast to the values held by their opponents. This clash of cultural attitudes was clearly spelled out in an alleged al-Qaeda recording released on 14 March 2004, following the Madrid bombing massacre that killed almost 200 people. In the recorded message an individual describing himself as al-Qaeda’s military commander in Europe declared: ‘You love life and we love death.’

The same theme has been repeated time and again in numerous Islamist communiqués. For example, Ismail Haniya, a Hamas leader, informed an American journalist in 2003 that his people were prepared to die whereas ‘the Jews love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die’ (7). Back in October 2001, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, an alleged spokesman for Osama bin Laden, told a news conference that there were ‘thousands of young men’ eager for martyrdom, who ‘loved death as you love life’ (8).

In these statements, Islamist leaders are really arguing that while their side believes in something that is worth dying for, their opponents do not. More importantly, these messages are an attempt to highlight the differential cultural attitudes towards risk and loss that are held by the West and by contemporary Islamism. The point of these statements is to cause alarm in Western, risk-averse societies. The Islamists’ public embrace of death is designed to intimidate their opponents, by reminding them that ‘through sacrificing our lives we are prepared to take an incalculably greater risk than you can possibly imagine’. Such statements also attempt to convey the message that ‘unlike you we have nothing to lose in this conflict’.

Either consciously or unconsciously, Islamist communiqués target the sense of vulnerability that afflicts their opponents in the West. It is the expansive mood of vulnerability and risk-aversion in Western society that invites its cultural opposite today: a self-conscious flaunting of indifference to risk-taking and dying amongst the opponents of the West.

The almost casual and theatrical manner in which death is embraced by some Islamist groups seems incomprehensible to Western societies where the smallest health problem is treated as a major personal crisis. For a risk-averse, self-consciously vulnerable culture, the suicide bomber personifies invulnerability. The willingness of some individuals to adopt a 100 per cent risk perspective provokes confusion amongst many political observers. Consequently, such individuals are often described as ‘desperate’, as irrational yet powerful actors whose motives are apparently ‘beyond comprehension’.

Individuals and groups who appear so cavalier towards the ethos of health and safety are indeed formidable foes. Such super warriors, who seem indifferent to death or pain, enjoy a moral advantage over ordinary mortal souls for whom life is very important. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has given voice to a widespread fear amongst Western commentators today - namely that the ‘suicide mass murderers’ have ‘revealed the vulnerability of Western civilisation’ (9). But why should small groups of suicide bombers constitute any kind of existential threat to Western civilisation?

It is clearly not because they are physically powerful. Even with the assistance of anxious Western fantasies about enemies who ‘fear nothing’, it is difficult to imagine how relatively small groups of zealots can threaten the entire Western way of life. Compared to the powerful foes of the Cold War, the threat posed by the fanatical suicide bomber pales into insignificance. And yet today Gordon Brown argues that British forces must remain in Afghanistan (for the time being at least) in order to protect Britain - and by extension Western civilisation - from the threat of Islamic terrorism.

If relatively small groups of suicidal bombers are able to reveal the ‘vulnerability’ of the West, it is mainly because, today, it takes very little to reveal this condition. Indeed, Western culture is all too ready to attest publicly to its weakness. And the constantly repeated concern about fanatics who fear nothing merely creates the incentive for militants to step up and adopt the role of zealous warriors who will stop at nothing to achieve their objectives.

Labelling terrorists as zealots and fanatics can lead to an underestimation, or at least a misunderstanding, of the problem. The threat posed by these individuals to our societies is determined less by what the individuals themselves do, and more by the way in which Western society responds to them. And one key factor that gives the terrorist threat such force today is the different cultural attitudes to risk-taking that exist in the Western camp and in their opponents’ camp. Today, the Western attitude to risk is influenced by a one-dimensional concern with loss, whereas those involved in terrorist action regard risk from the perspective of gain.

There is little doubt that casualty phobia has become a factor in the current conflict in Afghanistan, possibly even heightening the conflict between Western forces and the Taliban. Britain in particular has effectively advertised its casualty-aversion, allowing every soldier’s death in Afghanistan to give rise to widespread, tortured debate about risk, loss and whether the war is worth it. When every casualty suffered in Afghanistan is treated, not as a tragic but necessary part of some meaningful war effort, but as an incalculable loss that must force us to ask what the purpose of the British military is today, it sends a powerful message to the Taliban and other opponents of Britain: ‘You can provoke political and moral meltdown in Britain by killing one or two British soldiers.’ It implicitly strengthens Britain’s enemies on the battlefield.

Both the British and the American governments now believe that their room for manoeuvre is limited by their own society’s reluctance to accept casualties. Recently, US defense secretary Robert Gates warned that, although he did not think that the ‘war is slipping through’ his government’s fingers, there is clearly a ‘limited time’ to demonstrate success. Last Friday, British prime minister Gordon Brown echoed this sentiment, expressing his hope that the Afghan security forces might soon take over from the British. It appears that the West’s strategic thinking has become focused on reducing risk entirely, by heading for the exit.

(1) ‘A police state, without any police’, The Times, 25 February 2004

(2) See the Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2004

(3) ‘J’Accuse! Top General lambasts “moral cowardice” of government and military chiefs’, Daily Mail, 12 April 2007

(4) ‘The Casual-Aversion Myth’, by Richard A Lacquement Jr, in Naval War College Review, vol.57, no.1, p.41, 2004

(5) Multitude, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Penguin Books : London p.47, 2005

(6) ‘The Casual-Aversion Myth’, by Richard A Lacquement Jr, in Naval War College Review, vol.57, no.1, p.41, 2004

(7) Cited in ‘You love life, we love death’, Asian Times, 23 March 2004

(8) Cited in ‘The Echo Effect’, Wall Street Journal, 19 October 2001

(9) ‘The Silence of Words: On Terror and War’, by Ulrich Beck, in Security Dialogue vol.34, no.3, p.262, 2003

First published by spiked, 7 September 2009

Precautionary culture and the rise of possibilistic risk assessment
The shift from probabilistic to possibilistic risk management characterises contemporary cultural attitudes towards uncertainty.

This shift in attitude is paralleled by the growing influence of the belief that future risks are not only unknown but are also unknowable. Scepticism about the capacity of knowledge to help manage risks has encouraged the dramatisation of uncertainty. One consequence of this development has been the advocacy of a precautionary response to threats. This article examines the way in which precautionary attitudes have shaped the response to the threat of terrorism and to the millennium bug. The main accomplishment of this response has been to intensify the sense of existential insecurity.

Read the full article here: Precautionary_Culture.pdf

First published by Erasmus Law Review, 4 September 2009

Specialist pleading
One of the most influential contemporary cultural myths is that our era is characterised by the end of deference.

Commentators interpret the declining influence of traditional authority and institutions as proof that people have become less deferential and possess more critical attitudes than in the past. However, it is less frequently noted that deference to traditional authority has given way to the reverence of expertise.

Western culture assumes that a responsible individual will defer to the opinion of an expert. Politicians frequently remind us that their policies are “evidence based”, which usually means informed by expert advice. Experts have the last word on topics of public interest and increasingly on matters to do with people’s private affairs. We are advised to seek and heed to advice of a bewildering chorus of personal experts—parenting specialists, life coaches, relationship gurus, super-nannies and sex therapists, to name a few—who apparently possess the authority to tell us how to live our lives.

The exhortation to defer to experts is underpinned by the premise that their specialist knowledge entitles them to a higher moral status to the rest of us. For example, Ken Macdonald, former director of public prosecutions in Britain, pushed for the right to use expert witnesses to help boost the low conviction rate in rape trials. Former Home Office minister Joan Ryan, a junior Home Office minister at the time, backed him, arguing that expert evidence in court could “address myths about rape and its victims”. The assumption seems to be that ordinary jurors lack the intelligence to grasp how rapists and their victims behave, which is why courts need the expert psychologist to put them right.

In previous times, pronouncement about who was evil or who had sinned was the prerogative of the priest. With the end of deference to the church such mystical powers have become associated with the authority of the professional expert witness. The call for ordinary jurors to ignore their intuition and subjugate themselves to the superior insight of the expert is seldom characterised as what it really is, a new form of non-traditional deference. According to this perspective, the prejudices and myths of ordinary jurors need to be overcome through the intervention of the enlightened views of the expert.

It is necessary to state at the outset that any civilised 21st-century society is likely to take expertise seriously. The efficient functioning of such a society depends, to a significant extent, on the quality of contribution made by its experts. Anyone who is ill or confronted with a technical problem will turn to an expert.

The problem is not the status of the expert but its politicisation. All too often experts do not confine their involvement in public discussion to the provision of advice. Many insist that their expertise entitles them to have the last word on policy deliberation. Recent studies indicate that in public debates those whose views run counter to the sentiments of scientific experts find it difficult to voice their beliefs.

From time to time experts also use their authority to silence opponents and close down discussion. For example, those who argue that the debate on climate change is finished claim the authority of scientific expertise. That was how former British environment minister David Miliband justified his 2007 statement that “that the debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over”. The impulse to close down debate is also evident in the attacks on Australian geologist Ian Plimer for raising questions about the prevailing consensus on climate change in his book Heaven and Earth. Plimer, it was pointed out with some finality, was not a climate change expert.

THE cultural affirmation accorded to the authority of expertise originates in the 19th century. Historically, expert referred to someone having experience. “Tho that bene expert in love,” wrote Chaucer in the late 14th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary an expert was “trained by experience or practice” and was “skilled” or “skilful. Although the term was often associated with a skill, it could also refer to personal qualities. So an 18th-century monarch could be described as “expert both in the arts of peace and war”.

This general representation of expertise would soon give way to one that carried the connotation of possessing specialist knowledge or technical skill. The contemporary definition of an expert as “one whose specialist knowledge or skill causes him to be regarded as an authority” is directly associated with the role of the specialist and specialisation. As sociologist Michael Schudson observed in Theory and Society magazine in 2006,

an expert is someone in possession of specialised knowledge that is accepted by the wider society as legitimate. This knowledge includes specific, technical skill based on some wider appreciation of the field of knowledge inquestion.

The ascendancy of the expert was inextricably linked to the crisis of traditional authority in 19th-century Europe. Since the Enlightenment the important questions facing the world have been subjected to the power of reasoning. It was no longer sufficient to appeal to the authority of the past. Political theorist Hannah Arendt puts matters most starkly in Between Past and Future, first published in 1954, when she declares that “authority has vanished”.

However, the vanishing of tradition was an invitation to the reconstitution of authority in a new form. In an era of scientific and technological progress the project of reconstituting authority was drawn inevitably towards the status enjoyed by technical expertise and specialised knowledge. Unlike traditional authority, which touched on every dimension of the human experience, the authority of the expert was confined to that which could be exercised through reason.

As legal philosopher Joseph Raz writes in Authority (1990), the “authority of the expert can be called theoretical authority, for it is an authority about what to believe”. Raz observes that unlike political authority, which “provides reason for action”, theoretical authority “provides reason for belief”. However, while it is valid to draw a conceptual distinction between these two forms of authority, historical experience suggests that expertise becomes politicised easily. With the passing of time the distinction between these two forms of authority becomes blurred. Moreover the fragility of political authority encourages a process whereby politicians outsource their power to experts. As social scientist Stephen Hilgartner writes,

governments find expert advice to be an indispensable resource for formulating and justifying policy and, more subtly, for removing some issues from the political domain by transforming them into technical questions.

Political scientist Terence Ball suggests that the potential for the politicisation of expertise can be understood through understanding the distinction between epistemic and epistemocratic authority. Epistemic authority is “that which is ascribed to the possessor of specialised knowledge, skills, or expertise”. For example, this form of authority works through deference to doctors on medical matters and lawyers on legal affairs. Epistemocratic authority, “by contrast, refers to the claim of one class, group or person to rule another by virtue of the former’s possessing specialised authority not available to the latter”. Ball argues that:

epistemocractic authority is therefore conceptually parasitic upon epistemic authority. Or, to put it slightly differently, epistemocratic authority attempts to assimilate political authority to the non-political epistemic authority of the technician or expert.

Ball claims that the conceptual distinction between political rule and expert authority in modern society becomes “blurred if not meaningless”. In effect, the epistemocratic imperative extends the claim of expertise to the domain of political and public life. It assimilates moral and political issues to “the paradigm of epistemic authority” and asserts that “politics and ethics are activities in which there are experts”. The influence exercised by epistemocratic authority today is shown by the constant slippage between scientific advice and moral and political exhortation on issues as different as global warming and child rearing.

In the 19th century the epistemocratic ideal was endorsed explicitly by positivist thinkers such as Saint-Simon and Comte. Not only did they assert the primacy of technocratic authority, they insisted on obedience to it. Although such an explicit endorsement of a technocratic authority is rarely expressed today, its anti-democratic impulse continues to play a powerful role. The influence of managerial and technocratic ideals on public life indicates that epistemocratic ideal is one, as Ball puts it, “to which political reality in some respects increasingly corresponds”.

THE status of experts requires that their knowledge and skill is recognised as authoritative by the public. As historian Thomas Haskell points out, by the mid-19th century the man of science gave way to the scientist, representing a shift from gentlemanly vocation to profession. Haskell’s book, The Emergence of Professional Social Science (2000), provides a convincing account of the campaign “to establish professional authority on a firmer base and to extend professional performance into new areas”. He writes that the “word scientific then seemed to epitomise the very essence of professional idea: expert authority, institutionally cultivated and certified”.

Although influenced by self-interest the professionalisation of expertise also represented an attempt to respond to the crisis of traditional authority. Haskell perceives the trend towards professionalisation as part of a “broad movement to establish or re-establish authority in the face of profoundly disruptive changes in habits of casual attribution” and “changes in the very notion of truth itself”. He adds that

professionalisation in the 19th century was not merely a pragmatic and narrowly self-seeking tactic for enhancing occupational status, as it often is today; instead it then seemed a major cultural reform, a means of establishing authority so securely that the truth and its proponents might win the deference even of a mass public, one that threatened to withhold deference from all men, all traditions, and even the highest values.

So, the 19th-century professionalisation of expertise can be seen as representing the constitution of a new focus for public deference. At a time of disruptive changes and moral and intellectual confusion, the professional expert who personified reason and science was a reassuring authority figure. This was a form of authority that claimed to represent objective scientific truth and as possessors of this truth the expert could claim a superior moral status. Haskell argues that

Precisely because there were truths that no honest investigator could deny, the power to make decisions had to be placed in the hands of experts whose authority rested on special knowledge rather than raw self-assertiveness, or party patronage, or a majority vote of the incompetent.

Haskell goes on to ask: “What is it about modern society that causes men to rely increasingly on professional advice?” He also asks: “Under what circumstances do men come to believe that their judgment, based on common sense and the customary knowledge of the community, is not adequate?” Of course, the search for professional advice is founded on the loss of credibility of traditional guidance. The prerequisite for the rise of the expert was the erosion of traditional authority. The diminishing salience of custom and traditional truths created a demand for guidance and advice. The demand for experts was fostered by a cultural climate where little could be taken for granted and where people lacked the intellectual resources to make sense of the world. At a time when Western society was confronted with a crisis of causality the public was ready to embrace those who claimed the authority of scientific truth.

In the 19th century, the world appeared increasingly complex and interdependent. In such circumstances traditional notions of cause and effect could do little to illuminate the problems brought about by industrialisation, rapid social change and the rise of a world economy. Uncertainty about the world encouraged the birth of the social sciences, leading to the expansion of the empire of the expert. In such circumstances, a society that was all too conscious of the limits of lay knowledge was more than ready to defer to the claims of expertise.

Since the 19th century, expertise has thrived from the crisis of causality. For example, experts in the field of social science often justify their existence by insisting that the world is far too complex to be understood by ordinary folk. As historian David Haney has pointed out, the discipline of sociology sought to legitimise its expertise by drawing attention to the complexity of modern society. This argument was eloquently promoted by Talcott Parsons, probably the most influential sociologist of the post-war era. Haney observed that “in an argument consistent with those of earlier generations of social scientists”, Parsons asserted that “the very fact of modernity, with its complexity and resultant confusion, required the expertise of the social scientist”.

The tendency to render reality complex is one of the distinct features of the politicisation of expertise. Critics of technocracy, particularly of its propensity for an elitist, anti-democratic orientation to public issues, are often dismissed as naive, simple-minded people who fail to comprehend the complexities of everyday life. Writing in this vein, sociologist Michael Schudson dismisses the naive romanticism of critics who fear that reliance on experts may be incompatible with democracy. Such a standpoint “fails to see not only the complexity of democracy but the democracy of complexity”. He adds that

in a world too complex for any one person or agency to comprehend, there is no governing without colleagues, consulting, committees and compromise.

THE flip side of expertise is an incompetent public. Historically, the ambiguous relationship between democracy and reliance on expertise has led many thinkers to draw pessimistic conclusions about the capacity of the public to play the role of a responsible citizenry. This argument is presented forcefully by American commentator Walter Lippmann in his classic 1992 study, Public Opinion. Lippmann declared that the proportion of the electorate that is “absolutely illiterate” is much larger than one would suspect and that these people, who are “mentally children or barbarians”, are natural targets of manipulators.

The belief that the public was dominated by infantile emotions was widespread in the social science literature of the inter-war period. Often it conveyed the patronising assumption that public opinion does not know what is in its best interests. For Lippmann, the future of democracy depended on providing experts with the resources to influence the opinion of the public. American liberal philosopher John Dewey agreed with Lippmann’s pessimistic assessment of people’s capacity to understand the complexities of political life but was concerned about the potential for experts to transform themselves into an oligarchy. His solution was to confine expertise to the provision of facts and distance them from policy-making. Although the positions of Lippmann and Dewey are often counterposed, it is important to note that they both perceived the expert as possessing an intellectual, moral and political status that was qualitatively superior to that of the public.

The tendency to regard public opinion as the prisoner of irrationality informed the attitude of the elite towards the public display of emotion throughout most of the 20th century. Officials and opinion makers were particularly worried about the capacity of radical ideologies to generate too much political emotion. The passion and anger of protesters on the streets were regarded as the antithesis of reasoned and enlightened democratic process. Furthermore, it was generally assumed that, once mobilised, irrational emotionalism could vanquish the forces of rationality. That is why economist Joseph Schumpeter argued for the need to limit access to public affairs. Schumpeter believed that “utilitarian reason was simply no match for the extra-rational determinants of conduct”. The social sciences, and specifically sociology, continually communicated a sense of distrust towards the views and opinions of the public. Haney notes that in post-war America many prominent sociologists possessed a “profound suspicion of the character and inclinations of the American people”.

THROUGH extending the idea of complexity to the domain of personal and informal relationship, the authority of expertise has sought to colonise the private sphere. One of the characteristic features of modern times is that the decline of taken for granted ways of doing things has encouraged the perception that individuals are not able to manage important aspects of their life without professional guidance. Frequently the conduct of routine forms of social interaction are represented as difficult and complicated, which is why child-rearing can be treated as a science and why we often talk about parenting skills, social skills, communication skills and relationship skills. The belief that the conduct of everyday encounters requires special skills has created an opportunity for the expert to colonise the realm of personal relations.

For example, experts claimed that their science entitled them to be the authoritative voices on issues that were hitherto perceived as strictly pertaining to the domain of personal and family life. As one US study, published in the 1994 book Troubling Children, notes:

The authoritative voice of “scientific experts” on child development advised repeatedly that the correct training of children required an expertise that few modern parents possessed.

The new cohort of experts believed child-rearing, education and relationships needed to be reorganised in accordance with the latest finding of scientific research. They possessed a powerful crusading ethos and did not confine themselves to the presentation of research and observations. As psychologist William Kessen wrote in the journal American Psychologist:

Critical examination and study of parental practices and child behaviour almost inevitably slipped subtly over to advice about parental practices and child behaviour. The scientific statement became an ethical imperative, the descriptive account became normative. And along the way there have been unsettling occasions in which scraps of knowledge, gathered by whatever procedures were held to be proper science at the time, were given inordinate weight against poor old defenceless folk knowledge.

These experts, often with the backing of official institutions, could impose their proposals on schools and influence the conduct of family life. Against scientific authority, the insights and values of ordinary people enjoyed little cultural currency.

It is worth noting that the record of science in child-rearing, education and relationships has proved to be one of ever-recurring fads that rarely achieve any positive durable results. Nevertheless, at a time when adult authority has been on the defensive, the scientific expert has gained an ever-increasing influence over the conduct of inter-generational relations. Typically, educational experts claimed that since their proposals were based on objective science, only the prejudiced could possibly disagree with them. Pedagogic techniques were promoted on the grounds that they were based on the latest psychological research into child development or new objective theories of learning.

As far as Dewey was concerned, only an incorrigible superstitious traditionalist could object to the new scientific pedagogy. He could not comprehend how anyone could resist what the latest discoveries of the “science of individual psychology” showed about the way people learn. He wrote in the journal The Philosopher that “it was a little as if no one had been willing to put radios on the market because it was obviously an absurd idea that sound can be transmitted through vast distances”. And with an air of impatience he exclaimed that “although these psychological discoveries are as well established today as the facts of the radio, they are still temperamentally abhorrent to a great many schoolmasters and parents”. Dewey, like many of his colleagues, clearly felt frustrated by what he perceived as the unholy alliance of prejudiced parents and unimaginative traditionalist teachers who questioned the new science of the curriculum.

While this professionalisation of everyday life has been a distinct trend from the outset of modernity, it has grown at a breathtaking pace since the 1960s, with professionals systematically expanding the range of personal issues that demand expert knowledge. Today, every aspect of life from birth through to school and career to marriage and mourning is subject professional counselling. We live in an age of personal trainers, mentors and facilitators. Until relatively recently, the professionalisation of everyday life was contained by the belief that the problems of the private sphere were best left to the informal solutions worked out by people in their communities. Although the claim that the expert knew best was rarely contested, the so-called helping professions had far less opportunity to colonise private life. They were free to encroach into the life of people on the edge of society but, until the 60s, professionals had little opportunity to encroach into the private world of “normal”, especially middle-class, people. One of the most striking illustrations of the influence enjoyed by experts today is that they rarely feel restrained from lecturing people on how to conduct their lives. Nor do they confine themselves to the provision of advice. Expert advice is used to legitimise government policies that have a significant effect on people’s lives.

Of course, most experts are responsible and well-meaning individuals who have an important contribution to make to the welfare of society. But the consolidation of the political role of experts, and the reliance of politicians on expert advice rather than their own analysis, has encouraged a form of authority that violates the fundamental norms of democratic accountability. There is a tendency for politicians to retreat behind the complexity of expertise and complicate issues rather than striving to simplify, explain and achieve the resolution of problems. Expertise has also become a means to justify intrusion into areas of public and private life where it has no constructive role to play.

The problem is not expertise. Society needs expert authority, and expert authority needs an epistemic on which to draw. Society does not need the continuance of an episemocratic political approach that rejects decision making based on political judgment and hides behind technical expert advice. Nor does it need the manipulation of expert opinion as a smokescreen for political intervention, especially not in the private sphere.

ONE final point: expert opinion is not a substitute for intellectual reflection. Call them men (and women) of letters, intellectuals, generalists or polymaths. Since the Renaissance the intellectual and cultural life of a society depends on people who are able to transcend the limits of specialisation and have a grasp of the big picture. This point was clearly grasped in the 19th century by thinkers who were concerned about the consequences of excessive specialisation on public life. Writing in 1849, G.L. Lewis warned “that men of comprehensive minds should survey the whole circle of the sciences, should understand their mutual relations” so as “to avoid that narrowing influence which is produced by restricting the mind to the exclusive contemplations of one subject”.

Since the 19th century, the problem of narrow specialisation and the erosion of a genuine dialogue across the arts and sciences has been widely commented on. In 1959, C.P. Snow expressed his anxiety about the split of intellectual life into the two cultures of the arts and sciences. How would he respond to the situation today when the two cultures have given way to disciplinary insularity within science and arts, where philosophers can’t talk to historians and sociologists can’t have a conversation with economists? What we need are not more experts but thinkers and commentators who can interpret the meaning that different forms of knowledge has for society.

First published by The Australian, 2 September 2009

Al-Megrahi and the crisis of political leadership
The British government’s mismanagement of the al-Megrahi affair exposes its utter lack of intellectual, moral and political authority.

Sometimes the news catches me unaware, hits me in the guts, and forces me to ask: ‘Just how low can they go?’

I had one of these ‘What is the world coming to?’ moments last Friday while driving and listening to the news on the radio. A politician’s voice emerged from the airwaves. At first I could not make any sense of why this platitudinous Scottish person was droning on and on instead of simply getting to the point.

Even after it became clear that the voice in question belonged to the Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill, and that he was informing the world of his decision to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted for his part in the Lockerbie bombing, it was far from evident why he felt the need to make a 25-minute theatrical statement. Perhaps he is simply another ambitious provincial official hoping to make the most of his 25 minutes of media fame?

Like Sheriff Moose, who became the public face of the hunt for the Washington-area snipers in the US in October 2002, MacAskill has gained fame only because higher-up officials do not want to face the cameras. What really bothered me was not the ineptitude of a local Scottish official playing at being a world statesman (MacAskill managed to get the Libyan prisoner’s name wrong just three minutes into his statement), but rather the cavalier manner in which an event of major international significance was turned into a reality media programme.

As someone with a deep respect for the Scottish Enlightenment, and for the legal tradition that arose from it, I found it depressing to hear an individual claiming to be this nation’s justice secretary moralising about how his prisoner would now face a ‘sentence imposed by a higher power’, referring to the fact that al-Megrahi is likely to die soon from prostate cancer. A legal culture that produced the likes of James Dalrymple, David Hume and John Erskine now communicates an enormously significant judicial decision through cheap moral statements at a hastily arranged press conference!

But, of course, MacAskill’s bit of legal farce is not the real problem here. The most sordid thing about the tawdry al-Megrahi affair was the public role – or rather the lack of public role – played by the British government. It is worth noting that, in recent years, Western governments have loved conducting their foreign policies in front of TV cameras. Labour PM Gordon Brown, like Tony Blair before him, seldom misses a photo opportunity that might demonstrate that he is a global leader solving the problem of Africa or the world economy. So why such shyness over Libya and the al-Megrahi affair?

Here was an issue of global significance that directly touches upon the so-called ‘war on terror’ and on Britain’s relationship with the Muslim world and the US. Yet instead of taking direct responsibility for managing this complicated issue, and its potentially serious implications for Britain’s diplomatic and economic position in the world, Whitehall decided it was a matter best dealt with by a faceless local dignitary in Scotland.

Such outsourcing of diplomatic authority from Whitehall to Edinburgh is a clear example of opportunistic and institutional responsibility-aversion. The outsourcing of diplomatic power to a lower jurisdiction indicates that even foreign affairs have become subject to the narrow-minded, short-termist outlook that also characterises the Labour government’s approach to domestic political issues.

Brown’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the suggestion that the release of al-Megrahi was influenced by economic calculations – by Britain’s desire to keep sweet with oil-rich Libya – is a ‘slur’. He insisted that the Scottish government acted independently. His explicit attempt to distance his government from a decision of vital national importance only exposes the government’s incoherence, and its confusion about where the line exists between serious diplomacy and everyday public relations. In a different era, a British foreign secretary would have been embarrassed to acknowledge his government’s non-involvement with the pressing diplomatic issues of the day. In the past, the government might have pursued its foreign-policy objectives largely in secret, but it would still have felt accountable for them, responsible for their execution and for their consequences. Today, the foreign secretary himself can effectively say about a major diplomatic event: ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’ In keeping with this approach, Brown’s spokesman has said in the past few hours that: ‘[The al-Megrahi release] was a decision taken by the Scottish justice secretary in accordance with the laws of Scotland.’ He also said that this was such a ‘uniquely sensitive and difficult decision’ that it would be inappropriate for the PM to make any comment on it!

At the same time, the way that this story has grown in importance quite slowly over the past few days – gathering more and more steam and ratcheting up tensions between America and Britain and between Britain and Libya – captures the disorientation of the political class. None of them seems to have had any inkling that the decision to release al-Megrahi would have diplomatic and political consequences. All of them seem to have been surprised by the controversies that ensued, and now find themselves responding day by day to the latest developments in the affair. The failure to predict the diplomatic fallout, far less to put in motion a series of meetings or assurances to help manage it, reveals a political class cut off from reality and unable to act in its own interests.

Many commentators have questioned Miliband’s claim that Whitehall was not involved in this affair. Observers have suggested that Brown discussed al-Megrahi’s return home with the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi. It is also claimed that a Foreign Office minister, Ivan Lewis, wrote to MacAskill to nudge him into taking a favourable view of the Libyan prisoner’s application to be released. Commentators are also puzzled as to why Gaddafi thanked Brown rather than MacAskill for being so helpful.

Perhaps they are right to be puzzled by these things. But the real issue here is not any act of deception on the government’s part; deception has always played a significant role in diplomacy. No, the real problem is the government’s celebration of its own irresponsibility. By letting the local Scottish government handle the public management of this affair, Miliband is telling the world that Britain is not a serious global player.

And of course, there is deception and there is deception. Did the Brown regime really imagine that the outsourcing of authority to Scotland over this affair would convince the world that the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber had nothing to with London? Did Miliband really believe that this was an extremely clever way of bypassing the taking of a difficult decision? If they did, then their naïveté is even more worrying than their reluctance to face up to the responsibilities of office. Such PR exercises in blameshifting might work when ministers seek to blame a quango for the farce of the school exams system, for example, but in the sphere of international relations these see-through attempts to outsource decision-making are clearly a symptom of incompetence.

There is a debate to be had about whether the release of al-Megrahi was morally responsible or a just decision. However, the whole affair raises a far more fundamental question about the intellectual, moral and political resources possessed by those individuals who are formally responsible for the direction of this country. The evasion of responsibility by this government is a key problem of our time; it occurs almost every time there is a major debate or political controversy. The government’s failure to engage the public in a grown-up discussion of a very difficult military engagement in Afghanistan is probably the most disturbing example of its responsibility-aversion. And yet, sadly, critics and commentators appear to be far more interested in how much ministers spend on their travels than on how much time they devote to providing leadership.

First published by spiked, 24 August 2009

Medical labels are slapped on to rambunctious kids
Why am I not surprised to discover the number of Australian schoolchildren diagnosed with psychological or emotional disorders is increasing at a dramatic rate?

Because in Australia, as in every Anglo-American society, it is normal to treat the routine troubles of childhood as a mental health issue.

Since the 1980s the manufacture of child-related mental health pathologies has turned into a growth industry. Children’s behaviour is constantly portrayed through a psychological label. These days confused and insecure children are likely to be diagnosed as depressed or traumatised.

Virtually any energetic or disruptive youngster can acquire the label of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. If you give your teachers a hard time or argue with adults it is likely you are suffering from oppositional defiant disorder.

If you are a little bit shy you are afflicted with social phobia. And if for some reason you don’t like school it is only a matter of time before a mental health professional comes up with the diagnosis of school phobia. The rising number of referrals for school phobia in Britain indicates it is only a matter of time before a mental health professional invents aversion to getting out of bed syndrome. The medicalisation of childhood and of education has assumed alarming dimensions.

In Australia the proportion of students with a disability rose from 2.7 per cent of all Australian students to 6.7 per cent in the past 10 years. In Britain and the US the numbers of children diagnosed with a learning disability has increased year by year since the 1990s.

Consequently, schooling has been reorganised around a two-tier system of ordinary and special needs education.

Worse still, children diagnosed with behavioural problems are increasingly managed through medication. There has been a huge year-on-year increase during the past decade in drugs prescribed by doctors for the behavioural and emotional disorders among children. Ritalin has become the drug of choice that disoriented mental health professionals and anxious parents stuff down the throats of ostensibly hyperactive—that is, naughty—children. Sadly even children aged two to four are sometimes put on psychoactive medication.

So what is driving the diseasing of childhood? The explanation for this trend does not lie in the field of epidemiology but in the realm of a culture that invites adults to classify children as ill. It is not the emergence of a new disease but changing cultural attitudes that led to a 500 per cent increase in the production of Ritalin in the US between 1990 and 1995.

Today, Western societies find it difficult to accept that youngsters possess a formidable capacity for resilience.

Many professionals involved in the field of child care and education have an inflated conception of children’s vulnerability to emotional damage. Consequently, any child who has a normal reaction to adverse circumstances in their lives is assumed to have mental health problems.

That is why childhood is now seen as a marker for mental illness. Reports regularly claim the incidence of childhood mental illness, particularly of depression, is steadily increasing. A British-based study, Child and Adolescent Mental Health (2006), is typical in this respect. It states that one in 10 children under 16 suffers from a clinically diagnosed mental health disorder. The diseasing of childhood is continually promoted through surveys, reports, self-help books and newspaper articles insisting that the life of youngsters is shockingly bad.

The tendency to associate children’s troubles with psychological problems has had a significant influence on the way parents interact with their youngsters.

Today, medical labels are eagerly sought by some parents for their children. Some say they feel relieved when they discover their child has a mental health problem and so is not responsible for their behaviour. A diagnosis of ADHD eases the difficulty of dealing with problem behaviour.

When parents feel confused about their children’s behaviour, a medical diagnosis has the virtue of providing a ready-made explanation of a child’s predicament. A disease explains an individual’s behaviour and it even helps to confer a sense of identity. Moreover, a mental health diagnosis allows individuals to gain moral sympathy.

A diagnosis also represents a claim for resources. There is considerable evidence that teachers and parents collude in the popularisation of the learning-disabled classification in schools. One of the most effective ways for parents to get help for their children is to demand special treatment on account of their disability. Schools find it easier to attract funding for special education than for basic compensatory programs and are therefore often happy to classify children as having a learning disability.

Sadly, the introduction of new therapeutic techniques in the classroom distracts schools from challenging and inspiring students. So the medicalisation of the classroom has the unintended consequence of undermining the quality of education.

The most insidious consequence of the diseasing of childhood is that it directly threatens young people’s sense of adventure, independence and wellbeing. The narrative of illness does not simply frame the way children are expected to feel and experience problems, it constitutes an invitation to infirmity.

Through medicalising children’s normal emotional upheavals, young people are trained to regard troublesome experience as the precursor of an illness for which help must be found. Consider a recent example. During the past decade, experts and therapists have tended to re-present 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 offer transitional counselling for what was regarded, for decades, 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 result is a growing number of children who understand their life experiences in pathological terms and become disoriented.

What children need from adults is not a diagnosis but guidance, inspiration and understanding. It is time we put a stop to the medicalisation of children’s lives. 

First published by The Australian, 15 August 2009

Unspeakable
Why the West strains to name its enemy.

In the first few years after September 11, 2001, Western statesmen and analysts spent more time thinking and arguing over how serious the literal threat of jihadi terrorism was, and what to do about it, than trying to understand what it was. It did not often occur that the ideological basis of jihadi militancy could be the greatest threat to Western societies, or that a powerful anti-Western ideology was a necessary precursor to the will to perpetrate acts of violence against innocent people.

This perception was perhaps justified at first by the urgency of the terrorist threat, given its sudden explosion from minor nuisance to spectacular debacle. And it was perhaps justified by an assumption, particularly in the United States, that we knew quite well what was behind the violence: This was no ideology deserving of the name, but just crazy, atavistic nihilism perpetrated by a tiny minority and used by a few cynical regimes for purposes of their own, all emanating from a frustrated part of the world that had failed to keep pace with modernity. We knew whom we were fighting: al-Qaeda, similarly constituted groups like Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia, and the states that supported them. At times Western leaders said so, clearly and simply.

Yet for all the seeming simplicity of the conflict, the fact that Western statesmen have never been able to get a handle on the vocabulary or the rhetoric of the conflict suggests that the matter isn’t so simple after all. One key reason is that, in much of Europe if not yet in America, the real problem is not external but internal—and, if one is even remotely wise, one talks about internal problems differently than one talks about external ones. Moreover, the attraction to jihadi violence is not just about charismatic Muslim entrepreneurs preying on marginalized immigrant communities; it’s also about the many living in the West who feel alienated from Western values and from modernity itself. And their alienation, in turn, is deepened partly because the cultural and political elites of those countries seem uncomfortable articulating the settled virtues of their own civilization. In other words, not only do many Western elites have trouble talking about who the “bad guys” are in this conflict, they have trouble defining and defending the “good guys” as well. Not only do many in the West seem not to understand our adversaries’ ideas; we rather too often seem not to understand, or believe in, our own ...

The full article is available on subscription here.

First published by The American Interest, 13 August 2009

The experience of the recession
Interview on BBC World Service.

An audio recording of Frank Furedi’s interview is available here.

First published by BBC World Service, 10 August 2009

The fearmongers preying on pregnant women
It was only a matter of time before the swine-flu scare lobby turned its attention to those who are seen as an easy target for fear: mums-to-be.

Over the past month, I have been asked many times to give my opinion on the official response to the outbreak of the swine flu epidemic.

It is fairly easy to offer a balanced assessment of the authorities’ various responses. For example, it is clear that Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), was more than overreacting when, after raising the pandemic alert from level four to level five, she warned that ‘all of humanity is under threat’. Her alarmist statement was really a moral comment on humanity’s powerlessness when confronted with the forces of nature. It is always a pleasure to contrast such a high-level communication of moral disorientation with the refreshingly balanced views on swine flu provided by, for example, Fergus Walsh of the BBC.

However, sorting the alarmist statements from the sensible ones does not provide an adequate assessment of the official response to swine flu. The way in which the threat of swine flu has been framed has been dominated by powerful cultural influences, which all too readily turn a health problem into an existential crisis. Despite the fact that humanity enjoys levels of safety that are historically unprecedented, and is far more prepared to deal with a pandemic than in previous times, popular culture has transformed the flu into an apocalyptic threat.

Consequently, the swine flu epidemic has been turned into a moral story about human life itself. So it is not surprising that Britain’s National Childbirth Trust (NCT) took it upon itself to advise women to delay pregnancy until swine flu subsides. The message from the UK Department of Health was a little more ‘subtle’. ‘We advise everybody to plan their pregnancy carefully – we are not advising women not to conceive’, said a DoH statement. Since it might be difficult for everyday people to grasp the philosophical distinction between a call to avoid getting pregnant and advice about ‘planning your pregnancy carefully’, it is likely that mothers-to-be will feel unnecessarily anxious.

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, pregnancy would become the target of swine-flu scaremongering. By its very nature, pregnancy comes with a variety of risks – and that now includes the risk of complications from swine flu. In recent decades these very natural risks have been redefined as unnatural hazards. Now, pregnancy comes with a permanent health warning. Moral entrepreneurs continually prey on pregnant women and advise them to, amongst other things, avoid smoking, drinking alcohol or eating dangerous food. The suggestion now that women should delay pregnancy marks a new low, yet it is also merely an extension of the moral policing of women’s reproductive behaviour.

Of course, in the end the government tried to alleviate the damaging consequences of the conflicting messages to mothers-to-be. But confused messages are the inexorable consequence of the current regime of the culture of fear. Although it is still possible to come across sensible advice and informative public-health statements, such messages always tend to be overshadowed by worst-case thinking. What sticks in people’s minds is the UK chief medical officer Liam Donaldson’s warning that there might be 65,000 deaths from swine flu in Britain. With a catastrophe threatening to destroy the nation, is it any surprise confusion and conflicting advice become more and more widespread?

The principal problem with officialdom’s response to swine flu is that it is driven by the belief that this is a security problem rather than a health problem. Once health risks become converted into the moral language of security and existence they acquire an intensely menacing and malevolent character. Consequently, the risks associated with a flu epidemic cease to be constrained by objective epidemiological thinking.

Ever since an editorial for the New Scientist in February 2004 warned that a bird flu outbreak in which the virus was transmitted between people could kill 1.5billion people, it has become quite normal to confuse worst-case flu scenarios with normal flu outbreaks. In such circumstances, even attempts to reassure the public are undermined by officials’ own worst-case mindset. So UK home secretary Alan Johnson told us that the NCT’s advice on conception was an ‘overreaction’ – but then undid his clarification by casually informing us that, by the way, the swine flu crisis was a bigger threat to Britain than terrorism.

Johnson said yesterday that ‘we have been preparing for this for a long time’, adding that ‘it came actually above terrorism as a threat to this country, so we had the whole Cobra machinery and inter-agency working [on it]’. Some might see this as evidence of effective contingency planning in government circles. However, historians in the future will most likely regard it as an illustration of the early twenty-first century’s dramatisation of security. Part of this drama involves continually expanding the narrative of terror to a growing range of potential threats; now, the moral indictment of terrorism provides the vocabulary for representing flu as a mortal threat to the nation.

Today, the various individuals and institutions that make up the fear market forcefully demonise flu. For example, a promo ad for a course on ‘Pandemics and Bioterrorism’ at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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, in a circular linked to one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in the world, provides disturbing evidence that fearmongering has become a respectable pursuit today.

Similar arguments were put forward by the UK Institute of Public Policy Research’s Commission on National Security in 2008. A document published by the IPPR 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 current Hollywood fantasy plots, 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’ (1).

The most effective alternative to the current obsession with worst-case thinking is to affirm human life. Health professionals and officials should stick to providing scientifically grounded information and avoid the temptation to moralise and speculate in a dramatic fashion. People are quite capable of making sensible judgment calls about the risks they face. It is natural to feel anxious about being pregnant, as it is natural to be anxious about our children’s health – but it is no less natural to affirm our humanity by making love, getting pregnant and having children. In part, life gains meaning through reflecting upon and learning from our engagement with uncertainty. Throughout our lives, we convert uncertainties into insights about how to cope, how to live, and what makes us human. Ignore the scaremongers and carry on living.

(1) The IPPR report is available here.

First published by spiked, 20 July 2009

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