Let’s be cheeky and try to understand something about the Austrian School using the ideas of the Frankfurt School.  The two are, in any case, now permanently locked-together in a Reichenbachian struggle.  At least, the bastard ideological descendants of the Austrian School seem to imagine this.  For some reason.  So fuck it, let's ignore the fact that this is actually a delusional notion (at least as it is generally meant), and see what happens when they actually fight.

In his 1941 book Fear of Freedom, the Marxist-Freudian Erich Fromm elaborates a dialectical account of human consciousness in late modernity through the prism of a dichotomous conception of the concept of freedom.  For Fromm, freedom can be divided into the very dyad of ‘freedom from’ (negative freedom) and ‘freedom to’ (positive freedom) that we have already raised in connection with Hayek.  Hayek, the Constant Reader will remember, is (ostensibly) concerned for the most part with ‘freedom from’, that is: absence of coercion.  Fromm says that freedom from (hence ‘FF’), while desirable and often fought for, carries dangers within it.  It is not a guarantee of happiness.  Indeed, it can generate unhappiness, and from thence destruction.  (To be clear: Fromm is not offering this view as an apologia for tyranny.)  Essentially, Fromm’s idea boils down to saying that the absence of political or social coercion can be deeply unsatisfying because FF, being essentially negative (one does not, for instance, actively experience the absence of a policeman’s boot in the teeth as a pleasure), leaves us without ‘freedom to’ (hence ‘FT’).  In capitalist society, we remain alienated.  

Fromm goes on, in Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), to describe humanity, alienated in capitalist society, as having a self-orientation which he calls a “marketing orientation”, in which

man experiences himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. He does not experience himself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. He is alienated from these powers. … His sense of self does not stem from his activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from his socioeconomic role. If things could speak, a typewriter would answer the question “Who are you?” by saying “I am a typewriter,” and an automobile, by saying “I am an automobile,” or more specifically by saying, “I am a Ford,” or “a Buick,” or “a Cadillac.” If you ask a man “Who are you?”, he answers “I am a manufacturer,” “I am a clerk,” “I am a doctor–or “I am a married man,” “I am the father of two kids,” and his answer has pretty much the same meaning as that of the speaking thing would have. That is the way he experiences himself, not as a man, with love, fear, convictions, doubts, but as that abstraction, alienated from his real nature, which fulfills a certain function in the social system. His sense of value depends on his success: on whether he can sell himself favorably, whether he can make more of himself than he started out with, whether he is a success. His body, his mind and his soul are his capital, and his task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of himself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the “personality package,” conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If the individual fails in a profitable investment of himself, he feels that he is a failure; if he succeeds, he is a success. Clearly, his sense of his own value always depends on factors extraneous to himself, on the fickle judgement of the market, which decides about his value as it decides about the value of commodities. He, like all commodities that cannot be sold profitably on the market, is worthless as far as his exchange value is concerned, even though his use value may be considerable.

(I’d like to note in passing that I have some fundamental disagreements with Fromm.  He wrongly sees Marx’s concept of man as metaphysical and religious, and is far too reliant on Freud - himself, like Mises, a fin de siècle Austrian who elaborated a radically subjective, religiose, and pseudo-scientific crackpot theory of human behaviour.  And I have big issues with the Frankfurt School generally… though they’re not the same ones you tend to find vocalised on YouTube.  Even so, like the Frankfurt School, Fromm, while deeply flawed, offers some provocative insights.  And I’d even say the same about Freud.  Quack he may have been... but quacks can have good days, and Freud had a few.)

According to Fromm, even if all coercion from tyrants and institutions is removed, humanity in capitalism remains anxiously trapped in the corrosively hopeless condition of commodification.  Fromm sees humans, thus semi-freed, increasingly afflicted with the malaise of FF, as fleeing to authoritarianism, destructiveness, and conformity.  He sees Nazism as, essentially, a response to the predicament of FF.

For Fromm, this dialectical and circular process repeats through history.  He brings up the rise of Protestant theology during the Reformation – particularly the ideas of Luther and Calvin – as examples of the development of ideas which express and respond to increases in FF.  (We talked a little bit about this last week, if the Constant Reader will recall.)  As the old feudal order crumbled and capital arose, increasingly people felt less constrained by socioeconomic bonds and more aware of themselves as individuals with subjectivity.  “Growing individuation means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing doubt concerning one’s role in the universe, the meaning of one’s life, and with all that a growing feeling of one’s own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual.”  Freedom – that is FF – grew, and security was sought in beliefs which expressed the greater freedoms and also offered an explanation for feelings of anxiety.  As Fromm puts it: “Protestantism and Calvinism, while giving expression to a new feeling of freedom, at the same time constituted an escape from the burden of freedom.”  Lutheranism contextualised anxiety in the doctrine of sin, in Luther’s conviction of the essential evil and powerlessness of humanity, and then offered freedom in individual abasement to the ultimate authority of God, even as it expressed the class interests of the rising middle classes against declining and decadent feudal and Catholic authority, with its rejection of Catholic salvation.  To quote Fromm:

[In] Luther's picture, [m]an is free from all ties binding him to spiritual authorities, but this very freedom leaves him alone and anxious, overwhelms him with a feeling of his own individual insignificance and powerlessness. This free, isolated individual is crushed by the experience of his individual insignificance. Luther's theology gives expression to this feeling of helplessness and doubt. The picture of man which he draws in religious terms describes the situation of the individual as it was brought about by the current social and economic evolution. The member of the middle class was as helpless in face of the new economic forces as Luther described man to be in his relationship to God.

But Luther did more than bring out the feeling of insignificance which already pervaded the social classes to whom he preached--he offered them a solution. By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hope to be acceptable to God. Luther's relationship to God was one of complete submission. In psychological terms his concept of faith means: if you completely submit, if you accept your individual insignificance, then the all-powerful God may be willing to love you and save you. If you get rid of your individual self with all its shortcomings and doubts by utmost self-effacement, you free yourself from the feeling of your own nothingness and can participate in God's glory. Thus, while Luther freed people from the authority of the Church, he made them submit to a much more tyrannical authority, that of a God who insisted on complete submission of man and annihilation of the individual self as the essential condition to his salvation.  Luther's "faith" was the conviction of being loved upon the condition of surrender, a solution which has much in common with the principle of complete submission of the individual to the state and the "leader".

Luther's awe of authority and his love for it appears also in his political convictions. Although he fought against the authority of the Church, although he was filled with indignation against the new moneyed class--part of which was the upper strata of the clerical hierarchy--and although he supported the revolutionary tendencies of the peasants up to a certain point, yet he postulated submission to worldly authorities, the princes, in the most drastic fashion.  Even if those in authority are evil or without faith, nevertheless the authority and its power is good and from God, Therefore, where there is power and where it flourishes, there it is and there it remains because God has ordained it.

Similarly, Calvin’s ‘Doctrine of the Elect’, with its teaching that the salvation of a few is preordained, but that one must also strive, both expresses the ascendant feelings of isolation and anxiety while also allaying them with an extreme form of determinism, which then also permits an expression of individualism within the limits of an authoritarian cosmic schema.  If the damnation or salvation of each individual is pre-decided and unalterable, all that remains is for each individual to labour as hard as they can to discover their own degree of holiness.  An expression of individualism within a comfortingly rigid hierarchy.

These, like Nazism in the C20th, are expressions of Fromm’s thesis that

if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality … while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.

Now, something rather extraordinary emerges here.  The Austrians, for all their ostensible rejection of statism and authoritarianism, begin to look like a heterodox sect of radical Protestantism.  This outrageous statement clearly requires some justification, as amusing as it would be to simply leave it there.

In his essay ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’, which I directed you to last week, Corey Robin identifies certain profound assumptions on the part of the Austrians (or at least recurrent in the most prominent exemplars of their trend) which relate to their conception of value.  Having reiterated that, being among the originators and extremists of marginalism, the Austrians view (economic) value as radically subjective, Robin goes on to point out the deep ways in which they – most particularly Mises and Hayek – make “the market the very expression of morality”.  To quote Robin:

Moralists traditionally viewed the pursuit of money and goods as negative or neutral; the Austrians claimed it embodies our deepest values and commitments. “The provision of material goods,” declared Mises, “serves not only those ends which are usually termed economic, but also many other ends.” All of us have ends or ultimate purposes in life: the cultivation of friendship, the contemplation of beauty, a lover’s companionship. We enter the market for the sake of those ends. Economic action thus “consists firstly in valuation of ends, and then in the valuation of the means leading to these ends. All economic activity depends, therefore, upon the existence of ends. Ends dominate economy and alone give it meaning.” We simply cannot speak, writes Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, of “purely economic ends separate from the other ends of life.”

It would be hard, by the way, to encounter a more forceful backhanded admission of the truth of Fromm’s view of human alienation mired in commodification, nor of the Marxist view that ideology arises from underlying economic structures and class position.  Indeed, the only such admission more near-suspiciously perfect is the Doctrine of the Elect itself.

Moreover, the development of this viewpoint comes as a result of the Economic Calculation Debate.  (Yes, there was a reason I put you through this.)  This was, as the Constant Reader will recall, an argument between economists between the world wars which ensued from Mises’ contention that planned economies cannot work because, without a market, and therefore without price signals expressing demand, they can’t rationally allocate resources.  Hayek’s contribution was to argue that the sheer number of calculations required of a marketless society makes planned economies prohibitively complex.  When Lange et al developed the response of what was effectively the first idea of ‘market socialism’, they were effectively arguing (wrongly, in my humble opinion) that socialism could, essentially, just be capitalism but completely state managed.  (At least that is how Marx would view their plan, because Marx saw capitalism's essence being the self-expansion of value via competitive accumulation, which would conspicuously be retained in Lange's model.) 

The consequences of such thinking for the liberal capitalist order was what concerned Hayek.  Might Western civilisation be convinced to discard what it had been persuaded to see as a needless, extraneous aspect of the system: personal, private interest?  Hadn’t that dreadful process already begun?

As Duncan Foley puts it in Adam’s Fallacy:

Hayek saw disaster looming for the liberal cause in this episode.  He did not believe that socialist managers could ever mimic capitalist entrepreneurs well enough to make socialist markets function.  Thus he was led to shift the focus of this debate in a profound, fateful, and fruitful direction. It is not, according to Hayek, the market form that is critical to organizing the division of labor; it is the content of the market as a clash of personal interests that actually drives things forward. … The antagonistic relations of the market are no longer a necessary evil to be tolerated for the sake of getting our dinner (and a better one) out of the butcher and the baker, nor even an ingenious game we might play to squeeze out potential economic surpluses. In Hayek’s vision the antagonistic relations of the market are the existential core of human existence, the ground from which everything else emerges.

Hayek did not put his point in quite this way. He argued that the real metabolism of the market rests on its ability to force everyone to reveal their private information about needs, technology, and resources, whether they want to or not, and whether they participate in the market enthusiastically, seeking profit, or grudgingly, to defend their conditions of existence. …  Hayek puts this informational aspect of the market in the central position. The capitalist market now appears as a critical component of a complex system of information revelation and exchange. The division of labor itself becomes a by-product and side effect of this play of information. The reason the socialist managers cannot mimic the capitalist market is that they have no direct existential interest to defend and assert in making market exchanges. Socialism imagines that economic life is a means to an end, a method of supplying the material needs without which human life and social life cannot function. The conceit of socialism is that supplying this material basis is just a matter of getting necessary productive work done. In fact, according to Hayek’s way of thinking, the central problem is to know what the necessary productive work actually is. Even the best-intentioned and most self-disciplined socialist worker-citizens would find themselves helpless to know where to expend their labor effort, or even to know whether what looks like an obvious social need (building a steel mill) may not be doing more harm than good.

[My emphasis.]  (Pardon all these long quotes, by the way.)

Hayek has some points to make about command economies.  They're not great.  For instance, the managers have no personal interest in efficiently allocating resources, if we take ‘efficient’ to mean ‘best fulfilling the common good’.  But, contra Hayek, it is the absence of democracy in a command economy which causes this problem, just as it is the absence of democracy in, say, a corporation, which causes essentially the same problem.  The absence of democracy is the most fundamental thing negating the possibility of socialist co-ordination.  In a corporation, the undemocratic manager already has self-interest as his goal.  In a command economy, self-interest soon appears where the absence of democracy leaves the state manager without orientation.  Hence the endemic corruption and inefficiency of such systems.  The fact that the Right endlessly go on about this doesn’t make it untrue, and socialism won’t get anywhere sticking its fingers in its ears and pretending.  Socialism cannot be about authoritarian statism, not just because authoritarian statism isn't nice, but because it doesn't work - at least not for any purposes which can meaningfully be called socialist.  (Social-democratic or reformist, perhaps.)

Robin notes in passing that sentiments such as Mises’ view of wider human needs being satisfied by efficient market provision (see above) can be adapted to Left arguments.  As he also notes, it’s worth remembering that several early marginalists viewed their theory as bolstering some left-wing ideas, and that marginalism was put into the theoretical service of welfarism, liberalism, and social democracy in the C20th.  Even today there are left-libertarians, and most economists who are liberals or leftists embrace some form or other of marginalism (Keynesianism is marginalist).  Similarly, bits of Hayek’s occasionally very pertinent critique of command economies can actually be adapted by anti-authoritarian variants of socialism.  (Remember, there were even lefty(ish) currents within the early Austrian School.)

But we’re straying into another subject.  Here I want to emphasize the way Hayek’s insights lead him deeper and deeper into an escalating fetishism of private property relations and thus, whatever his protestations (and he does protest), of the market form.

Marginalism’s rejection of any real element to value is taken to an extreme by Hayek, and is part of a wider semi-mystical belief in what Corey Robin calls, in The Reactionary Mind, “an almost hyperactive subjectivity - comparable to Freud’s anarchic id”.  (Oh, hello again Sigmund.)  It’s true that this is Robin’s description of John Gray’s picture of Hayek, but that picture was endorsed by Hayek himself in glowing terms.

Mises and Hayek are fundamentalist in their rejection of reason and rationality. Hayek sees rational, conscious understanding as being a mere thin layer on top of a vast, submerged well of tacit knowledge. His belief in the free market’s ability to express such mysterious gnosis is religiose. And at the center of it are his chosen caste of divine sensitives, the ‘entrepreneurs’, who he fetishizes as having special qualities, special style and timing and creativity, special abilities to express themselves and thereby remake the world. The horror of state planning is that it will, like repression or oppression, cramp the style of these artistic creatives. In its peculiar way, it’s a deeply Romantic vision. (Rooted in fin de siècle Europe, it might even be possible to describe it as a form of last-minute counter-modernist mechanically-recovered-Romanticism... another respect in which it has some similarities with fascism.)  For Hayek, the entrepreneurs, if set free, create the world anew as they express their unique visions.  They are capitalists as artists-as-heroes.

According to Robin, the Austrians – with, as I've said, their avowedly and a priori anti-socialist intent – push to the extreme of arguing that, since all decisions about ends and means are value-judgements, and since the essence of economic judgements is deciding on ends and means in the context of finite resources, then economic choices are revelatory of our highest and most fundamental moral values.  (They, of course, take it as read that resources will always be scarce because they silently take it for granted that class will always endure, because no society can achieve generalised abundance – a self-fulfilling prophecy that is key to their project.)

The economics of the marketplace – the battleground in which we work out our desires and methods against ourselves, unforgiving nature, and others – is thus where morality comes from.  It is where we make our economic choices, which are based on values, which are how we separate our higher and lower ends.  The essence of morality, then, is the market.  It is not that we achieve our highest ends via our market behaviour, but rather that we separate higher from lower ends via the market’s provision of the lower.  Moreover, for Hayek, it is our very freedom to make the lower, economic choices which forces us to make them, and thus which forces value and values into our lives in the first place.  As Robin puts it: “While the economic is, in one sense readily acknowledged by Hayek, the sphere of our lower needs, it is in another and altogether more important sense the anvil upon which we forge our notion of what is lower and higher in this world, our morality.”  It is the hardscrabble, the suffering, the husbandry, that makes us capable of good.  A profoundly (if fragmentarily) Protestant, even Puritan view of human life. 

 

Part 2 Next Week.  (You can't wait, can you?)

 

#932, 10th August 2002

Such was the grip of Pop Idol on the singles-buying imagination that two winners weren’t enough – bronze medalist Darius Danesh got a career too. But “Colourblind” is not just a participation medal. In Darius we see not one but two of the classic reality pop tropes make their appearance. First of all – in his note-strangling debut on the Popstars series, wrestling “Baby One More Time” to the ground like prehistoric man tackling an aurochs, there’s the Freak: the terrible performer armoured in their own self-confidence who we indulge because we want to see what on earth they’ll do next.

There’s little question that if the public had been given any say in things we’d have seen more from Darius in Popstars. But by the time they got a chance to vote for him and carry him to third place in Pop Idol, he’d reinvented himself to fit the second trope, the Artist: the figure who is Actually Talented but who must yet put themselves through the circus of a singing competition to gain recognition. “Colourblind”, fittingly, was a self-penned composition he’d been ‘working on’ before Pop Idol. (Actually this is entirely believable – its procession-of-colours lyric certainly feels like the kind of solid but banal structure a beginning songwriter might try.)

In general the Freak and the Artist are separate reality-show characters, and compared to the real maestros of each form – Jedward on the one hand, James Arthurs on the other – Darius is far milder. But his trope-switching shows the basic linkage between the two ideas – in the sense that both need unusual reserves of self-belief, but also in the role both play in the keyfabe of reality TV. “Colourblind” became a hit partly because it was rejected by Simon Cowell, who decided Darius’ self-penned material didn’t cut it. The Freak and the Artist are both presented as rejections of Cowellism, one via excess, one via authenticity – they are useful parts of the reality show narrative because they preserve the illusion of autonomy, the idea that the story can be disrupted. We’ll come back to this bit of theatrical play again and again in 00s Popular.

All of this is a lot more interesting to me than the actual song. “Colourblind” shoots its creative bolt quickly – you get the basic lyrical conceit immediately, and in any case whatever promise and momentum the verses build is frittered by the chorus. The emotional core of the song – D has lots of ambiguous negative feelings about his relationship but can’t sustain them in the face of her smile – just doesn’t fit the treatment he gives it. The sense of the lyric suggests something dark, helpless and conflicted, but Darius, eager to please his crowd now he’s finally got one, belts out a big jolly chorus. (It’s also not clear he knows what colourblindness is.) The arrangers do a creditable job gussying up slim ideas into something listenable, but not for the last time Simon Cowell is right: willpower and good intentions aren’t enough, and even next to “Anyone Of Us” or “Light My Fire”, this is muddled and thin.

I write a lot of obits on this site. Some are about people I didn't know very well.  Ten years ago today, I had to write one about someone I knew well and liked a lot.  I still miss Steve Gerber and so does the comic book industry even if some who work in the field don't know it…or him.

I don't think I ever told you how I met Steve.  I knew him first through his published stories which I thought were some of the best coming out of Marvel at the time.  From a writer's standpoint, there are two kinds of comics you find yourself writing for a company like DC or Marvel.  One is the kind where you're handling characters created by others, working in a mythology established by others.  Some writers do some wonderful work in this arena but when I think about my favorite comic book writers, I'm more impressed with their work in the other kind of comic book.

That would be the kind that you either create the comic or co-create the comic…or you take over a book about which very little has been established.  Generally speaking, you have to be the only person writing those characters at the time.  That gives you more freedom to shape the environment of that book and to add new characters or reshape existing ones such that you can tell the kinds of stories you have to tell.  You make it your own, at least for the time you do that book, which generally has to be a long period.  It never happens when you're doing an issue or three.  You have to stay on a book for a while before you can form-fit it to your strengths.

Steve did that when he took over a comic called Man-Thing, making it distinctly his own for a while.  He did it of course with Howard the Duck and a few other comics he launched.  He wrote some good stories for ongoing comics handled by many like The Defenders and  Sub-Mariner but he found his voice in the more personal books.  In them, he wrote more about human beings even if those human beings were monsters or ducks.

Anyway, I liked his writing but before I met him, when I mentioned his name to anyone at Marvel, I was told he was crazy…and I don't mean brilliantly, eccentrically crazy.  I mean "crazy" the way Charles Manson was crazy.  Several people, including a writer or two who I guess thought of him as competition, told me that any day, Steve Gerber would be hauled off to the looney bin.

I didn't necessarily believe them.  I've had too many people in my life turn out to be exact opposite of the way they were described.  But I also didn't not believe what I was being told about this Steve Gerber person.

Now then: For several years in a row, my partner Sergio Aragonés would host an annual post-con party right after what we then called the San Diego Comic-Con and now call Comic-Con International.  The con ended on Sunday afternoon and a lot of us would caravan (or drive home) to Los Angeles and by 8 PM, there'd be a big crowd at Sergio's old home in the Hollywood Hills, sitting around the pool and eating pizza.  Just talking and unwinding.

At one of these parties, I found myself talking to a guy with glasses.  We were discussing comics, the world, life, movies, the pizza we were consuming, everything…and the guy was bright, funny, perceptive and I had no idea who the hell he was.  He somehow knew who I was but if I'd been introduced to him, I hadn't caught the name.  And after 40 minutes or so of great, enjoyable conversation, I didn't feel like I could say, "By the way, who are you?"  I was trying to figure it out without doing that.

I forget which comics he mentioned he'd worked on but let's say one of them was Daredevil.  He'd say, "You know, when I was writing Daredevil…" and I'd start thinking, "Okay, who wrote Daredevil besides all the people I know who wrote Daredevil?"  And then I'd think, "Well, I believe Steve Gerber wrote a few issues but this person is way too sane to be Steve Gerber."  He'd mention some other comic that several people had written and I'd think, "Gee, the only person I can think of who wrote that comic and who I don't know is Steve Gerber.  Could this possibly be Steve Gerber?  Naw…"

Finally, he mentioned writing Howard the Duck and I thought, "This is Steve Gerber!"  And I instantly realized that not only was he not demented or insane but he was saner and smarter than any of the people who'd told me Steve Gerber was out of his mind.  He was also a better writer than any of them.

We spent a lot of time together.  When I was running the Hanna-Barbera comic division, I brought Steve in as my assistant and he also wrote a lot of the comics, most of which were published overseas.  Later, I recommended him for animation writing for the Ruby-Spears studio and he quickly became one of their most valuable writers and story editors.  He wrote for many of their shows and developed Thundarr the Barbarian.

Often, you bond with people by charging into battle alongside them.  Steve had his infamous legal battle against Marvel over Howard the Duck and a lot of folks (not just me) joined that battle in whatever way we could.  But Steve also fought a lot of fights to better working conditions and compensation for all writers, not just himself.  If and when an accurate history is ever written of how life in comics got better for creative people in the eighties, Steve's name will be mentioned a lot.  That's what I meant about how the industry misses him.

I do, too.   He was a clever, creative guy and we all out missed out on the wonderful things he might have written if he'd been around the last ten years.   A great, great loss.

When Steve died, I seized control of his blog and it's still up and running at www.stevegerber.com.  Not a lot has been posted since and as I write this, the most recent post and comments are from October of '16.  But every message Steve posted is still there, followed by many posted since we lost him.  You might want to drop by and read and maybe even write something.

The post Steve appeared first on News From ME.

Throughout her life, my grandmother insisted that she, as a woman, must never "usurp authority" by teaching men in the church. But a lot of men in the church could learn a lot from my grandmother.

This news story has my favorite headline of the week…

The post Briefly Noted… appeared first on News From ME.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Finally in December [1945] he managed to persuade the owner of a large dilapidated building on the Finchley Road in London to rent him two rooms. A friend of my mother describes it well, ‘After the war they rented a flat in Swiss Cottage on a stretch of the Finchley Road opposite the old Odeon and close to the famous pub. In those days there was a row of substantial detached houses, each with what had been stables, but then converted into garages with flats above. I remember a very rickety staircase inside the garage up to the flat, and the intriguing fact that the bath was in the kitchen, with a large wooden cover serving perfectly as a table during the day. I envied them living there so close to the bright lights, and the fact that they had such a relaxed ‘bohemian lifestyle’ which included going out for breakfast when they felt like it!’

Slowly working through the published biographies of Doctor Who crew and cast, and it's time to look at Patrick Troughton, possibly the most versatile actor to take on the role as a regular, and certainly the only one to appear in a Oscar-winning film (as the Player King in Olivier's 1948 Hamlet, which also features Peter Cushing as Osric; John Hurt is in A Man for All Seasons which won the Oscar for Best Film in 1966, and of course Peter Capaldi shared the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in 1994). The author is one of Troughton's many acting descendants, his third child Michael, who actually appeared in the 2014 Christmas special Last Christmas as Dr Albert Smithe.

It must be very difficult to write about a father like Patrick Troughton, who was loving but physically distant. Troughton's own life was full of much human drama, which we must largely infer from Michael's childhood memories and his father's preserved correspondence. Soon after Michael was born in 1955, Patrick left his first wife, Margaret, for another partner with whom he had another three children; at the point that he decided to take on the Doctor Who role, he was in the middle of a brief and ultimately unsuccessful reconciliation with Margaret, played out to a certain extent in front of the children. At the same time there was a third partner in the mix. He married someone else entirely in the mid-1970s. He said to Michael, years after the final split with Margaret,

‘I needed change. Things have to change all the time for me I’m afraid, that’s the way I am made. I am sorry if I hurt you.’

Reminiscent of one of his first lines as the Doctor: "Life depends on change and renewal."

He seems to have been a man who broke many hearts, but continued to take his emotional commitments to all his lovers and children very seriously, but always suffered from the pressure of generating enough income to meet his financial obligations to his two families, which eventually ground him down; he had his first heart attack at 58, and died of another at a convention eight years later. (Incidentally the circumstances of his death are clarified here, and are much less exciting than we had been led to believe.)

There is quite a lot here about Troughton's approach to acting, including his early education ain London and New York. He is on record (sometimes contradictory) about his philosophy of theatre, particularly on how it defined his own sense of personhood:

My father was a complex man but one thing was very clear – he had to act. He once confessed to me, whilst working together on an episode of the seventies TV nursing drama Angels, that acting was part of his being, something he had to do rather than had chosen. He likened the process of inhabiting another character in performance to ‘a drug-like craving that seemed to keep my whole self in order. I can’t imagine my world without it. It sparks me with life.’

This craving for multiple identities perhaps played out in his complex private life, and even his approach to being an ex-Doctor Who, where he embraced the American convention circuit once he had discovered it, but was much less visible in the UK, where he wanted to avoid typecasting for the sake of future acting work. He would no doubt be pleased that IMDB ranks The Omen as his most notable performance. There's not much on politics here (Troughton fought in the second world war, where he became noted for wearing a tea-cosy; he was contrarian for the sake of it in argument). Interestingly, there is more on religion: Troughton was deeply hostile to organised Christianity, boycotted one son's wedding service and was dismayed when another decided to get ordained.

It's a more lively book than Jessica Carney's biography of her grandfather, William Hartnell, because Troughton had a more lively life, and Doctor Who came in the middle of his career rather than at the end (chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10 out of fifteen total). It scratches one's itch of curiosity about its subject, while inevitably leaving you wishing you knew more. Well worth getting.

(Next up, if I can find it, is Directed by Douglas Camfield by Michael Seely; if I can't find it, I'll turn to Robert Holmes: a Life in Words by Richard Molesworth.)

One of Marx’s many great insights was the theory of commodity fetishism – the idea that in capitalism relations between people assume “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” For example, the labour market – “a very Eden of the innate rights of man” – serves to depersonalize the relation between boss and worker and disguise the fact that the former exploits the latter.

Some things I’ve seen recently remind me that this phenomenon is still very much with us.

Alex says:

So many problems that are spoken of as “computer systems” problems are systems problems, that just happen to be implemented using computers rather than paper or giant rocks or whatever.

In this way, management tries to pass off blame for failure onto inanimate things. He’s surely right. We’ve all heard somebody say “our systems are down” as if this were an act of God rather than what it is – bad management.

A lot of talk of this week’s stock market fall fits this pattern. We’re told that the drop was amplified by algorithmic trading, and invited to believe that if only humans were in charge the market would be more stable. This is, of course, pish: who wrote and implemented those algorithms?

Sarah O’Connor describes how a similar thing is happening in workplaces, as workers are increasingly monitored not by humans but by algorithms, with the result that “human managers [are] hiding behind the veneer of ‘data science’ to offload responsibility for their decisions.”

Technology, then, serves an ideological function. It permits bosses to shift their own responsibility onto impersonal things, and to disguise their own power by attributing it to machines. Commodity fetishism lives.

This is on top of the fact that it also provides means for capitalists to better exploit labour. Peter Skott and Frederick Guy show how technologies (pdf) such as CCTV, containerization and bar codes have allowed bosses to screw down wages; the algorithmic management discussed by Sarah is an extension of this.

There is, of course, nothing new here. Supporters of worker oppression in the 19^th century claimed that workers needed to be closely supervised because it would be too expensive for thousands of pounds worth of machinery to lie idle even for a short while. James Carey describes (pdf) how the telegraph “turned colonialism into imperialism: a system in which the centre of an empire could dictate rather than merely respond to the margin.” And more recently, containerization facilitated globalization and hence the entry (pdf) into the global workforce of millions of low-paid workers.

But might there be a backlash here? Rene Chun describes how self-checkouts encourage shoplifting because people feel anonymous. Partial gift exchange – which is the foundation of many economic transactions – is something that happens between humans, not between people and a machine.

My point here should be an old and trivial one, but I fear is under-appreciated. It’s that technology is not merely a neutral set of possibilities for improving the human condition. It plays a central role in shaping both the reality of class relations and our perceptions of those relations – often in ways which we cannot foresee at the time.   

I came up with this while thinking about what an awful job the government is doing at negotiating Brexit, and the tragedy of how a marginal victory by one side in a dubious referendum is taken as a sign that instead of trying to bring the country together, you should just ignore one half completely.

 

So this is my fantasy Brexit policy. It’s not the policy of any political party at the moment. I do wish it would be. If you’re a politician reading this, feel free to steal it.

 

Sarah’s Brexit Policy

The referendum revealed a profound split in our country. Since the result, politics has pandered exclusively to one side while completely ignoring the other. This is not a way to heal the fracture in our society, and will only lead to escalation and further division. A 52/48 split should have been a time to reflect on ways to bring both halves together. Nobody has tried to do that.

If elected we would revoke Article 50 and then start the process the government SHOULD have embarked upon after the referendum vote. We will hold a national conversation respecting both sides of the debate and seek to find a consensus position. If two halves of society want contradictory things, the only fair thing to do is find a position that both can, at least, live with. Only then will we go forward with a change to our international position.

Times

Maybe Corbyn’s LAB is paying the price for its Brexit ambivalence

Threre’s a new YouGov poll in today’s Times that sees a dramatic move to the Tories. The figures are with comparisons on last week:

CON 43%+1
LAB 39-3
LD 8+2

As can be seen this has been driven by LAB losing vote share – three points – with the Tories up 1 and Cable’s LDs up 2.

Also in the poll TMay extended her lead over Corbyn to 8 points as “best PM”. Last week the margin was 6 points.

The pattern of a drop for LAB, a move to CON and an increase in the LD share has been seen in the last three polls from ICM, Survation, and now YouGov.

On Brexit it is not all good news for TMay. A total of 59% think she is doing a bad job negotiating with Brussels compared with 22% saying she is doing well. This is a net minus 37 which equals the worst ever rating since the referendum. At the end of January this was a net minus 32.

Quite why this is happening is hard to say except that Brexit dominates just about everything and on this Team Corbyn has very little to say. The red team’s leadership is very much out of line with the party supporters.

Without a Brexit stance that resonates with party supporters then Corbyn’s party could face an uphill battle and it is hard to see JC achieving his “PM by Christmas” goal.

Mike Smithson

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Tony Yates and Andrew Neil were debating gravity models on Twitter this morning. Tony was right. The gravity model isn’t some hi-falutin theory without much factual backing. It is in fact (pdf) “one of the most empirically successful in economics”.

Even so, talk of “models” is a bit fancy. Let’s instead look at some facts. According to the World Bank Germany exported $118.6bn of goods to the US in 2016. That’s $1434 per person. The UK exported $61.6bn, which is $939 per person. That's one-third less. Germany exported $85.4bn to China, or $1032 per person, whereas the UK exported only $18.1bn or £277. To Russia, Germany exported 5.4 times as much per person as the UK. To Japan it exported 2.5 times as much, and to India twice as much. Even to Canada Germany exported one-third more per person.

These facts tell us something important. They tell us that membership of the single market/customs union is NOT a great obstacle to trade with other nations. It is not the lack of good trade deals with China, the US, or Japan that is restraining exports. Germany has exactly the same deals with them as us and is exporting far more.

What is stopping us exporting? There are countless possibilities: poor management; lack of animal spirits; insufficiently skilled workers; lack of investment; financing constraints; exchange rate volatility; a lack of price competitiveness; and so on. Many of these are, unsurprisingly, the same factors that lie behind our poor productivity.

And these will be the same after Brexit as before. They will continue to hold back exports even if we do sign free trade agreements with non-EU nations. Monique Ebell (pdf) and Silvia Nenci have shown that such deals do little to boost trade. Even if you cut legal barriers to trade, real ones remain. I am free to do a park run on Saturday, but I’ll not – and certainly not in a good time.

Why do Brexiters find it so hard to grasp this?

In part, it’s because some of them do “violence to basic facts of economic life.”

But I suspect two other things are going on. One is that many support Brexit for non-economic reasons and – motivated reasoning being so powerful – they then invent reasons why it will be a good economic thing, like a man putting lipstick on a monkey and pretending it’s Rachel Riley. They forget that there are trade-offs – not least between sovereignty and the regulatory harmony that facilitates trade.

Also, support for Brexit is a way of avoiding unpleasant realities.

Since the 80s, the right has got pretty much want it wanted: weaker unions, more power for bosses, lower top taxes, less regulation and so on. And yet the UK’s macroeconomic performance has remained unimpressive, not least because many structural weaknesses in British capitalism remain – weaknesses that contribute to our lack of exports.

Brexit allows the right to avoid having to acknowledge these weaknesses, however, because they can pretend instead that we can become a great trading nation if only we are free from the shackles of the EU. This prolongs the right’s longstanding belief that British capitalism is fundamentally dynamic if only the right legal framework can be imposed. This, however, is a fantasy.

The Electoral Calculus projection based on proposed boundaries

And the Electoral Calculus projection on current boundaries

Over the next couple of years the boundaries review is going to become a major issue. The final proposals are almost there and to show the effect of them I have taken a projection, based on yesterday’s ICM poll, from Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus based on the old boundaries and compared them with the new.

As can be seen the Conservatives do better with the new boundaries and will be closer to an overall majority. The big question is whether the House of Commons will approve the changes which come to it later on in the year.

A big issue is what was originally the Cameron plan to cut the number of seats by 50. This results in more potential losers amongst those sitting MPs who might worry about having to fight for a seat against neighbouring MP in areas where the number of seats are being cut back.

For many MPs this may be that their livelihoods could be at stake.

In the meantime the existing boundaries, the ones on which the 2010 General Election was fought, are increasingly becoming out of date.

What is interesting is that under both the new boundaries and old boundaries the Tories do better in terms of seats and on the same percentage vote than Labour.

As I have repeatedly highlighted here of late we have moved on from a situation where the boundaries favoured the red team to one where they favour the blue – something that is accentuated by the changes. The issue with Northern Ireland looks as though it has been resolved and the DUP remains the top party in the province.

Mike Smithson

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Being a guy who writes science fiction, people expect me to be well-informed about the current state of the field—as if I'm a book reviewer who reads everything published in my own approximate area.

(This is a little like expecting a bus driver to have an informed opinion on every other form of four-wheeled road-going transport.)

Similarly, marketing folks keep sending me SF novels in the hope I'll read them and volunteer a cover quote. But over the past decade I've found myself increasingly reluctant to read the stuff they send me: I have a vague sense of dyspepsia, as if I've just eaten a seven course banquet and the waiter is approaching me with a wafer-thin mint.

This isn't to say that I haven't read a lot of SF over the past several decades. While I'm an autodidact—there are holes in my background—I've read most of the classics of the field, at least prior to the 1990s. But about a decade ago I stopped reading SF short stories, and this past decade I've found very few SF novels that I didn't feel the urge to bail on within pages (or a chapter or two at most). Including works that I knew were going to be huge runaway successes, both popular and commercially successful—but that I simply couldn't stomach.

It's not you, science fiction, it's me.

Like everyone else, I'm a work in progress. I've changed over the years as I've lived through changing times, and what I focus on in a work of fiction has gradually shifted. Meanwhile, the world in which I interpret a work of fiction has changed. And in the here and now, I find it really difficult to suspend my disbelief in the sorts of worlds other science fiction writers are depicting.

About a decade ago, M. John Harrison (whose stories and novels you should totally read, if you haven't already) wrote on his blog:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader's ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there.

I recognize the point he's putting in play here: but I (conditionally) disagree. The implicit construction of an artificial but plausible world is what distinguishes a work of science fiction from any other form of literature. It's an alternative type of underpinning to actually-existing reality, which is generally more substantial (and less plausible—reality is under no compulsion to make sense). Note the emphasis on implicit, though. Worldbuilding is like underwear: it needs to be there, but it shouldn't be on display, unless you're performing burlesque. Worldbuilding is the scaffolding that supports the costume to which our attention is directed. Without worldbuilding, the galactic emperor has no underpants to wear with his new suit, and runs the risk of leaving skidmarks on his story.

Storytelling is about humanity and its endless introspective quest to understand its own existence and meaning. But humans are social animals. We exist in a context provided by our culture and history and relationships, and if we're going to write a fiction about people who live in circumstances other than our own, we need to understand our protagonists' social context—otherwise, we're looking at perspective-free cardboard cut-outs. And technology and environment inextricably dictate large parts of that context.

You can't write a novel of contemporary life in the UK today without acknowledging that almost everybody is clutching a softly-glowing fondleslab that grants instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, provides an easy avenue for school bullies to get at their victims out-of-hours, tracks and quantifies their relationships (badly), and taunts them constantly with the prospect of the abolition of privacy in return for endless emotionally inappropriate cat videos. We're living in a world where invisible flying killer robots murder wedding parties in Kandahar, a billionaire is about to send a sports car out past Mars, and loneliness is a contagious epidemic. We live with constant low-level anxiety and trauma induced by our current media climate, tracking bizarre manufactured crises that distract and dismay us and keep us constantly emotionally off-balance. These things are the worms in the heart of the mainstream novel of the 21st century. You don't have to extract them and put them on public display, but if they aren't lurking in the implied spaces of your story your protagonists will strike a false note, alienated from the very society they are supposed to illuminate.

Now for a personal perspective. I don't find other peoples' motivations intuitively obvious: I have to apply conscious reasoning to put myself in a different head-space. I am quite frequently alienated by my fellow humans' attitudes and outlook. (I strongly suspect I have mild ASD.) For me, world-building provides a set of behavioural constraints that make it easier to understand the character of my fictional protagonists. (For example, if writing a 2018 story: new media channels lead to a constant barrage of false news generated by state actors trying to produce political change, delivered via advertising networks? And this is why my characters constantly feel uneasy and defensive, dominated by a low-level sense of alienation and angst.) The purpose of world-building is to provide the social context within which our characters feel, think, and act. I don't think you can write fiction without it.

Now, what's my problem with contemporary science fiction?

Simply put, plausible world-building in the twenty-first century is incredibly hard work. (One synonym for "plausible" in this sense is "internally consistent".) A lot of authors seem to have responded to this by jetisoning consistency and abandoning any pretense at plausibility: it's just too hard, and they want to focus on the characters or the exciting plot elements and get to the explosions without bothering to nerdishly wonder if the explosives are survivable by their protagonists at this particular range. To a generation raised on movie and TV special effects, plausible internal consistency is generally less of a priority than spectacle.

When George Lucas was choreographing the dogfights in "Star Wars", he took his visual references from film of first world war dogfights over the trenches in western Europe. With aircraft flying at 100-200 km/h in large formations, the cinema screen could frame multiple aircraft maneuvering in proximity, close enough to be visually distinguishable. The second world war wasn't cinematic: with aircraft engaging at speeds of 400-800 km/h, the cinematographer would have had a choice between framing dots dancing in the distance, or zooming in on one or two aircraft. (While some movies depict second world war air engagements, they're not visually captivating: either you see multiple aircraft cruising in close formation, or a sudden flash of disruptive motion—see for example the bomber formation in Memphis Belle, or the final attack on the U-boat pen in Das Boot.) Trying to accurately depict an engagement between modern jet fighters, with missiles launched from beyond visual range and a knife-fight with guns takes place in a fraction of a second at a range of multiple kilometres, is cinematically futile: the required visual context of a battle between massed forces evaporates in front of the camera ... which is why in Independence Day we see vast formations of F/A-18s (a supersonic jet) maneuvering as if they're Sopwith Camels. (You can take that movie as a perfect example of the triumph of spectacle over plausibility at just about every level.)

... So for a couple of generations now, the generic vision of a space battle is modelled on an air battle, and not just any air battle, but one plucked from a very specific period that was compatible with a film director's desire to show massed fighter-on-fighter action at close enough range that the audience could identify the good guys and bad guys by eye.

Let me have another go at George Lucas (I'm sure if he feels picked on he can sob himself to sleep on a mattress stuffed with $500 bills). Take the asteroid field scene from The Empire Strikes Back: here in the real world, we know that the average distance between asteroids over 1km in diameter in the asteroid belt is on the order of 3 million kilometers, or about eight times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This is of course utterly useless to a storyteller who wants an exciting game of hide-and-seek: so Lucas ignored it to give us an exciting game of ...

Unfortunately, we get this regurgitated in one goddamned space opera after another: spectacle in place of insight, decolorized and pixellated by authors who haven't bothered to re-think their assumptions and instead simply cut and paste Lucas's cinematic vision. Let me say it here: when you fuck with the underlying consistency of your universe, you are cheating your readers. You may think that this isn't actually central to your work: you're trying to tell a story about human relationships, why get worked up about the average spacing of asteroids when the real purpose of the asteroid belt is to give your protagonists a tense situation to survive and a shared experience to bond over? But the effects of internal inconsistency are insidious. If you play fast and loose with distance and time scale factors, then you undermine travel times. If your travel times are rubberized, you implicitly kneecapped the economics of trade in your futurescape. Which in turn affects your protagonist's lifestyle, caste, trade, job, and social context. And, thereby, their human, emotional relationships. The people you're writing the story of live in a (metaphorical) house the size of a galaxy. Undermine part of the foundations and the rest of the house of cards is liable to crumble, crushing your characters under a burden of inconsistencies. (And if you wanted that goddamn Lucasian asteroid belt experience why not set your story aboard a sailing ship trying to avoid running aground in a storm? Where the scale factor fits.)

Similar to the sad baggage surrounding space battles and asteroid belts, we carry real world baggage with us into SF. It happens whenever we fail to question our assumptions. Next time you read a a work of SF ask yourself whether the protagonists have a healthy work/life balance. No, really: what is this thing called a job, and what is it doing in my post-scarcity interplanetary future? Why is this side-effect of carbon energy economics clogging up my post-climate-change world? Where does the concept of a paid occupation whereby individuals auction some portion of their lifespan to third parties as labour in return for money come from historically? What is the social structure of a posthuman lifespan? What are the medical and demographic constraints upon what we do at different ages if our average life expectancy is 200? Why is gender? Where is the world of childhood?

Some of these things may feel like constants, but they're really not. Humans are social organisms, our technologies are part of our cultures, and the way we live is largely determined by this stuff. Alienated labour as we know it today, distinct from identity, didn't exist in its current form before the industrial revolution. Look back two centuries, to before the germ theory of disease brought vaccination and medical hygeine: about 50% of children died before reaching maturity and up to 10% of pregnancies ended in maternal death—childbearing killed a significant minority of women and consumed huge amounts of labour, just to maintain a stable population, at gigantic and horrible social cost. Energy economics depended on static power sources (windmills and water wheels: sails on boats), or on muscle power. To an English writer of the 18th century, these must have looked like inevitable constraints on the shape of any conceivable future—but they weren't.

Similarly, if I was to choose a candidate for the great clomping foot of nerdism afflicting fiction today, I'd pick late-period capitalism, the piss-polluted sea we fish are doomed to swim in. It seems inevitable but it's a relatively recent development in historic terms, and it's clearly not sustainable in the long term. However, trying to visualize a world without it is surprisingly difficult. Take a random grab-bag of concepts and try to imagine the following without capitalism: "advertising", "trophy wife", "health insurance", "jaywalking", "passport", "police", "teen-ager", "television".

SF should—in my view—be draining the ocean and trying to see at a glance which of the gasping, flopping creatures on the sea bed might be lungfish. But too much SF shrugs at the state of our seas and settles for draining the local acquarium, or even just the bathtub, instead. In pathological cases it settles for gazing into the depths of a brightly coloured computer-generated fishtank screensaver. If you're writing a story that posits giant all-embracing interstellar space corporations, or a space mafia, or space battleships, never mind universalizing contemporary norms of gender, race, and power hierarchies, let alone fashions in clothing as social class signifiers, or religions ... then you need to think long and hard about whether you've mistaken your screensaver for the ocean.

And I'm sick and tired of watching the goldfish.

It also suggests a way back for the LDs

The Stop Brexit pressure group Our Future Our Choice has published a YouGov poll it commissioned which suggests that LAB’s poll rating could drop from 39% to 30% if it goes into the next election backing or having backed Brexit.

The big dangers comes from the very same group of voters who were behind the party’s better than expected performance at GE2017 – those under 40.

It finds that 73% of Remain voters in this group would back LAB if it opposed Brexit, compared to just 39% if it supports going ahead.

I should say that I’m not convinced by polls that seek to test opinion in such a way. By its very nature such questioning is leading because you have to link the voting intention to a theoretical proposition.

Also the polling has been funded by a group which has a very clear agenda. Having said that it does highlight a huge risk in Corbyn’s ambivalent approach. He is going very much against a large bulk of the voters who helped save Labour’s bacon on June 8th last year.

As long as Seamus Mline, John McDonnell and Corbyn, all with long histories of being opposed to the EU, are the main drivers of LAB’s position then the party is probably not going to be moved.

The big question is how Brexit will be perceived at the time of the next election which almost certainly will be after it has happened.

Mike Smithson

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So, you said something racist. Or, someone told you that you said something racist.

Or, someone you really like & admire said or did something racist, or is getting told on for saying something racist.

And now you feel uncomfortable. You feel guilty, maybe, or ashamed. Whatever it is, it’s weird and you don’t like it.

What I need you to do when this happens is stop, drop, and be quiet for a minute. You are not Racism Columbo, your job is not to interrogate the situation for whether it is actually, “objectively” racist. Your job is not to find the motive, to drill down to whether it was intended to be racist. Your job is not to revert to High School Debate Club mode and split hairs looking for plausible deniability. Your job is not to defend your fave from the racist stuff they said!

Your first job is to shut the fuck up for a second. If you have to say something, say “I’m sorry.” Then stop talking. Definitely stop typing in that little social media window. Stop. Don’t. Make. It. Worse. Honestly, if most people just stopped there, the world would start becoming a marginally better place almost instantly.

Important: Engaging with white people about race is an incredibly high-stakes and potentially exhausting activity for a person of color to take on. (Women, think of the last time you tried to sincerely engage with a sexist dude who mansplained your world to you. Did you need a drink/seventeen naps afterward? Did you feel like you’d been trapped in a horrible alternate reality with no way out? Yeah.) So if someone is willing to actually talk with you about this, chances are it is an investment having a better relationship with you, not a drive-by insult-fest or attack designed to tear you down and make you feel terrible and hate yourself. They are talking to you about it because they want you to get it and to stop doing the hurtful thing so that they can keep working with/hanging out with you. The people who hate your guts or think you’re a lost cause will just avoid you. There are worse things you could do than just listen without interrupting. 

Step 2, after that initial encounter, instead of trying to justify or excavate why whatever it is isn’t racist or isn’t “really” racist or wasn’t meant to be racist or isn’t usually racist or is racist only on Tuesdays, think about why it is or could plausibly be racist. (Think about this quietly, inside your head.) Why might someone see it that way? What context or history are you missing? How might your action look to someone who doesn’t know about your pure heart and good intentions, somebody who experiences the same “mistakes” and “slip-ups” over and over again from white people? And what are the relative stakes & consequences here if you’re wrong? The saying about misogyny goes: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them.” Welp, white people are worried about being unfairly called racist and feeling weird about it. People of color are worried about dying (in medical situations, at the hands of police, from environmental racism, etc. etc. etc.)

The history of racism is complex enough and insidious enough that chances are:

1. Yep, race is a factor affecting that “fun” or “simple” thing you’re discussing. That one, too.
2.  It’s just possible that we white folks have some rill big knowledge gaps about it.
3. Automatically discounting someone’s lived experience or point of view just because we’re momentarily uncomfortable is a crappy thing to do and we should stop it.

There are steps after that. Reading. Listening. Self-reflection. Finding ways to do the work of dismantling racism. Here is one organization that is doing work. Here is another. This one, too. (Don’t take my word for it or get distracted by whether any of these are the Perfect One. Do research and find something that works for you.)

For today, here are your steps if you should make a mistake and say or do something racist:

1. AT MINIMUM, DON’T MAKE IT WORSE. This almost certainly means saying “I’m sorry” followed by a period of listening and quiet reflection.
2. During that quiet time, think about what it would mean to accept, at face value, someone else’s insight on what is or might be racist. What do you lose when you say to yourself hey, wait a second, I’m the one who screwed up, so maybe I’m not the expert here?

Baby steps, friends.

 

"What are your politics?"
"Well, I am afraid really I have none. I am a Liberal."
"Oh, they count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate."
The Importance of Being Earnest

The Berlin wall was erected on 13 August 1961. It was breached on 9 November 1989, after 28 years, 2 months and 27 days (10315 days, to be exact). Counting forward another 28 years, 2 months and 27 days (or just 10315 days, you get the same answer) takes us to tomorrow, 5 February 2018.

Below is the blog entry I posted on the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, in 2009. Since then, I have continued to enjoy visiting Berlin; and I always pay my respects to the Wall and its memories, for me and for many others.

Originally posted by nwhyte at The Fall of the Wall, twenty years on

The day the Wall fell, I split up with my girlfriend. She had moved to a different city, and the long-distance thing wasn't working; I went to visit her that Thursday evening, and we had an intense conversation over drinks and pizza, vaguely aware that people were staring at the television screens but assuming it was some sports event. By the time we had worked out that we had both reached the same conclusion about the future of the relationship, I had missed the last train; we went back to her place, I slept on the couch and got up early to go home. And then I bought a newspaper and discovered that while one (short and mostly sweet) chapter of my life was ending, the world had changed forever.

I first went to Berlin in 1986, over the long weekend of German Unity Day which was then on June 17, hitch-hiking there with a friend who I was working with in Heilbronn way off in the southeast. In those days Berlin was a slightly hippyish enclave (the hostel we stayed in was very hippyish and slightly threatening) on the front line of the Cold War. The inner German border remains the most vigorously fortified frontier I have ever seen. We went east as well as west (by tram to Frieedrichstraße), and took pictures of the Brandenburg Gate from both sides which I guess I must still have somewhere; I went to an eastern bookshop and made the mistake of referring to "Ost-Berlin" (rather than "Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR"). At that point the Wall had been up for almost 25 years and looked like it would remain a lot longer.

I went back with Anne in 1992. It was utterly transformed, of course. I cried as we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, which had appeared so utterly blocked by historical circumstance and concrete fortification only a few years before. The west of the city had found a new security and confidence, a strong sense of liberation; the east was still shell-shocked by defeat. The transport system, now unified, charged considerably less to former easterners buying tickets. The frenzy of new build was just getting going but the momentum wasn't yet there. Since then I've been back perhaps half a dozen times. Earlier this year I took an afternoon to retrace the Wall, helpfully marked out by bricks in the road. It remains a fascinating city for me, and every time I go I find something new.

The BBC has a handy list of walls that remain, including two of which I have direct experience (Belfast and the Green Line in Nicosia) and another which I work on (the Moroccan berm closing off the illegally occupied part of the Western Sahara). Just as the Berlin Wall disturbed me in 1986, any restriction like this disturbs me now. Robert Frost wrote "Something there is that doesn't love a wall"; his New Hampshire boundary markers were threatened by natural forces, perhaps elves, built by old stone savages. The conflict-built walls of the world are also perpetually under threat from the erosive force of history. And a good thing too.

Both the timetable and the politics make it all but impossible

It’s the Remainer dream that won’t go away. Indeed, it’s as if they’ve never woken up to the strong coffee the electorate served on the fateful night in June 2016. They want to believe that the fight is still on and continue to make the case that they should have made better before EURef1. It isn’t still on and the dream is just that: an hallucination in the dark.

There can be no EURef2 both because the politics don’t allow it and because the timetable doesn’t realistically allow it, even though Brexit Day remains nearly 14 months into the future.

In truth, there are two referendums that opponents of Brexit are touting for – which is itself a reason why it won’t happen: only groups which have a very clear aim and can mobilise great force behind it can overturn the political establishment. With no agreement as to what their detailed objective is, such energy as the Continuity Remainers have is dissipated. Do they want a re-run of the original vote or a confirmatory ballot on the Article 50 agreement? The tactics are as yet unclear.

Let’s pause that question for the moment and look at the logistics, which are similar for either route. Although 14 months might seem a long time, in truth, it isn’t. If the vote is on the same question, the latest it can realistically be held is in the late autumn of this year. To go into December would clash with Christmas, as would a January ballot, and any later than that wouldn’t leave sufficient time to either reverse the A50 notification (if that is indeed possible), or to confirm an exit deal – depending on how the vote went.

So, if the vote was no later than November, that means that all the campaign registrations would need to be in place for September, which in turn means that the legislation would need to be signed off before the summer recess. It’s true that where there is consensus, legislation can be rushed through parliament very quickly – in days or even hours (the Abdication Act of 1936 received royal assent the same day it was introduced) – but a second EU Referendum Act would not be like that for two reasons.

The first reason, which is obvious, is that there would be a great deal of opposition from MPs who believed that the vote has already taken place and that the mandate should be respected (most, but not all, of whom supported the winning Leave side). Let’s also put aside the party politics here for the moment.

The other reason is that even if Leave MPs were minded to let such a bill through, there would still be a mighty battle over the details. In Tim Shipman’s outstanding All Out War, he identified five crucial procedural or legislative victories that Leave MPs (led by Steve Baker, of recent controversy), won that was almost certainly critical to their winning the vote, given the closeness of the final result. The point here is not the specifics as such (which are in chapter 6 for those interested), but that the specifics have a very real effect and that there would therefore be battles over them. The 2015 Act didn’t receive royal assent until a little under 7 months after it was introduced. Even if we accept that a sense of urgency could condense that process, we’d still be surely looking at a minimum of 3 months for the legislation to pass Commons and Lords – so publication would have to be no later than early April.

That’s the true deadline for a re-run of the EURef: two months for the government (or a government) to commit to a new vote and for it to draft and publish legislation to enable it.

And yet where is such a government going to come from? No Conservative PM could possibly introduce such legislation in the current climate and apart from anything else, May is far too weak and even if she were deposed next week, it’d still take the best part of the two months just mentioned to election a new Conservative leader – who would have to be either an original Brexiteer or someone who was utterly signed up to making Leave work. Either way, it’s no new referendum.

Might a Labour government take a different course? Possibly, even under Corbyn, it would – but how does a Labour government come about? They don’t have the votes in the current parliament and even if the DUP were to find some reason to withdraw support from the Tories in the next few days, an election wouldn’t occur until our identified deadline of early April (although possibly a Labour majority government could push the Bill through faster) – but this is loading profound improbability upon profound improbability. In truth, the door has already closed.

What then about the possibility of a ratification vote on the A50 deal? That would presumably have to occur early in 2019, in which case there’s still time to put the arrangements in place – though again, not by much: we’d still probably need a Bill introduced no later than May. That again makes the domestic politics extremely difficult to square with the outcome.

And then there’s the international politics: the diplomacy. This is the angle simply not being considered by those whose advocacy of an EURef2 is driven by a determination to stop Brexit so strong that it’s blinded them to all other outcomes.

If Britain was to go down the road of initiating a second referendum – a process which, as mentioned, would take several months – the withdrawal talks would inevitably become even more difficult for Britain as the EU waited to see what the UK electorate did second time round. How could a British government negotiate withdrawal during that period, when the rug could so easily be pulled form under their feet by the voters?

Even more importantly, what happens if the public do not play ball, as they may well not? It’s true that most recent polls have suggested that a slim majority now would have preferred the UK to have stayed in the EU but it is slim, with low single-figure leads being the norm. Given the scale of Remain’s lead before EURef1 that’s not anything like comfortable, particularly as very few have been making the case for Brexit in principle of late, rather than the case for honouring the referendum mandate – and in any second vote, it’s unlikely that the Conservatives would remain neutral as before.

What happens if the public vote to Leave again in a late November vote? At best, it would require an extension to the A50 period; at worst, it’d mean almost certainly either crashing out with no deal or accepting more or less whatever the EU put on the table before the December summit.

Even worse, what happens if the public voted down a ratifying referendum after a deal had been reached? This point also applies to parliament who theoretically could vote down the deal – though if they do, they at least will do so far more quickly, giving a little time to sort it out. In fact, probably the biggest risk to the whole process is that the European Parliament votes the deal down – but that’s a scenario for another day. At least if Westminster says No, it would probably do so in December, giving a little time for May or her successor to sort something out. Were a referendum to go down in late February or March, there’d be no time for a repeat. Some seem to hope that without a deal, the default would be to remain. They are wrong: the default still be to leave.

But it doesn’t matter. These political-diplomatic tangles are simply additional reasons why MPs will not go down the road of offering a second referendum, on top of the straightforward one that enough of them don’t want to anyway and the boring but very real one that even if they did want to, time has essentially run out.

None of that will stop campaigners from demanding that the political world stop turning and conform to their own preferred laws of physics but their appeals will go unheeded. It’s all a Westminster show now.

David Herdson

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Falmouth, Smithick on Cornwall (Lab defence)
Result: Lab 643 (60% +20% on last time), Con 184 (17% -7% on last time), Lib Dem 184 (17% -2% on last time), Green 57 (5% -11% on last time)
Labour HOLD with a majority of 459 (43%) on a swing of 13.5% from Con to Lab

Pallion on Sunderland (Lab defence)
Result: Lib Dem 1,251 (54% +50% on last time), Lab 807 (35% -16% on last time), Con 126 (5% -8% on last time), UKIP 97 (4% -25% on last time), Green 39 (2% -1% on last time)
Liberal Democrat GAIN from Labour with a majority of 444 (19%) on a swing of 35% from Lab to Lib Dem

Harry Hayfield

Simon says Brexit is a fantasy:

There is nothing about the case for Brexit that is based in reality. This is why everything Brexiters say is either nonsense or untrue.

This poses the question: will they ever acknowledge reality? I’m not sure they will.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Brexit proceeds without massive glitches such as hold-ups at ports but otherwise much as Remainers expect (pdf)– that is, we get slower growth in trade and productivity than we otherwise would. This implies weaker trend growth than otherwise. If we are to be five per cent worse of in the mid-30s than we would had we remained, we’d get average growth of (say) 1.6 per cent rather than (say) two per cent per year.

But the thing about counterfactuals is that nobody sees them. In 2035 there’ll be no Jim Bowen saying “here’s what you could have won”. There’ll be no “a-ha” moment of proof that Brexiters were wrong, even if (arguendo) they are.

And this will bring a host of cognitive biases into play. Once we have bought something, we invent reasons to justify our choice. This is especially true for things we’ve strived hard for. As Dan Ariely put it in Predictably Irrational, “the more work you put into something, the more ownership you begin to feel for it.” This is the Ikea effect (pdf). And it’s amplified further by the fact that if a belief is part of our identity, we are especially loath to ditch it.

Brexiters, then, are likely to play up the benefits of being an “independent people”. And they can easily attribute slowish growth to other causes: inadequate infrastructure or training, a lack of entrepreneurship and so on. Such blame will not be wholly wrong.

As Leon Festinger and colleagues showed, even the clear failure of a prophecy does not necessarily cause its believers to recant. This is likely to be especially true of Brexit, as the failure might not be glaringly, irrefutably obvious.

Asymmetric Bayesianism, choice-supportive bias, the endowment effect, ego involvement and dissonance reduction might combine powerfully to stop Brexiters recanting.

There’s more: adaptive preferences. We’ll get used to mediocre growth and resign ourselves to it. As John Band tweeted:

In 30 years time British people will just plain have forgotten that the country used to be about as rich as France, rather than benchmarking itself against Poland and Portugal.

Facts rarely settle political debates. This might be especially the case with Brexit.

 

It is fitting that the pre-publicity for Afua Hirsch’s book Brit(ish) should have coincided with the death of Mark E Smith. What they have in common are stories of exclusion and isolation.

Ms Hirsch writes:

This country of mine had never allowed me to feel that it is where I belong. If I were to single out the most persistent reminder of that sense of not belonging, it would be The Question: “Where are you from?”

Not belonging, though, is also the experience of many clever working class people. Obituaries of Mark E Smith call him an outsider: The Fall were named after a novel by Albert Camus who also wrote The Outsider. As Mark Brown has written in a wonderful essay, “cleverness meant loneliness.”

And this has been my experience too. My grammar school was on the other side of town and it played rugby, the function of which was not so much to produce rugby players as to signal to people like me that we didn’t belong. And then I went to Oxford which was chocka with charmless dullards from “nice” middle-class backgrounds*. All along there were cues that I didn’t fit in.

Of course, the ruling class rarely gave overt outright messages of class hatred, just as Ms Hirsch rarely encountered crude racism. It likes to think of itself as open and tolerant. But this is self-regarding bullshit which rests upon a denial of the real lived experience of the tens of thousands of black, mixed-race or working-class people: Michael Henderson’s “review” in the Times is a wonderful example of this.

But the undertow is there. And it has real, material consequences. Black people earn less than whites with similar qualifications and are under-represented in influential jobs. Likewise, people who “rise” from working class backgrounds earn less for the same credentials, are more likely to live alone, and are even more likely to die early than those from posh families.

Even if we try to fit in, we never wholly do.

What I’m trying to do here is to lean against a regrettable tendency in identity politics. It is the case that everybody’s particular experience of isolation or oppression is different: Ms Hirsch’s experience is not mine, and mine is not that of a woman or a gay man. But these are different facets of a similar thing: the barriers we face from the beneficiaries of the existing order. Sure, capitalism, patriarchy or heteronormativity are different things. But they have something in common.

Yes, we should rail against the injustices here. But we should also – for the good of our health – remember our comforts.

One of these is the potential for a greater understanding of each other. It’s difficult (though not impossible) for insiders to understand outsiders because fish don’t know they are wet.; this of course was the message of that song. Many of us with experience of both sides, however, might be capable – should we choose to be so – of more empathy. One recent study has found that people from lower social classes are better able to think well about inter-personal conflicts. The divisions in the Tory party – drowning men fighting for a brick - are perhaps consistent with this.

Secondly, when you realize that there’s no point trying to impress some people you lose ambition and the need to work hard. That can be liberating.

And then, there’s art. There’s lots that we outsiders can feel more strongly about than the privileged – from Dostoyevsky** and Camus through to Bowie and Holland. We might have a material disadvantage, but not, necessarily, a cultural one.

* It’s insufficiently appreciated that the more typical product of Oxford is Theresa May rather than Boris Johnson.

** Fyodor Karamazov was just like my dad.

Another thing: there’s a link between this post and my last one. Both are about the need to hear the voices of the excluded.  

Over on Twitter, some foolish person posted the following question, which I will replicate here with all grammatical confabulation intact, because it’s necessary for context:

As a straight male, how would u feel about your child having a homosexual school teacher?! Who their around 8hours a day !

This was my response:

As a straight male, the best teacher I ever had was a gay man. Among many other things, he taught me the difference between “there,” “their” and “they’re.” His name was Keith Johnson. I would have been absolutely delighted for my daughter to have known him. I sang at his funeral.

This tweet, boosted by folks like Neil Gaiman, JK Rowling and Nick Offerman, has now been seen by over three million people. So now I would like to tell you a little bit about Keith Johnson, the best teacher I ever had.

To begin, in 1980, when he was my sixth grade teacher, I had no idea he was gay. It was 1980, when bluntly it wasn’t safe for a teacher to be out (he may have been out to colleagues but I wasn’t aware of it if he was). Also I was eleven years old, and in that time and place, I wouldn’t really have known what it meant to be gay. Not that I hadn’t heard the word or ones like it, which we flung around as slurs — “that’s gay,” “don’t be a fag,” and the game we rather obliviously called “smear the queer,” in which someone caught a ball and then everyone else in the game tried to drive them into the ground. But I didn’t have a very good idea of why those were slurs, nor how those slurs would have been applied to Keith.

No, in that time and place, Keith was simply “Mr. Johnson” — not Keith Johnson, mind you, as the idea of calling a teacher by their first name elicited the sort of holy terror that convinced you that if you were to do so you would promptly burst into retributive flame. “Mr. Johnson” would do. It wasn’t until years later that I could even say “Keith” without feeling I stepped over some still-glowing, forbidden line.

Keith’s reputation preceded him. At Ben Lomond elementary’s “MGM” (“mentally gifted minors”) program, the upper grades went through Mrs. Fox, Mrs. Swirsky and Mr. Johnson, for fourth, fifth and sixth grades. Even in fourth grade you heard about what a hardass Mr. Johnson was, how he didn’t suffer fools, and how if you got out of line, you were in for it. He was legendary in a way that elementary school teachers could be: Here was this fearsome leonine visage, and he was coming for you. Well, not coming for you exactly, but one day you would be in his class, and then you would feel his wrath. Sure, you get away with some things in Mrs. Swirsky’s class. But if you tried that in Mr. Johnson’s class? Principal’s office. Or worse.

Which, when you was finally ended up in Keith’s class, turned out to be only about 30% true. Certainly, Keith wanted you to pay attention, and if you weren’t, he had a boomy baritone voice which would snap you back into line. And if the entire class was lazy or inattentive, then Keith had a phrase that let us know we disappointed him on a fundamental level. “Boy, I’m telling you, some people,” he would say, loudly and with a slathering of reproach, and then would detail what some people would do, and it was clear that some people were foolish and silly and would eventually lead lives of regret and disappointment, and the genesis of those regretful lives would be now, in this moment, when we weren’t getting our history projects done in a timely way. And it would work, because obviously we didn’t want regretful, disappointing lives, but also because we didn’t want to disappoint Keith.

Because here was the thing about Keith. Fundamentally, he wasn’t frightening, or mean, or an indiscriminate hardass on eleven year old kids. He was in fact kind and attentive, and more to the point, he saw each of his students in the way teachers are supposed to, and the way the best of teachers do, seemingly by reflex. He saw us, and saw our quirks and flaws, where we needed encouragement and also what kind of encouragement we would need. He saw us as individuals and as a group, and while he always had the same educational goals year in and year out, it became clear he would get us to those goals in ways that we could get there.

Being seen by one’s teacher, as it turned out, was especially important to me in the sixth grade. My mother was having a bad divorce that left me, my mother and my sister briefly homeless and then shuttling around between houses for the rest of the year. There was little stability, emotionally or physically, in my home life, and it would have been easy — and understandable — for me to fall down a hole and not come out of it for a long time. I didn’t because as it happened a number of people stepped up to help save me. One of those was Keith, who in seeing me saw some of the possible paths of my future, and gently but with just the right amount of push, set me on those paths.

I’ll give you two examples. The first happened when Keith asked me to write a letter. Every year Keith had his class perform a play (my year it would be “Oliver!” in which I would play the Artful Dodger; I can still sing most of the songs from that play by heart). To pay for it, he would have the class run a small business selling doo-dads to other students and parents. We would do the whole nine yards, including registering the business with the city and issuing stock (and at the end of the year, paying off the stock with dividends, if any), and by naming officers of the corporation.

Among the things Keith had us do was publicity, and one day while explaining the concept of publicity to us, he said one of the things he wanted us to do was contact a local TV station and try to get them to do a segment on us for the five o’clock news — and as he was saying this, he turned to me directly, pointed at me, and said “and I want you to write the letter.” Why me? He told me later and privately it was because I wrote differently than everyone else in class and he thought I could make the argument in a way that would interest the news crew. Keith was the first person aside from my mother to see that writing was a thing I did — and the first person to say to me that it was a thing I could do well, in a way that set me apart. It would be a few years until I decided for myself to become a writer, but I never forgot that Keith saw it first in me.

(Also, he was right: I wrote the letter with his editorial guidance, sent it in to Channel 7 News, and then a couple of months later they called and wanted to do a segment on us. We did an extra run of doo-dads so they could see us in production, and then sold those for a nice profit. And that’s how we paid dividends on our stock that year.)

Another example I’ve detailed elsewhere, when Keith gave me a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, said to me I would enjoy it, and said to me it was one of his favorite books. For me, this wasn’t just a teacher suggesting a book, it was my teacher sharing a confidence that was for me alone. And again he was right — The Martian Chronicles is in many ways foundational to my understanding of a field that I would eventually come to write in. I can’t say I became a science fiction writer because Keith gave me Bradbury’s book. But I can say I believe he understood me well enough to believe that it was the right book at the right time for me. And it was.

When I left Keith’s class to middle school, I would still drop by after class to chat with him and catch up; he always seemed pleased that I would come to say hello. I wasn’t the only former student who would do that — others told me they did it as well — but perhaps I was the most persistent, keeping in touch through high school and then college and then in the early parts of my professional career. Somewhere in there I directly asked him if he were gay, because by that time, several years on, some rumors had begun to circulate among his former students. Keith by this time had retired from teaching and told me it was true, named his partner and seemed perfectly at peace with it, and with me knowing.

By this time Keith was also sick. He was one of the many gay men who contracted HIV in the early days, before it was well understood and before there was a good treatment regimen for the virus. It developed into AIDS and he died of it, as did hundreds of thousands of gay and other Americans (and as do thousands still do, even today). I went to his memorial service, as did a few other of his former students, and at his funeral, with the permission of his family and partner, I sang a song I wrote for him.

Keith Johnson was a teacher and I can’t claim that I was more special to him than the hundreds of other students who passed through his classroom over the couple of decades he taught. But I think that’s the point of him being one of the best teachers I’ve known: His skills and talents as a teacher were for everyone, and were there for every student who came through his class. I don’t think I’m alone in saying he was the best teacher I’ve had, and I’ve had some magnificent ones over the years. But he stands alone.

To go back to the original question of how I as a straight male would feel about a homosexual teacher with my child eight hours a day, the answer is: A homosexual teacher was my best teacher, was the right teacher for me at a critical time, and saw me when I could have been lost. It’s even possible that in his way Keith Johnson saved me at a time when I most needed saving, simply by being the teacher he was with each of his students. I would have loved to have been able to introduce my daughter, born after he died, to Keith, my teacher and my friend. And I would want my daughter, and for every child, to have a teacher like Keith — one who saw her, one who taught her, and one who helped make her more herself, as Keith did with me. How could one not wish that for one’s child?

And now you know a little more about Keith Johnson, at least from my perspective. He was my best teacher. His memory is a blessing.

Some time this year, Irish voters will have a chance to repeal Article 40.3.3° of the Irish Constitution, inserted by referendum in 1983. It reads:

The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.

This embedded a ban on abortion into the Irish constitution. Many on both sides of the debate, including the Catholic Church, assert that this ban is in line with traditional Christian teaching, particularly in Ireland. The word “medieval” is sometimes used on the pro-choice side.

This is very unfair to the medieval Irish.

A brilliant 2012 article by Maeve Callan of Simpson College, Indiana, “Of Vanishing Fetuses and Maidens Made-Again: Abortion, Restored Virginity, and Similar Scenarios in Medieval Irish Hagiography and Penitentials.” (Journal of the History of Sexuality vol 21 pages 282-96 - summarised here, but the whole thing is worth a read) recounts the records of four medieval Irish saints who miraculously “cured” unwanted pregnancies, one of them being no less than St Brigid of Kildare. Prof. Callan also transcribes the medieval Irish recommendations of what penance to impose on a woman who confesses to abortion - in one text, less than half the penance for carrying a child to full term and giving birth; for another, it is half the penance imposed on a man who has extramarital sex. Basically, for the medieval Irish church, God might well be on the side of a woman who wanted to terminate her unwanted pregnancy.

I have come on a significant personal journey on this issue. I was educated in the Catholic system in Belfast, and accepted the doctrine which we were taught (and had to regurgitate for our compulsory O-level in R.E.): that human life begins at conception and abortion is therefore always wrong. It seemed logically coherent on its own terms. As an undergraduate I campaigned for David Alton’s bill which would have reduced the term limits for abortion in England, Scotland and Wales, to the extent of visiting Parliament as part of a mass (unsuccessful) lobby. I actually had to withdraw from a spot in a national Lib Dem student slate in 1989 when it became clear that my record on the issue would be a problem. (My replacement, ironically enough, was a younger chap called Tim Farron; I wonder what happened to him?)

But despite my public commitment, I became troubled by two things. The first was that although back then (and until not all that many years ago) I counted myself as a practicing Catholic, my research into the history of the Church’s position on the issue revealed some serious inconsistencies. The logical coherence that I had valued was not there. Maeve Callan’s research was not yet available, but it was perfectly clear that, for instance, St Augustine condemned early-stage abortion as equally (but no more) sinful than sex outside marriage, or marital sex using contraception, both of those being activities which he strongly opposed but that I have enjoyed without, I like to think, any lasting moral harm. The Catholic Church’s dogmatic firmness that full human life begins at conception dates only from 1869, and to assert now (as many pro-lifers do) that it goes back to the earliest times of Christianity is simple dishonesty about theological history. The early picture is murky, as is the picture from Classical times. I don’t go all the way with those who see Numbers 5:11-31 as a text allowing the local priest to terminate an embarrassing pregnancy by magic ritual, but I can see their point. (Going a lot further back, the origin of pregnancy itself is murkier still.)

The second thing that troubled me, frankly, was that although some of my closest friends were also pro-life, many of the other pro-life activists who I dealt with were simply on a completely different political wavelength to me in many other respects, and in addition some of them were not very nice people at all; meanwhile most of the people who I generally had more in common with politically and personally were also pro-choice. (The National Union of Students had a joke: “How many pro-lifers does I take to change a lightbulb?” “The lightbulb may not be working, but I’m going to ignore that and tell you about a much more important issue.”) I have never minded being a maverick, but I started looking around and wondering if it was them or if it was me, and I came to the conclusion that it was quite probably me. I strongly relate to this moving account by an evangelical American former pro-lifer of her growing awareness that the supposedly "pro-life" movement was in reality anything but. (See also U.S. Congressman Tim Ryan.)

So I underwent a quiet change of mind, with no particular need to speak out on it one way or the other. Since the proposition that full human life begins at conception is not tenable, all we are left with is the question of where and when to draw the line, which is obviously a matter for legislation and not the constitution. The issue was not raised once as an issue when I last stood for public election, in 1996, and I doubt that I will ever stand for election again. On the other hand it became increasingly clear to me that a healthy society is a society where everyone is able to make free choices about how they shall live: most fundamentally, whether and how to have children. The State should in general stay out of people’s decisions about fertility, except in so far as it prevents abuse and maximises the available options. Talking to people who have directly made the decision themselves one way or the other reinforced my change of mind.

Many years on, becoming a parent has confirmed my scepticism of the pro-life agenda. I love both of my daughters very dearly. But life with them has not always been easy. I would not condemn any prospective parent who had the opportunity to avoid such an experience of parenthood, and took it. (See also this piece on the Eighth Amendment debate by the father of a girl with Down Syndrome.) This is a very different issue from fatal fetal abnormality, of course, an issue which in my view unhelpfully restricts the discussion even though it is the least defensible aspect of the Irish situation. We need to emphasise the right to choose parenthood positively, a point made quietly but well by Rachel.

Even more so when I consider the awful prospect that either of my daughters might become pregnant, which could only come about as a result of molestation; both are physically mature, but neither is remotely capable of consent. I have no doubt at all that we would exercise our legal authority to have such a pregnancy terminated. A consistent pro-lifer would have to argue that our potential grandchild should not have to pay the penalty of its father's crime or its mother's incapacity. Such arguments frankly do not interest me in the slightest.

Coming back to Ireland, it’s clear that on its own terms the Eighth Amendment has failed. (And I could write a lot more about the crazy times of the 1983 referendum, the Kerry Babies and Ann Lovett, but that will have to wait.) Thousands of Irish women every year still go to England, or to other countries, or get pills mailed to them, to terminate their pregnancies. The defenders of the Eighth Amendment seem to have little to say about that. If the intention was truly to stop abortions from happening, the effect has been to ensure that unwanted pregnancies are restricted to women without the necessary resources to end them. (A similar point is made in this piece by a Texas woman who found Texas had placed so many obstacles in the way of getting a legal and necessary abortion that she had to go to another state.) And, of course, another effect of the Eighth Amendment is that medical care for women fails them because necessary abortions are banned, most notoriously and fatally in the case of Savita Halappanavar.

In four Irish referendums since 1983, two attempts to strengthen the ban by excluding the threat of suicide have been rejected by voters (in 1992 and 2002) while two proposals to recognise reality by formally permitting women to travel abroad for abortions and to access relevant information have been approved (both in 1992). Really it is ridiculous, in any field of policy, for this level of fine detail of women’s rights to be regulated by the blunt instruments of constitutional amendment and referendum.

Ireland now faces another vote on abortion. The new Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has committed to holding another referendum. A specially convened Citizens’ Assembly recommended last June that Article 40.3.3° be replaced by a new text explicitly allowing for legislation on abortion. The parliamentary committee charged with the subject last month recommended the straight repeal of Article 40.3.3° without any new text (rightly so; any new text will quickly become a traumatic litigation playground). High profile politicians including opposition leader Micheal Martin and government MEP Brian Hayes have endorsed the straight repeal option. The tide appears to be turning.

And who knows, maybe it will even reach Northern Ireland next?

Alastair Meeks looks at the challenges facing Cable’s party

There isn’t going to be an early general election

Labour came out of the last election 56 seats short of the Tories and the MP totals of other parties barely make up the gap particularly as Sinn Fein don’t take up their seats. This situation eas exacerbated by the Conservative-DUP no confidence vote agreement.

As the law stands at the moment there are only two ways that an election can take place before 2022. The first would require the Conservatives to do like Theresa May in last April and seek to secure the support of two thirds of all MPs. Given how badly wrong that went for the PM it’s hard to envisage her or her successor doing it again for a very long time indeed.

The other way of an early election can be triggered is if there are consecutive no confidence votes in the government within a period of a fortnight. The deal with the DUP is the first hurdle and the second one is that the SNP, with 35 MPs the third biggest party, surely won’t back any move that could trigger an early election. Their position in quite a large number of Scottish seats is quite precarious and the largest SNP vote share is just 46%.

The election system is now biased in favour of the Tories

Even with the current boundaries the Conservatives could expect to have a double digit lead on seats over Labour if both parties achieve the same national voucher.

This will be even more so if the new boundaries are brought in when the theoretical margin of victory for equal vote shares with Labour increases 20-30 seats

LAB has failed to establish election winning poll leads

Even though by any standards TMay’s Tories have been all over the place what is currently TMay’s party has managed to keep within a percentage point of Labour in almost all recent polls.

On current boundaries Corbyn’s party public needs a national vote lead of about 7% for a majority. On top of that the regional variation in Labour’s support has to be factored in. The party has not been doing anything like as well in the towns of midlands and the north as it had in the big conurbations. The former are places where there are the most marginal seats.

Part 2 of this analysis will be published tomorrow.

Mike Smithson

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One of the world's most-read cartoonists, Mort Walker died early this morning at the age of 94.  He was a professional cartoonist for eighty years.

That's right.  I said he was a professional cartoonist for eighty years.  He was selling 'em from the age of 14 and drawing them years before then.  In September of 1950, he launched his first of his many syndicated newspaper strips, Beetle Bailey.  Originally set at a college, the feature didn't really take off until a few months later when he shifted it to an army setting, drawing on his own military experiences.

It soon became one of the most popular comic strips of all time and Mort could have had a very fine, lucrative life just producing it until he could draw no longer. Instead, he began expanding.  He and his friend Dik Browne began Hi and Lois in 1954 and then he and Frank Roberge started Mrs. Fitz's Flats in 1957.  In 1961, Mort and Jerry Dumas gave us Sam's Strip, which only lasted two years but which was revived (somewhat changed) as Sam & Silo in 1977.

There was also Boner's Ark, which Walker started in 1968, signing it with his real first name, Addison.  There was also The Evermores, which he started in 1982 with Johnny Sajem.  There was also Gamin & Patches which "Addison" launched in 1987.  Some of these strips didn't last long but Mort still had an amazing track record…and Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois and Sam & Silo still persist to this day.

They will not suffer the loss of Mort because for years, they were produced by a squadron of Walker friends and relatives, with Mort writing and drawing as his health allowed.  King Features Syndicate distributed all but Gamin & Patches, and Mort's output was so much a part of King's offerings that the New York office referred to his Connecticut studio as "King Features North."

Mort himself was a cheery, affable fellow who was also very involved in the National Cartoonists Society (serving as an officer and winning many awards from it) and in 1974, he opened the Museum of Cartoon Art, said to be the first museum devoted to the art of comics.  The times I encountered him, he was delightful to be around and always willing to draw Beetle or Sarge for any of his fans.  He sure had a lot of them.

If you'd like to know more about this extraordinary fellow, I would recommend a book he wrote in 1974 called Backstage at the Strips.  It's kind of an autobiography up to that point, and a look at how he and others produced their strips back then.  Here's an Amazon link to a paperback version that's still in print.  It's also a love letter to the cartooning profession — a profession that served him well (and vice-versa) for, like I said, eighty years. That's right: Eighty years!

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“If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?” Two things I’ve seen recently remind me of that line of Ely Devons.

When I approvingly tweeted Stephen Marglin’s account of the rise of the factory system, Pseudoerasmus referred me to Greg Clark’s paper (pdf). He argues that factory discipline emerged because when workers had freedom to choose their hours they short-sightedly worked too little and earned too little:

Whatever the workers themselves thought, they effectively hired the capitalists to discipline and coerce them. Even in the factories of the Industrial Revolution they were the ultimate masters of their fate, but weakness of the will meant they delegated that mastery to the capitalists… Though factory discipline was coercive, forcing the worker to do what he or she would otherwise not have done, the worker was in no sense exploited by the introduction of discipline. The workers voluntarily entered into the temporary servitude of the factory…Had they been able to exercise more self-control, factory discipline could have been avoided for most technologies in the 19^th century.

There is, though, a massive hole here. Clark gives us no direct empirical evidence that this actually happens. He points to no real worker who freely chose factory discipline as a commitment device; to no evidence as to how workers actually chose among different capitalists; and to no worker who was with hindsight grateful to capitalists for saving him from himself. The voice of actual workers is wholly absent*. Clark is not studying horses, but asking: what would I do if I were a horse?

He is not atypical. This is an example of something common in economics – “as if” modelling. Clark describes the rise of factories as if workers chose them as a commitment device, just as (say) Murphy and Becker describe smackheads as if they were rational maximizers. But this is insufficient. You can describe a woman’s black eye as if she had walked into a door. But if in fact her husband had beaten her, you are missing the truth and overlooking genuine oppression and injustice.

My second example was an exchange on Twitter about Cobb-Douglas production functions. Nobody saw fit to point out that if you want to know how useful they are, you should look at how actual firms produce actual stuff: do Cobb-Douglas functions describe the real world or not? Again, nobody’s looking at the horses.

What happens when they do? One nice example is a study (pdf) of a steel mill by Igal Hendel and Yossi Spiegel. They showed that it doubled production over 12 years with the same plant and workforce. Every time the mill seemed to be at “full capacity”, its managers found ways of tweaking production methods to eke out more output. “Capacity is not well defined” they conclude. If this is true of an old economy steel mill, how much more true might it be of intangibles-intensive firms which are more scalable?

To the extent that this is the case, it has an important implication. It means that growth in demand and a zero output gap will lead not to capacity constraints and rising inflation, but to productivity improvements. Hendel and Spiegel give us micro-empirical evidence for a claim by Joan Robinson:

When entrepreneurs find themselves in a situation where potential markets are expanding but labour hard to find, they have every motive to increase productivity.

Recent data is consistent with this. The UK and US have both recently seen unemployment fall to multi-year lows. And both saw productivity jump in Q3 after years of stagnation.

 If all this is the case, then Unlearning Economics is right: long-run growth can indeed be influenced by aggregate demand. Trend and cycle might not be so cleanly distinguished. A zero output gap is to be welcomed as a spur to productivity growth, not feared as a portent of inflation.

Now, I stress the “ifs” here. I’m not saying the evidence for this is overwhelming. All I’m doing in endorsing Sarah O’Connor’s point – that the best economists are those with dirty shoes.

* You might reply that we have few first-hand accounts of the lives of workers: history is written by the winners, or at least the literate. We must not, however, let our thinking be distorted by the availability heuristic.

But there’s a good chance Con MPs will do it anyway

Only one of the three traditional British parties currently has a leader – and that one by happenstance. To lead is by definition a dynamic thing. It is to set oneself at the head of something and take it somewhere in such a way that others follow. It is not a quality granted simply by virtue of holding a given office.

On those terms, Vince Cable is not a leader: he and his party are simply invisible. A leader of the Lib Dems would be going and grabbing publicity. Certainly, the losses sustained over the last two general elections left his party make that far harder than it was before 2015 but capable leaders of smaller parties – Caroline Lucas and Nigel Farage spring to mind – have managed it in the past. The Lib Dems’ impressively large membership has been garnered despite their leader, not because of him.

But Cable’s failings pale beside those of the prime minister. It was telling that she devoted her speech at Davos to the subjects of internet security and regulating artificial intelligence: important matters no doubt but not ones to grab the attention of either the national media or her international peers. She was in effect running back to the ground on which she felt comfortable as Home Secretary – a post that she’s never truly psychologically left. Even more importantly, she didn’t propose anything so there was nowhere for her to lead anyone nor for them to follow.

Her failure to become the leader she was elected to be is, inevitably, what’s at the heart of the renewed speculation over her future at the head of the Conservative Party. The newspaper stories this week might have been based on the alleged comments of the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, asking Tory MPs to be careful in submitting any more letters (a comment which by definition should always apply and which might be as likely to encourage some MPs to act as to put them off), but if more letters have been dropping into Graham Brady’s inbox recently, it’s because of the extent to which her standing has been damaged as much by the actions of others as by anything she’s done. But that in itself is only possible because the vacuum at the centre.

Politically, that’s a recipe for instability. Sooner or later, something will happen that will prompt MPs to act – possibly after a minister does so – or for May to quit of her own accord, though that’s much less likely: prime ministers are rarely short of self-confidence. If Tory MPs are thinking straight, it should be later.

There are all sorts of reasons not to call a Vote of No Confidence now. For one thing, while she’s not much of a leader, she’s not a bad head of government. There’s no great innovation and the intentions she spelt out on entering Number Ten will forever be unfulfilled by her, but as far as anyone else’s ambitions go, that failure to establish a direction is no bad thing: they have no need to engage in premature action to stave off an irreversible decision. In terms of the economy and public services, she’s doing a reasonable job of minding the shop. Sure, there are issues in the NHS at the moment and there are other challenges ranging from Universal Credit to Stormont but none that can’t be rectified with application and perhaps more cash.

Except of course for Brexit: that cannot be deferred. (Let’s leave aside unrealistic legal loopholes here – Britain will leave in Spring next year, probably on March 29, because that’s what nearly all Conservative MPs, plus a large enough number from other parties, are committed to). However, that very fact should of itself be a deterrent to action. To take another two months out of the timetable to indulge in a leadership election would not only be grossly irresponsible and look ridiculous to the public and to the EU27, it could only result in one of two possibilities: a new leader with much the same policy, in which case why bother, or one that wants to rip up 18 months’ work and replace it in a third of the time with something that the other EU members will almost certainly find harder to agree to (on the assumption that any change in policy would be to a harder Brexit) – which is probably not deliverable.

Either way, whatever the outcome, those who don’t like it will blame the leadership contest, certainly for it being a distraction and, depending on their view, because of the outcome.

Besides, if the last three years have taught us anything, it’s that elections are inherently unpredictable, both in themselves and in what the person or party elected turns out to be like. An attempted coup from the Ultras could end up with the membership being given a choice of Amber Rudd and Jeremy Hunt if, say, Boris knocked out the other Leavers and then imploded in a badly misjudged remark. Is it worth the risk?

And of course, there’s the even bigger risk that the leadership election messes up the Conservatives’ relationship with the DUP – not at all impossible given the interrelated issues of Brexit and the N Irish border – and the country is plunged into another general election, taking a further six weeks or more out, riling the public and risking the very real possibility of a Labour win.

We should note, while we’re at it, that there is the risk that the MPs having called a Vote of No Confidence, May then wins. I doubt that she would – the disillusionment seems too deep and the very act of calling a vote would undermine her position further – but the possibility must be faced. In that case, if she won narrowly, it would do nothing to resolve the situation and would probably bring discontent further out into the open; if she won comfortably, with MPs taking the view that now is not the time, then May’s position could be strengthened sufficiently that it becomes hard to challenge her again later in the parliament. On that basis, my own view is that whatever damage a leadership contest would do, calling a vote is of itself the point of no return.

But this is a betting site. The question of what MPs should do (from their own perspective) is a rather different one from what they will do. Muddling through is not an attractive option when there is an alternative, even if that alternative is a leap in the dark.

Will May be forced out this year? Until this last week, I’d have said no based on the power of the logic (though that was also the reason why I didn’t think May would reshuffle this year either). But now? I think there’s a good chance and if it happens, it’ll probably be in response to some incident we cannot yet predict in detail. Everyone has a limit to their patience.

David Herdson

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The Academy Awards nominations came out earlier this week and there is probably no one in my area code who cares about them less than I do. I don't get to a lot of movies the same year they come out. I generally get to them a year or three later.

That's the great thing about movies: They never disappear and they never change. When I take Amber out for entertainment, we mostly go to plays, concerts and other live events since those do go away. Next year or the year after, we'll probably watch the screener I received of The Post or the one here for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or the one for The Shape of Water. They'll be just as good then.

That explains why I can't muster a whole lot of rooting interest in the Oscars. What does interest me is how people try to predict who'll win in this game for which we don't have any idea who votes or why. Analysis of political elections involves knowing how blacks between the ages of 18 and 40 voted or the past voting trends of people who make $200,000 a year or more and what they thought was the Number One Issue. Data like that. With the Oscars, all we know who's won in the past — and we don't even know whether they got 51% of the vote or 99%.

We also don't know who voted or how many. Did 90% of eligible Academy members vote or did 10%? It's probably somewhere in-between but where in-between? There are indications that the key to winning our political elections is turnout. It's not how many people are on your side. It's how many of them went to the polls. So what was the turnout for last year's Oscars? How many people returned their ballots? Answer: You have no friggin' idea.

And here's the thing I'd really love to know: What is the criteria for a category like Best Actor? I mean, I assume it's different with everyone but how different?

Some years, it seems to me — and remember, I'm basing this on no data whatsoever — that a lot of voters are voting for the actor who most successfully tackled a controversial, non-glamorous role in a film that didn't seem like a shoo-in at the box office. The Oscar, it seemed to me, was about taking big risks…which is why you see so few nominations for raunchy comedies or movies with a lot of CGI. (General rule of thumb: If the movie's up for Best Visual Effects, it'll get zero acting nominations.)

But maybe some people are voting for the actor they think is overdue to win for past work. And some are voting for the actor they just plain like more than the others. And maybe some are voting for the actor they think will give the most exciting acceptance speech. And maybe a lot of 'em are voting for the only nominated performance they saw last year.

And maybe — and I have a hunch this is true in more cases than one might imagine — they vote for the performance that "the buzz" (industry chatter) says is the most outstanding. Since we have zero data, my hunch can never be proven right or wrong but there are folks out there who do a pretty good job of predicting the Oscars and most of them seem to basing their predictions on "the buzz." I think that may be it.

Then again, maybe they're all voting for the movie star they last saw in a fast food restaurant…and Meryl Streep wins so often because she eats every meal at a Burger King. Yeah, that could be it.

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