Category: Uncategorized

[Being some notes towards a talk I couldn’t give.]

There are two things that are commonly said about utopian thinking. These are: (a) that it is indispensable to progressive change – by which I just mean change for the better; and (b) that it is dangerous. So why don’t I begin by reiterating both of these things, because both of them are true.

(a) Sketching utopian alternatives to the present opens our minds to imaginative possibility, to ways in which we might live differently and better than we do now. This point might seem straightforward, but one must not underestimate how common it is for minds to be closed against radically different alternatives. For many of us the world we know is the only one we know; we can fall into taking it for granted that the ways of doing things in this world, its rules and structures, are the only conceivable ways or the only practicable or efficient ones. In what Marxists sometimes refer to as reification, we turn historically specific modes of life into universal realities or what we assume to be universal and unchangeable. Utopian thinking uses the devices of abstraction, projection, imagination, to challenge the power of the seemingly obvious.

Marx himself was dismissive of the practice of constructing detailed utopias – ‘writing receipts… for the cook-shops of the future’, as he once contemptuously put this – but there were undoubtedly utopian elements in his thinking. For example, there is his notion of a world that could inscribe on its banners the slogan ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ Or there is the idea of a society in which alienated labour could be overcome or at least much mitigated, so that human individuals could enjoy, all of us, a rounded existence, and if not exactly ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner’, then be able to engage in some range of activities, rather than being chained day in and day out to a single narrow function.

How far either of these ambitions is realizable – or indeed desirable – I won’t go into here, but it is an old and distinguished purpose of political philosophy (and of literature, science fiction, etc) to engage in this critical, sometimes utopian, exercise, in order to encourage us to question what we are familiar with and its seeming permanence and/or legitimacy.

(b) And utopian thinking can also be dangerous. The conditions in which it becomes so typically involve something like the following: when the partisans of utopia get their hands on political power and determine to carry out their will irrespective of, even against, the balance of popular opinion; in other words, when some would-be project of progressive change lacks democratic support and popular legitimacy and has become the work of a ‘vanguard’, it can do great mischief and destroy and ruin millions of lives. The pace of change is often then forced, and the impractical or impossible tried against the weight of experience, or what has been tested, or just elementary common sense. Yet because it is supposed to be utopia we have in prospect – the very ideal human society – nothing, according to its partisans, may be allowed to stand in its way. What price some few million lives when the solution of all human difficulties is on offer?

Except this never is on offer: the human condition is imperfect and problematic by its very nature; so we must beware every utopian dream that has become detached from the basic norms of democratic validation and respect for human lives and human rights and civil liberties now. If Marxism has had something to teach about the possible benefits of utopian thinking, it has also, in its more monstrous historical forms, taught us enough and too much about the risks and the costs of utopia when divorced from liberal and democratic norms.

Going beyond those two contrasting truths from which I’ve begun, I want now to argue briefly for what I think is the minimum condition of any acceptable utopia today, and insist that it has to include an anti-utopian element. The core of it is this: the recognition that human beings are not only not perfect, they should also not be conceived as being perfectible – neither morally perfectible nor perfectible in other ways. As a species we have shown ourselves capable of enormous achievements, both individual and collective, in every sphere: scientific, industrial, technological, aesthetic, cultural, medical. Morally, too, human beings have displayed the greatest in heroism, compassion, altruism, perseverence, and disinterested help to others.

At the same time, however, our moral nature is fragile and it is flawed. Human beings are also responsible for terrible levels of cruelty, evils that defy belief, callous indifference to the sufferings of others. This is not merely the occasional product of ‘bad’ social conditions; it is a permanent potentiality of our natures, and therefore no prospective utopia is worth even a rusty nail that doesn’t build restrictions and limits against that potentiality – not only but at least the traditional constraints of the rule of law and the standard liberal protections of the individual, of all individuals.

For in the very idea of utopia itself are linked both the marvels and the evils lying dormant within human nature. Everything is possible, says the soaring imagination, the imagination of beauty and creativity and wonder. In a manner of speaking, so it is. But everything is also possible at the wrong end, in the eye and the places of human depravity. It was a common wisdom of the Nazi camps: I did not know before that on the human stage everything happens; now I do know. It is a lesson not to be forgotten.

Hold on to your hats, everyone. I have discovered the source of all our national ills. Not bankers; not a messed-up education system; not the Tories; not bad sportsmanship in football; not a culture of skiving; not people spending too much time on Twitter and Facebook; not dishonesty in public life. No, it goes much deeper. Yesterday, in conversation with WotN, I learned of the fact that Waitrose now sells those fruits that some call tangerines and satsumas but that I still call naartjies, as Easy Peelers. Then my friend Chris put me on to this (from 2008):

Oranges are being struck off shopping lists because people are losing the patience to peel them, according to suppliers.

Consumption was down 2% over the last 12 months – the third year of decline in a row, trade magazine The Grocer reported.

The drop has been countered by growth in the market for smaller, “easy-peeler” varieties.

Readers, I ask you! I am not an especially strong or rugged person. But is an orange really hard to peel? What has happened to the moral fibre of the nation if the young and even middle-aged are now finding it so? I can only conclude that we were a tougher generation, born as we were during the war.

Chris reiterates the point earlier made by Alex here: we should not allow the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh to obscure the fact that economic development in that country, including through sweatshops, has had beneficial effects in mitigating poverty, and that child mortality there has fallen. Chris’s particular angle on the issue is the ordinary bias in news reporting; this focuses on abnormal events, like a collapsing building, but not on what is taken to be ‘normal’, as acute poverty is.

Against that background, Chris writes:

[N]ews reports which draw attention to the evils of sweatshops but not to those of rural poverty understate the benefits which such sweatshops have brought. Yes, they’re hellholes which perhaps could and should be improved upon – but they’re better than the alternative.

In this sense, news generates a bias amongst its western consumers; it encourages a hostility to globalization and industrialization even though these are – albeit imperfect – routes out of poverty.

There are three comments I have about this. First, Chris’s – and Alex’s – points are well made against anyone who is indeed hostile to globalization and industrialization or who overlooks the actual trends in a country like Bangladesh in child mortality rates and the statistics on poverty more generally. Second, it is far from clear to me that the majority of Western consumers are hostile to globalization and industrialization. Some number amongst them are sure to be, but it’s a matter of the proportions and I’d be very surprised – no, flabbergasted – if there were large majorities amongst Western consumer populations biased in this particular way. Third, I’m puzzled by Chris’s ‘perhaps’ in the phrase ‘hellholes which perhaps could and should be improved upon’; because thinking they could be improved upon requires no opposition whatever to globalization and industrialization or their benefits, and my own earlier post on this topic tried to make it clear that I was arguing for reforming safety standards and working conditions without in any way gainsaying the benefits of economic development.

The history of capitalism has never imposed a stark choice of either economic development without any legal or moral restraints or holding back development in favour of the persistence of acute poverty. No more is one forced to make that choice today. One need accept neither bias.

There was a time, way back, when I used to collect cinematic occurrences of the hymn ‘Shall We Gather At The River’. By ‘collect’ I just mean I remembered them and had a mental list. I no longer do remember all the occasions on which I’ve seen it cropping up, just a few of them. Here’s the first, from one of my very favourite sequences of film of any genre, in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine. For ‘Shall We Gather At The River’ you want 4 minutes 15 seconds in to just after 6 minutes, but the whole 9 minutes is worth your time, starting with the barber (and his follow-on effect) and ending with the dance.

‘I’d admire to take you’ is a line I’ve never forgotten.

A writer at the Scientific American looks at what happened at this year’s Boston Marathon and sees what he calls ‘an unmistakable beauty’. You read that right; it isn’t a misprint. For it’s not the act of terrorism and the deaths and injuries resulting from it that Adrian F. Ward is referring to in so characterizing what happened. No, it is, rather, the responses prompted by the crime: people showing concern for one another; rushing to help without care for possible danger to themselves; individuals giving blood; behaviour patterns that ‘transcend us-vs-them ways of thinking’; testimony, all in all, to the altruistic impulses in human nature. It is the ‘immense capacity for human goodness’ that moves Ward to write in the terms he does.

I have no desire to make light of any of this. It is entirely proper to remind people of the good of which we are capable, and it is especially apt to do so in the face of acts of wanton criminality and wickedness. Even in the most extreme circumstances, human courage and compassion are there to resist the evils perpetrated by some human beings against others. I have never accepted the argument, for example, that it is wrong to focus on Holocaust rescuers, wrong because that is to suggest there was a good side of the story when the overwhelming weight of things was in fact otherwise. But there was a good side; even there – and even in the death camps – however reduced it was by the force of Nazi barbarism.

So I have no quarrel with Ward’s effort to balance the picture of the crime done in Boston with the positive social responses it evoked. Yet it is the balance that is everything, and Ward gets it wrong. He concludes by saying that the reactions of ordinary people in Boston ‘offer the hope, at least, that the good in people will always overcome the bad’. Unfortunately, it won’t; that is a manifest falsehood. The bad is neither overpowered nor washed away by any good called forth in response to it. The prematurely dead remain dead; the injured and the traumatized rarely recover fully from what has been done to them; the grief of those who have lost loved ones cannot be undone. And this is to say nothing of the other poisons that are invariably released into the social bloodstream: those who celebrate the crime, or make myths about the agents of it, those who insist that it wasn’t as bad as some previous crime (which is nearly always true), or who go into apologia’s thousand other modes. This is true of smaller crimes, as it is true of vast ones genocidal in scope.

To speak of the bad always being overcome is what truly makes light of things that should be properly weighed – makes light of the terrible permanence of grave wrong-doing when it occurs. This can never be put right; nothing redeems it.

Further to my post about the collapse of the Rana Plaza buiding near Dhaka last week, here’s Justin Forsyth (£), chief executive of Save the Children:

The wrong response to Dhaka would be for companies to disinvest in the light of the international outcry. Bangladesh’s women garment workers need decent jobs so they can raise and educate their children. Bangladesh as a nation needs to grow its private-sector jobs and investment to raise its population out of poverty.

Investment from the private sector is a big cause of growth in poor countries and has played [a] powerful part in creating jobs, lifting people out of poverty and improving the prosperity of countries such as Bangladesh, where headline rates of poverty have fallen from 57 per cent in 1992 to 31.5 per cent in 2009. That means a child born in 2008 can expect to live to 66, while in 1970 it was 44. Economic growth has also provided tax revenues that have led to investment in healthcare and education: there has been an impressive rise in girls attending school, to as much as 82.5 per cent in 2009.

But we need to go further, not just in Bangladesh but across the developing world, and companies have a big role to play. Tragic though this week’s events have been, we don’t start from zero. The sweat-shop campaigns in the 1990s have had a serious impact on the behaviour of companies such as Nike and Gap. But progress has not been even and too many companies still turn a blind eye to unacceptable business practices.

More companies need to sign up to the “Do No Harm” approach championed by campaigners; this means ensuring basic health and safety standards, protecting labour rights, paying decent wages and addressing environmental impact. It also means paying fair taxes. Despite the outcry over Starbucks’ tax bill in the UK, the bigger scandal is that developing countries are estimated to lose as much as $160 billion in tax dodging each year – more than the entire global aid budget.

The final, vital element is greater concerted international action by governments to incentivise business leaders and to regulate against unacceptable practices.

So: capitalism but with more acceptable business practices. It would seem hard not to prefer this to capitalism with less acceptable business practices.

Marc Tracy is ruing the decline of the blog. Its golden age is over, he says; in the new world of what the internet has become, with Twitter and Facebook and other such conduits, there is no longer much place for the personal political blog. ‘Twitter has replaced any individual blog as the place the political conversation plays out’; and:

Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter. Instead, they use social media to efficiently pick exactly what they do and do not click on, rather than reading what a blogger or blog offers them.

Well, Tracy is focusing on the biggest hitters in the world of personal blogs, and he’s probably studied statistical trends, as I for my part haven’t. But I would like to enter a caution or two all the same.

There’s no denying that the blogosphere, as it used to be called, has changed. One of the main changes has been how much the pattern of blog traffic has altered: once a large proportion of this came from other blogs linking to posts that bloggers found interesting or took issue with; now much more of it comes from Twitter and Facebook links. However, just judging by the visitors to my own blog, this doesn’t inevitably mean either an irreversible decline in the overall numbers visiting personal political blogs, or that the readership established before the changes under discussion came about has departed, so to say Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Whatever may be the case for Andrew Sullivan, others of us continue as before and find it worth doing, for a variety of reasons. One reason, at least, is this: it may be true that the political conversation ‘plays out’ much more on Twitter and elsewhere, but it is rather harder to set out a reasoned argument on anything in 140 characters than it is in a blogpost – for which there are still readers, as there are for op-ed pieces in the press. (Via JF.)

What should be the balance between our obligations to others who are in need or emergency, on the one hand, and our rights to pursue our own ends, on the other? I don’t know the answer to the question, though it’s one I addressed in my book The Contract of Mutual Indifference. I think that most of us could and should do more than we in fact do in the way of fulfilling our obligation to help others; at the same time, I don’t think anyone has a duty to others so extensive as to require them to sacrifice their own pursuits and their own ends without limit.

My answer to the question ‘Is it moral to be happy in a world like this?‘ – where ‘like this’ covers the existence of enormous suffering – is: yes, it is. This is my reason for saying so. It’s based on the axioms that ground one’s thinking about ethics. If human lives matter at all, as the above question implies they do, then it is arbitrary to rule that your own life must fall out of consideration when making judgements about what it is moral for you to do.

Putting the same thing in another way perhaps, the claim that it would be immoral to be happy where others are suffering entails that attention should be given to halting or mitigating the suffering of those others, so far as is possible. But doesn’t that mean that we think that they have a right to be happy? And if they have, then why not everyone, including you and me? It might be said that no one should be happy unless everyone is, but in view of the brute realities of the world – I mean such things as bad luck, ageing, interpersonal friction and animosity, crimes, grief, illness, accident – the simultaneous or permanent happiness of everyone is a utopia (in the bad sense), and ought not to govern our moral thinking.

After the factory disaster on the outskirts of Dhaka on Wednesday, in which a collapsing building killed more than 300 people (with many still missing), some have expressed concern about the inadequacy of safety standards in such factories in poor countries that supply cheap goods to Western outlets. One journalist who did so was David Blair in the Telegraph, where he wrote, among other things:

Campaigners say that retailers do carry a burden of responsibility. If you are going to make money by selling products on the high street, you have an obligation to ensure a basic minimum of decency in the conditions in which they are produced. That was recognised as long ago as 1802, when the first Factory Act was passed limiting the hours that British women and children could work.

Today, globalisation means that the seamstresses who make our clothes are not working in Lancashire or Nottingham, but in Bangladesh or India. These women live far away, but they are equally worthy of a sense of obligation.

“Legally, as businesses in the UK, the responsibility of the retailers is only to their shareholders,” says Clare Lissaman from the Ethical Fashion Forum. “But morally, if they are making their money off the backs of people who are dying, then absolutely they have a responsibility.”

On the other hand, several commentators have argued that the benefits of globalization, including to those having to work in unsafe conditions, clearly outweigh such moral qualms. Among these commentators are Matt Yglesias, Tom Chivers and Alex Massie. There are differences of detail in the way the three of them present the case, but they express some common central themes as well. Thus, Matt thinks ‘it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different – and, indeed, lower – workplace safety standards than the United States’, and this is because, in his view, ‘there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans’. The same thing is said by Tom – that it comes down to the choices made by the workers concerned: ‘those people working those awful jobs are doing so, finally, out of choice. Not a nice choice – their options were not good but a choice: work in a sweatshop, or work for a local employer (if there is one), or try to subsist without an employer.’ And Alex for his part emphasizes the point repeatedly. He writes:

Some 45% of Bangladeshis work in agriculture, many of them still, alas, on terms little better than subsistence farming. By contrast, working in a clothing factory is, relatively speaking, an attractive option.

Again:

We might deplore the conditions in which they are compelled to work but that should not blind us to the fact that, like it or not, these are still preferable to the alternatives realistically available to them.

And again:

Life, however nasty, in these cities is preferable to the miseries of rural poverty. Similarly, life working in what we deem a sweatshop is, for millions, preferable to the alternatives available to them.

Alex plainly feels some discomfort over his own argument, asking, ‘Is it callous to think that industrial accidents – even tragedies – are, to put it in unfortunate terms, a price worth paying for this improvement?’ and answering that perhaps it is; but then reiterating that it is a price which Bangladeshis themselves are prepared to pay.

What strikes me, however, is the unqualified way in which all three of them arguing this case present the choices available to workers facing less than adequate safety standards at work as if there were some natural context of choice (as defined perhaps by globalized markets?), one unconstrained by anything else, to do, for example, with law, morality, institutional checks of one kind and another, or cultures of employment, good professional practice and workplace welfare. It’s as if capitalism – called by Alex ‘a brutal mistress’ – came into the world and now subsists there without any institutional or cultural context, and the choice of a worker took place in a vacuum and just had to be accepted at face value. Yet, this has never been so. Markets whether local, national, regional or globalized have always been subject to legal and other institutional influences, permitting some practices, forbidding others; this is the case in richer countries now, it has been in the past of those same countries, and it is not clear why Bangladeshi workers should not also be subject to suitable protections. Where workers in poorer countries are not subject to relevant protections, neither is it obvious why campaigns to improve things shouldn’t be waged and supported. The campaigns may be for factory legislation in the countries involved, or they may be to impose legal obligations on firms in wealthier countries profiting from cheap labour elsewhere, but either way it’s hard to see what should restrain us from favouring such reforming efforts.

This is not a question of being forced to accept or reject globalization in a wholesale way. One can think, as Alex does, that globalization has been a great success, and still press for better working conditions in countries that need them. Tom appears to recognize this point when he writes ‘This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to make things better for workers, everywhere in the world. Of course we should. But it needs to be done in the acceptance of a simple fact about humans: most of the time, we try to make or save money.’ Which is, once again, to advert to the free market as sovereign and uncontrollable, when in fact it can always be and most often is set about by legal and cultural limits. Tom also says that to imagine we can change bad (cost-cutting) behaviour through campaigning is ‘utopian thinking’. One thing or the other: either we can try to make things better or we can’t. Wanting to eradicate the human temptations that lure people into profiting from the unsafe working conditions of others may well be utopian; wanting to put in place limits that curb what they may freely do without incurring penalties is not only not utopian; we have seen it happen time and again in democratic societies.

Finally, if we are to gauge accurately what workers in Bangladesh want and therefore the choices they would prefer to make to the ones they have to make, we must surely pay some attention to the large protests that have been set off in Dhaka by the lethal collapse of the Rana Plaza buiding. There doesn’t seem like any good reason to restrict one’s conception of free choice to the way people express themselves through employment decisions. Human beings have a wide range of means of expression, amongst these political acts like voting, demonstrating, writing to the press, blogging, going on strike, and so forth.

From a tribute to Sir Alex by Darren Richman:

Last Yom Kippur I went to synagogue with a book of Ferguson quotes disguised as a prayer book and read it cover to cover. Initially I felt bad about breaking the second commandment on the holiest day of the year but then I recalled I need only beware false idols. It brought to mind a Passover choon entitled Dayenu in which we list all of the gifts God has bestowed on us (brought us out of Egypt, gave us the Torah, yada yada yada) and conclude each line with the titular word, the rough translation of which is ‘That would have been enough.’ Even just one such wonderful blessing would have sufficed.

If He had brought us our first title in 26 years? That would have been enough.

If He had brought us our first European trophy since 1968? That would have been enough.

If He had brought Cantona to the club? That would have been enough.

If He had brought home 2 European Cups? That would have been enough.

If He had placed us on top of a certain perch? That would have been enough.

And Giggs, Scholes, Rooney, Van Persie, etc… Dayenu.