Porter’s Pensées

All those nineteenth-century anti-democrats’ warnings about the evils of ‘mob rule’ – see https://bernardjporter.com/2019/03/31/the-mob/ – seem to be coming to roost now, in the new guise of ‘populism’. There can be little doubt that ignorance and stupidity are two of the elements that fuel political discourse currently, on all sides, of course, but most noticeably and dangerously (I would say) on the Right. We’ve witnessed several example of literal ‘mobs’ in the US and the UK recently (Washington 2021, British cities 2024); all of them expressing typical Right-wing complaints, and many of them coloured by far-Right conspiracy theories. It’s not necessarily their fault, of course, but a response to real – but ignored – grievances and concerns, boosted and manipulated by both the millionaire-owned mainstream media and, now, the billionaire-owned ‘social’ sort.

There are general questions to be asked over whether foreign-based multi-millionaires of any political persuasion (and they are likely to be Rightist, because they’re rich) ought to have so much influence over any country’s domestic politics. There are also questions to be asked about the veracity of the information they put out: how we can tell whether it’s true or reliable, or untrue enough to be discouraged or even censored by the ‘fact-checkers’ who used to be employed to establish the reliability of posts on blogsites, until Musk and Zuckerberg came along. Is it only a ‘freedom of speech’ issue, as those two chappies maintain? And – more philosophically – what is truth? One doesn’t have to go all the way down the ‘postmodern’ burrow, or adhere to Kellyanne Conway’s 2017 line on ‘alternative facts’, to think that Trump’s claim that the USA’s alliance with Italy goes back to the days of the Roman Empire, or Musk’s description of Labour minister Jess Phillips as a ‘rape genocide apologist’ (and there’s more where that comes from), were anything but grotesque lies: stupid in the first case, malevolent in the second. True or untrue, the fact that these views have millions of dollars projecting them on to the internet, whereas the rest of us only have a single comment or vote each (or at best a newspaper article) to disagree with them, can’t be healthy for a democratic politics.

Quite apart from their distribution, where do these views – in general terms – come from? I think I glimpsed a clue when I once lived in the USA, and heard this comment on a night-time phone-in radio programme. (I’ve quoted it before, possibly more than once, but think it’s worth repeating.) The topic for discussion was the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. The host brought up the issue of the London Blitz. A phoner-in justified that by claiming it was ‘in retaliation’ for the Dresden bombing. The problem with this, of course is that the Blitz came four years before Dresden. When this was pointed out to the speaker, his reply was I think revealing: ‘I’m a free American and can believe whatever I like.’ Could that be the mind-set that lies behind Trump’s and Musk’s dangerous howlers?

Or it may be simply the amoralism that seems to be endemic in Right-wing politics these days: the idea that in a flawed political world what persuades is more important than what is true. Especially if it can be trumpeted over and over again, by those whose views can be amplified – in the present case by social media – and to people who rely on headlines and slogans, and have not been educated to discriminate between propaganda and likely truth. Surveys of the educational attainments of each of the sides in recent national debates in Britain and the USA indicate that the ‘populist’ Right is relatively unschooled by comparison with ‘progressives’. Which is why ‘populists’ demean schooling so much – ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ (Michael Gove) – and put them in the ‘élitist’ category that is the common target of most of them.

Which of course raises the hackles of the populists even more, and is a further obstacle to a politics of a more considered and rational kind. Listen to any phone-in programme today and you will find stupidity in abundance. Dare to say it, however, and you’re immediately dismissed as one of those liberal, wokeish ‘elitists’. It’s depressing.

Solutions? Electoral reform. A ban on rich people having too much influence on the internet. Dissociate yourself from the most outlandish ‘woke’ ideas. An educational system that prioritises thinking over everything else.  And perhaps take Musk off his anti-depressants. (What are the side-effects of ketamine?)

Anyone who is alarmed by Trump’s recently-expressed expansionist ambitions – Greenland, Canada, Panama, and even Britain – and is curious about the place of US ‘imperialism’ in modern history, might like to take a look at my Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (Yale University Press, 2006). Its argument is that the United States, despite its anti-colonial pretensions – ‘we don’t do empire’ (Donald Rumsfeld) – has long been ‘imperialistic’ in much the same way as nineteenth-century Britain was, and with similar motivations, methods and results. Most people outside the US, especially on the Left, won’t need to be told this; but it’s important to know, especially just now.

I’m sure this has occurred to many others; but what’s the chance of Johnson defecting to Reform UK to become its leader – and then possibly a second-term  prime minister – after Musk’s ditching of Farage?

Musk’s interventions in British politics recently – and also in German, Canadian and (of course) American affairs – are clearly worrying. In the first place many of them are misinformed, especially the ones blaming Starmer and his ‘Safeguarding’ Minister Jess Phillips for covering up child-rape gang crimes: Phillips to the extent of claiming that she should be sent to prison for being (I quote) ‘a rape genocide apologist’. He also thinks that King Charles should prorogue Parliament to enable another general election; in which he has indicated that he would generously finance the ‘Reform UK’ Party (or Limited Company) in order to propel his new friend (but vide infra) Nigel Farage into Number 10.

All these indicate two things: a very weak grasp of British constitutional politics, as well as of ‘truth’ in the cases he makes against Starmer and Phillips (who surely have grounds for libel actions against him); and secondly, what is now revealed as his extreme right-wing approach to politics generally, putting him in the company not only of Farage, but also of Trump, Meloni in Italy, the AfD in Germany, and probably Putin. In Sweden (where I’m living) he’s currently in conflict with the powerful trade unions over workers’ rights (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/01/one-year-on-we-know-this-swedens-trade-unions-are-more-than-a-match-for-elon-musk); which makes him persona non grata here. He has also alienated liberals worldwide with his views on gender issues, sparked by one of his children’s seeking re-assignment from male to female, and what she has described as his cruelty to her over this (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-wilson-interview-rcna163665). He has recently positioned himself as one of the most prominent members of a movement pledged to eradicate what he sees as the  ‘woke mind virus’ in America and elsewhere (https://wng.org/opinions/a-vow-to-destroy-the-woke-mind-virus-1722103194). So we know where he stands philosophically.

Where does all this come from? And why is he now particularly targeting the UK?  It could of course be his South African birth (in 1971) and early upbringing: ‘white’ South Africans are not particularly noted for having liberal ideas, and may still resent their former British masters for their role (eventually) in ending apartheid. His parents were wealthy, which enabled him to enrol at prestigious universities in Canada and the USA, whose citizenship he acquired in 2002. Thereafter he made his huge personal fortune – he’s reputed to be America’s, or even the world’s, richest person – in the high-tec industry. (All this can be followed up in his Wiki entry.) His political influence today comes through his acquisition in 2023 of the social networking service Twitter, now renamed simply ‘X’; and his very recent public support of President-Elect Trump, whose administration he’s hoping to join – although they don’t agree on everything: immigration, for example. He regards the English racist activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who hides behind the more normal-sounding moniker of ‘Tommy Robinson’: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson), as a defender of ‘free speech’ and a British patriot, and has pleaded for his release from prison on these grounds. (He disagrees with Farage on this; and also – according to reports today – on his leadership abilities: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigeln-farage-elon-musk-reform-b2674035.html). This indicates a surprisingly close interest in what might be regarded as the minutiae of British politics, for someone who has had little or no personal experience of the country, and can only have been briefed at a distance by fellow Rightists there. Their main channel seems to have been our ‘Nige’, who is cuddling up to him too, proudly – and profitably, if Musk comes up with the dosh he is said to have promised to ‘Reform UK’. Or was, until today: vide supra.

Of course capitalists have always tried to influence politics; but none – that I can think of in British history – quite as openly and personally as Musk. (Cecil Rhodes may be the closest. South African, again.) You can understand some of the intrinsically ‘capitalist’ reasons for this: democratic accountability is often regarded as an unnecessary hindrance to the free play of market forces, especially under Labour, whose election to government last summer – against the global Right-wing trend – is what seems to have ignited his attacks on Britain.

For a Marxist all this must make sense. This is a late stage in the development of capitalism, and a problematic one, when one might expect to see its power revealed more blatantly: in this case with the richest capitalists emerging into the setting (?) sun, and taking personal control. If Marx was right, this should presage the system’s final collapse, under the weight of its own contraditions. Of course it won’t. With any luck men like Musk, Trump and Farage will be tamed, and life will go on.

I used to be a bit of a fan of Elon’s, especially his environmental cars, which could help prevent climate Armageddon; and his spaceships, which – if that didn’t work – might enable earthlings to escape, and the best creations of our culture (Mozart et al) to be preserved for ever in galaxies far away. But now I’ve gone right off him.

One of the appeals of free-market capitalist theory when it first arrived on the (British) scene in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries was that it appeared to be natural, and so consonant with many of the new scientific assumptions of the time. Leaving an economy untrammelled would enable it to develop, advance and grow in the same way that nature does – plants, animals, humans, diseases, humanity as a species (after Darwin), societies (often as empires), the universe, knowledge… and indeed, almost everything. It was an optimistic view of life and of history, adhered to by Marxists as well as by the free marketists, albeit with the adjustments to the mechanics of economic ‘progress’ that were insisted upon by Karl. (His, remember, was a ‘scientific’ socialism.) And it arguably still prevails in the political discourse of today, and especially in all parties’ emphasis on the necessity for economic growth.

That’s what they nearly all promise; on the assumption that material progress is the main measure of a government’s success, with ‘are you better off now than you were under the last lot?’ being a key question in many politicians’ rhetorical armoury. If people don’t feel ‘better off’, then the previous government will have been deemed to fail in its main mission; if the answer is ‘yes’, the incumbents will have a good chance of getting back into power. Barring major interruptions like wars, economic ‘progress’, measured in monetary terms, is seen as the natural way societies should go. That is why ‘growth’ is so much emphasised in election manifestos today; certainly in Britain, and probably in other countries too.

I don’t know how apt the analogy with ‘nature’ is to this way of thinking; but if it is a factor there seems to me to be an obvious flaw in it. Yes, everything in nature does evolve ‘naturally’; but that isn’t the end of its story. After growth, in every case, comes death, often fired by the same evolutionary mechanisms that powered that self-same growth. Another way of putting this is that every living and evolving thing contains the seeds of its own destruction; as Marx predicted in the case of capitalism, and could be seen in the way capitalism – and indeed the world – are developing today.

If this is so, then we obviously ought to pause before giving capitalism or any other kind of ‘development’ free rein, and perhaps consider better ways of measuring ‘progress’. Another rationale for the free market was always supposed to be that the wealth it created for the rich would invariably ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us; but that no longer seems to be happening, with the gap between the (very) rich and the (pretty) poor widening in most capitalist societies. There’s already enough ‘wealth’ washing around in the world – certainly in Europe and America – to satisfy and motivate everyone if it were shared around more fairly; which of course would require socialism – of a sort – to effect it. Then we shouldn’t need ‘growth’, but only a better distribution of the wealth we have already accumulated; which among other advantages might temper social and political unrest, and even – it could be said – make people nicer. So let’s have done with ‘growth’ as a desideratum, or as a measure of ‘progress’, and manage better with what we’ve got.

Of course this analysis is somewhat simplistic, and not particularly new. As I was composing this post Kajsa came across a reference to a book by the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito, who calls himself a ‘degrowth Marxist’, which could well express more rigorously what I’m getting at here (see https://www.philonomist.com/en/article/kohei-saito-marxist-pro-degrowth-and-pragmatic). I’ve not yet read the book, but will try to get hold of it. In the meantime, let’s hope that 2025 – growth or no growth – turns out better than 2024.

Bored with simply surviving into old age, without much work to do, apart from posting this inconsequential blog, I’m now thinking – only thinking, as yet – of turning the academic expertise I’ve gained over the past sixty years into writing one of those ‘alternative history’ novels. You know the sort: ‘what if the Neanderthals had won their struggle for dominance over homo sapiens 40,000 years ago’; or ‘Harold had defeated William at the Battle of Hastings in 1066’; or ‘the Reformation had never caught on’; or ‘the Battle of Waterloo had turned out the other way’; or ‘the Indian Mutiny had stopped the British Empire in its tracks’; or ‘Hitler had won World War II’; or ‘Robert Kennedy had survived to become the 36^th President of the USA’; or ‘Diego Maradona’s ‘hand of God’ goal in the World Cup quarter-finals of 1986 had been disallowed’…. and so on. Novels have been written based on most of these fictional scenarios (though not the Maradona one, I think), which are usually quite fun; and can also furnish food for thought for serious historians, who should never assume that anything that has happened in the past was inevitable – certainly not when it could have involved individual human agency. I’ve got the material for this project at my fingertips, to be supplemented by good old Wikipedia; and am now hoping that I may have the imagination to be able to think beyond what was, to some ‘might have beens’.

The particular ‘might have been’ that I’m choosing centres around the British General Election of May 1979, and the notion that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party actually lost it, thus presumably changing Britain’s subsequent history for at least a decade. This outcome was not inconceivable at the time – what, a woman? and a grocer’s daughter to boot? – as neither was the idea that some of her feistier ideas would not be smoothed down by their contact with political reality if she won. In fact that ‘reality’ turned out very differently from how most of us had predicted it, and so we in Britain ended up where we are now.

The novel will begin with its hero waking up on the morning of 4^th May 1979 to a narrow but secure victory for James Callaghan’s Labour Party; and will continue with a story about him (or her: I’ve not decided yet; it will probably be safer for me to stick to a ‘him’), set against the events that would follow thereafter. I’ll need a good ‘plot’, probably one that involves him (or her) in the politics of the day, but not too prominently. That’s my main difficulty currently: I can’t think of one. Any ideas?

I don’t know if I’m up to this. I’ve tried my hand at speculative fiction before, but got nowhere with it. Inventing history, I have come to realise, is much more difficult than retailing and analysing real events. And I still remember my A-Level English teacher’s assessment of me when I disappointed him by announcing that I was applying to university to read History rather than English: ‘The trouble with you, Bernard, is that you have no imagination’. He may have been right.

Further to my post of 20 Nov…

From Dagens Nyheter, via the Guardian.

MP for Hull, and Blair’s Deputy PM. Probably the last of ‘Old’ Labour. Working-class origins, worked on the Hull ferries, came up via the Trade Union movement and Ruskin College. Much mocked by his social ‘superiors’, but a good and warm-hearted man, with solid socialist principles. (I met him very briefly on a train to Hull. Second-class carriage, of course.)

Who in Britain remembers those ‘Protect and Survive’ pamphlets sent to every home during (I think) the Cuban missile crisis, advising people what to do if an H-bomb hit them? (I only remember ‘hide under the stairs’.) Well, the Swedish government has just circulated this little booklet to all of us here: ‘Important information for Swedish residents, if crisis or war comes.’ Remember how close we are to Russia…

I’ve not blogged recently because of a struggle I’m having with HMRC, which seems to be staffed exclusively by robots. The Swedish Skatteverket is much more customer-friendly. It knows what you’ve earned, for example, before you tell it. One of the advantages, perhaps, of living in a more invasive – and protective – State.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is under fire today for not taking sufficient action against a sex offender, John Smyth, who worked for the Church of England in a number capacities, most of them involving the care of adolescent boys, usually at public schools – Winchester especially. Wiki’s piece on him characterises Smyth as a sadist; and also reveals that he was a defender (as a lawyer) of Mary Whitehouse, the infamous campaigner for ‘morality’ – rather narrowly defined – in the sixties and seventies:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smyth_(barrister). There’s a petition on line now to persuade Welby to resign his own position as head of the Church. The issue may rest on when and how much he knew about Smyth. I know nothing more about him, apart from what I can find on the web.

The case however has reminded me of a similar one I was cognisant of in my younger days, and which I wrote about here, in a post that I think is worth republishing: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/march/clerical-abuse.

And then only yesterday I received a long email from my old school, telling of a music teacher there, one David Pickthall, who has just been sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for sex offences spanning 40 years. That was after my time, thank God; but I do remember some other rather dodgy masters while I was there.

All this happened in all-male environments, of course. But I imagine it was worse for girls.