One of my few rules is not to write (except for money or mineral rights) in August.  This has nothing to do with holidays since I tend to work through the month in any case.  The rule is based on a belief that you can become staid and repetitive if you do not stop to think about whether what you are doing really works for you and others  So, this will be the last posting until September when I expect to resume with whatever strikes me as important then ....

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Meanwhile, falling ill has its discoveries.  My illness represented no more than 24 hours of quasi-flu, enough to have me knocked out in bed for a day or so, but it threw me back onto the radio as the only entertainment available when reading was too tiring and painful and my aching muscles and head required me to lay flat in near-darkness.

When I was younger, BBC's Radio 4 seemed like comfort food at such times, but no longer.  After half a day of being repeatedly, incessantly , preached at - over climate change, humanitarian intervention overseas, multiculturalism and the importance of the Olympics in 2012 - I came to the conclusion that the 'crusties' who complained of it being taken over by the liberal left were absolutely right.  Classic FM and even Radio 2 came as a blessed relief and my long term allegiances have now changed permanently.

Was this burst of institutional group-think on Radio 4 a temporary reaction to the many BBC-related tabloid scandals of recent days?  Was it merely a recognition that the Corporation's fate lay with political masters who had a liberal 'rights and duties' agenda?  Was it just the second team in charge while everyone else was on holiday?  Or was this unutterably dull, repetitive and feeble-minded c**p arriving in my ears because the sort of person who is employed by the BBC actually believes that we are all interested in being told a combination of the bleeding obvious and the unproven but politically correct?  And has national group-think reached such critical mass that the dear old Beeb is now little better than Pravda or Radio Moscow in the heyday of Soviet mass culture.

Whatever!  I don't care.  There are plenty of other sources of information and it is Radio 4 not the BBC that is the problem.  In desperation, I certainly switched channels and rediscovered Radio 3 which had an exceptionally lucid and interesting account of the political ideology of Pope Urban II and of his management of the Council of Clermont.  This, you may recall, was the occasion for the start of the Crusades and the Radio 3 analysis provided more insight into the origins and politics of current day events in the Middle East than a whole afternoon of over-hyped human interest news and holier-than-thou environmental and cultural evangelism on its second rate sister channel: even the comedies on Radio 4 are less funny than they used to be, a few old stalwarts and dangerous satirists excepted.

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The Pope's inner circle helped me to this conclusion by continuing to say outrageously stupid things about Islam and confirming that Radio 3 had educated and informed me whereas Radio 4 had merely used up my valuable time with gerede [mere useless chatter] - the latest gem from the Vatican can be noted in brief at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtmlxml=/news/2007/07/27/wislam127.xml  Here,we have a Church that links a rival religion to violence as if, as was made clear by the independent academics on Radio 3 that very evening, Pope Urban II had not unleashed the psychopathic boot-boys of the European aristocracy against the civilisations of the East as a deliberate tactic to divert domestic violence.  His reasons may have seemed moral to him but a lot of people were to die from that essentially political decision.

Really, the Pope's Private Secretary should not go there.  Should we raise complicity in the murders involved in the forced conversion of pagans in Germany under Charlemagne, the deliberate and truly evil murder of civilian Cathars or the bringing of the Cross by the sword to the Amerindians?  Let alone an extremely odd view of how to deal with AIDS in Africa and the perhaps more ambiguous and sometimes comprehensible role of the Papacy in tolerating any brutal fascism or authoritarian obscurantism that might be regarded as a barrier to the atheist Left (Iberia under Franco and Salazar, inter-war Slovakia, Croatia under the Ustase, Latin American military men, Poland under the 'brothers" fortunately restrained by the EU, the list seems endless) - and then not using its influence to halt the operations of death squads, torturers and the more than occasional mass murder and victimisation.

No, this is not an anti-Catholic diatribe.  On the contrary, I was raised a Catholic.  I married into a High Catholic Opus Dei family.  I respect Catholicism as a civilising force in many circumstances.  It is a sincerely held faith.  It provided the nearest thing we had in the West to a welfare state until it was unravelled by the Protestants.  I also know enough of politics and history to know that compromises must be made and that principles can be contingent for good reason.  But I also smell when 'evil' starts to creep in by the back door and it makes its home easiest where authority is not placed under scrutiny.  (Oh, did I mention the toleration of child abuse?)

The Catholic Church has had its swings from the authoritarian Right to the cuddly Left and back again.  Pope Benedict's circle seems to represent the final stage of a shift from the easy, lazy pragmatism of the Italians to the intense dogmatism of a Middle Europe whose old men are still fighting the intellectual battles of the Middle European 1930s - first through a Pole and then through a German.  And if you think that I am engaged in ethnic or ageist sterotyping, then listen to what Archbishop Meisner of Koln has to say: " .. immigration of Muslims has created a breach in our German, European culture."  So much for the universal church, so much for the equality of all before God.  And as for the ageism charge, you might not think much of the Communist Chinese, but there's a bunch of old men who have certainly moved with the times.

Can you imagine Radio 4 or even a High Tory, or anyone outside the BNP, saying that " ... immigration of Muslims has created a breach in our English, Western culture."  We do not say it because it is not true.  Yet this sort of nasty primitivist thinking is common currency on the German, French, Italian and Spanish Right where it is associated with the Catholic vote for Merkel (who is, in fact, liberal-minded by standards), Sarkozy (who at least promotes Muslims in office), Berlusconi (who fortunately knows that his vote just wants low taxes and more football and scantily clad women on the television) and Aznar (about whom we should perhaps stay silent).  It lurks there, in danger of bending otherwise pragmatic politicians to obscurantism and prejudice.

The New Right in Europe now includes, of course, a chunk of the Liberal Left, notably the late Oriana Fallaci, the Dutch radical liberals and the Parisian Left Bank 'de nos jours', who share this negative vision of Islam as non-Western and so, therefore, a threat by its very nature.  If we are talking about threats, the political threat really lies in a new rather dark and odd coalition of right-wing Catholics and radical liberals who hate all things Arabic and Turkish as 'alien' and threatening.  Never has it been more important for liberal Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Secularists and new religionists to assert the separation of Church and State and the utter meaninglessness of fascistic definitions of the superiority of the Christian West. 

Meisner's 'German' privileging of his own culture, of its implied centrality to Europe and of the implied centrality of Europe to the world contains the unintentional seeds of evil within the bosom of an agency that claims to speak for God.  Is the Pope, who grew up in a Germany of resentment and violence, surrounding himself with dark forces?  Is traditionalism cover for something?  Have we seen yet another political coup, one in which yet another inadequately accountable centre of global power, like the British State under Blair or the White House under Bush, has been captured by single-minded, perhaps simple-minded, faith-based utopians who are prepared to play fast and loose with peoples' lives in order to effect change in the world?  

I hope not.  But that small bit of me that remains Catholic knows that it would be a 'sin' not to speak out, despite the claimed absolute authority of the Vatican, much as it was necessary to speak out against Blair within the Labour Movement against the assumption of 'solidarity' - and to leave when one felt complicit in the darkness.  As I say, sometimes one can start to smell evil cloaked in apparent goodness.  When you can smell evil in your kitchen, that is the time to make sure that you empty the bin.



 

Tags: culture, religion
Current Location: tunbridge wells
Current Mood: angry

I believe I promised to write on evil.  I was pulled up short the other day by a science fiction book.  I like the work of Ken Macleod and have written on this elsewhere - http://timinlondon.zaadz.com/blog/2007/4/macleod_and_300_-_two_responses_to_the_darkness - so it was interesting to discover a new writer, Charles Stross, who is recommended by Macleod and who has many similarities in style and sensibility.  There is a sudden rush of his books on the market, all very recent and published first in America (although he is a Brit).  I picked up what I believe is his second to be written and the first to be published here (The Atrocity Archive ) and had an enjoyable pulp read [see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/index.html for more on Stross]

Anyway this isn't a book review.  The book has many flaws but if you think in terms of a mix of H. P. Lovecraft, Len Deighton and Neal Stephenson (his assessment) and then add in a mix of hacker techno-nerdiness and BBC Sci-Fi humour (my assessment), you get somewhere close to what Graham Greene might politely call an 'entertainment'.  It is in the vein of Mick Carey's much-loved (by my family) Felix Castor novels - http://www.mikecarey.net/ - which have the sexiest demon-incubus you have never ever wanted to meet and is part of a wry relatively new English horror/sci fi style of cynicism, dark humour, nerdy manners and tributes to American and British genre pulp that seems to go down well in a reading culture that is at much at home with Marvel Comics as it is with Conan Doyle.  Think the peculiar but stimulating world-view of Alan Moore [from V for Vendetta through to Promethea] and you see the culture of angry radicalism bent to market needs that epitomises the new school.

No, I am not offering a book review but a single observation.  I am not giving the story away by saying that one of the key conceits of the book is that the mass murder of the Jews in the Second World War was the ritual sacrifice of millions to gain sufficient psychic energy from pain to call on an occult power, not unlike one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, to ensure a national socialist victory.  Aztec brutality is not mentioned but the cultural similarities between the blood rites of Tenochtitlan and those of the Ostreich offer a platform for the next step taken by Stross.  

The conceit pulls you up short - has the very real suffering of millions under a vicious regime now become mere fodder for a rather tasteless foray into alternative history?  Is this the point where the Holocaust has become released from lived experience (after once being 'that of which nothing may be spoken") in order that it might become the plaything of creative artists?  If so, it has been creeping in that direction for some time, yet this is the first mainstream book, published in America of all places, that I have seen, where the evil of the Holocaust has been so detached, first, from greed and power and, then, from ill-will and human malice to become the subject of occult forces beyond time and space?  How different this is, in terms of potential for a psychological denial of the truth, from the works of David Irving - not that I would ban either - is a moot point.

The point is that, at a certain time after an act has taken place, it seems that the act moves into a world where it is disconnected from reality and becomes fodder for fantasy.  Perhaps this is why I think that the conservative philosopher John Kekes [The Roots of Evil, Cornell, 2005] does us a service by returning to some of the great crimes of the past, not excluding the realpolitik of the Cathar Crusade, to lodge these evil acts back where they should be lodged - at the heart of the human condition.  I cannot entirely dismiss the environmental roots of evil acts as he seems to do by implication, but he is persuasive that not all evil can be optimistically wished away as something that is purely a matter of condition and that there is no evidence that, with improvement of condition, evil will be automatically banished from the world.  

The Catholic Church has a concept in which there are sins of commission and sins of omission.  This is useful here.  To wilfully order the murder of millions is a sin of commission.  To participate for careerist reasons in such a murder and go into denial about what is happening as one does so may be a sin of omission.  Our culture tends to punish the first far more than the last and yet there would be no large-scale evil (it would be mere vicious local gangsterdom or individual rapine and murder) if it were not for the complicity of the grey men and their wives who do their duty.   Charles Manson is rightfully incarcerated for life for his actions, yet Robert McNamara, the grey civil servant, continued to teach and write and speak (albeit admitting error) as if nothing had happened to civilians while he was working in national security - like German lawyers who practised before and after the Gotterdamerung of '45.  

McNamara's war (and I do not really want to single him out as much worse than thousands of such grey men in history, not forgetting our own imperial crimes and misdemeanours), in which he participated 'with good intent', cost the Vietnamese people an estimated 666 times (an interesting number in itself) the number of people who died in the 9/11 incident.  A suicide bomber is rightfully condemned, but the act of war that has lead to the murderousness of contemporary Iraq is treated by our establishment as if it were merely an honest mistake by well-meaning buffoons rather than as an act of irresponsible evil.  Those who have done their duty as military men or civil servants drive blame upwards to the 'buffone' yet refuse to accept their own complicity in carrying out their duty.  Fascinating!

You see, I think a sin of stupidity or denial that is complicit in the deaths of lots of people or creates widespread misery is much less forgivable than our culture allows.  We seem to want to forgive 'intent' ,so that if vicious things result from good intent then we are prepared to forgive the perpetrator.  This seems to be very culturally useful for our middle classes but philosophically absurd - and not from a utilitarian perspective either.  After all, if existentially we must take responsibility for our actions, then we must take some responsibility for the consequences of our actions.  It is not only that we do evil in actually undertaking some act but that we do evil when we fail to question what we do and when we fail to question what we have done after we have done it.  We do evil when we stop thinking.  

Real evil lies not so much in making the error in a sin of commission, but in persisting in the error after the costs and consequences have become clear.  Perhaps this is because, in the group-think of 'grey man evil', the alternative is always justified as worse.  But this is mere displacement and denial.  So, perhaps, the idea that Communists would overrun all of South East Asia (which did not happen and never was going to happen) justifies in these men's minds, supported at home by their wives, the massive use of terror tactics and of brutal methods simply because such tactics and methods are (using another more malignly self-deluding Catholic concept) the 'lesser evil'.

This may seem like a round-the-houses way of linking a popular novel to the thinking of the architects of death in our global elites.  Poor old Stross (and I certainly do not want to single him out at all) is just another writer reflecting his times, but there is a quiet potential evil in taking any real suffering and reifying it without thought into something abstract and unconnected to the fact of lots of very individual specific sufferings having actually taken place at a specific place and time - whether this reification be through the appropriation of the suffering by Zionists to justify state creation, liberals to justify political correctness or authors to justify a story.  

The best memorial to those murdered under such conditions (since nothing can ever bring them back , memory is no substitute for life really lived and their property has merely been restituted to occasionally tenuous bloodlines to 'make a point') is never ever to think about people in the way that their murderers did, as objects for use and manipulation.  Of course, a novelist has the right to do this - at the end of the day, I cannot really condemn Stross for reflecting our culture so accurately in his work.  Far from it - I very much recommend his book as a jolly entertaining travel read (if you can get through the bursts of Stephensonian techno-babble).  But actors in the real world do not have this right: if fantasy should not ever be limited in either its light or dark aspects, reality, well that is another matter altogether.  Or is that thought too heavy for the lightweight brains of our oh-so-well-educated grey men?

Tags: culture, philosophy
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: thoughtful

Now here is a film that I can recommend 100% ... The Prestige.  There is magic as, well, magick and there is magic that is really science and artifice, the illusion of the stage magician.  The Prestige, from the novel by Christopher Priest, is about the last two and more.  It is one of those rare films that is utterly flawless - direction, mise-en-scene, story-line, script, acting (notably Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, but also Michael Caine).  Even David Bowie as Tesla jars no more than Keith Richards in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 - in other words, scarcely at all.  Nothing may be said of the plot, I am afraid, and you might be advised to see the film before reading the book.  But you will feel, as you watch it, as if you are seeing the late nineteenth century world for the first time just as it might have been - and not as BBC costume drama.  You will see behind screens and inside machinery.  You will see how craftsmanship could create things out of wood and metal as fascinating to audiences of that time as anything created today by digital technology for the audiences of our day.  

But none of this would have been possible without the genius of the prolific Christopher Priest (though novel and book are different) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Priest_(science_fiction_writer)   Priest covered social breakdown and migration in the UK with a dark insightful eye in his Fugue for A Darkening Island in 1973 and his Dream of Wessex looked at virtual reality as fantasy in 1977 long before Snowcrash.  His tribute to H.G Wells, The Space Machine (1976), is a rollicking adventure that has its own hidden debt to Arthur C. Clarke, while the 2002 novel The Separation approaches the alternate history of the Second World War in a way that might be a frustrating read on occasions (this is literary science fiction after all, not mere adventure) but is well worth the effort expended.  See the film (which is currently running on Filmflex) and read the books if you can get hold of them.

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Best not to hide away when I get it wrong!  I certainly did not get it wrong in backing Jon Cruddas for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party.  He came from nowhere to third place.  Those interested in these things can pick up some of the story from the Compass Online website at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/article.asp?n=713   What I did not get right was my reasonably firm belief that Hilary Benn would get the job.  I was not alone - the bookies put him ahead and my insiders in the Party Establishment were going to vote for him (see my Posting of June 2nd).  But something went wrong for him between the first week of June and the closing of the ballot.  My sources told me that he was lack lustre in public and failed to present any new ideas.  He switched off the unions and he failed to inspire the constituency activists.

Meanwhile, as Blair started to move off, no doubt  to the great get-rich-quick lecture circuit and the halfling-job of Special Envoy to the Middle East, the release of tension moved the Party to the Left., though not dangerously so.  The two Left-Blair loyalists who had been biding their time, Peter Hain and Benn, were swept aside.  This game was played out under Single Transferable Vote and so enabled Harriet Harman, simultaneously a candidate of the Left and a loyalist to Gordon Brown, to get the job as a woman who had proved herself independent-minded, loyal to the future and in tune with the culture of the party.  The centre-right candidate (Alan Johnston) did creditably (there was only 0.8% between the final two candidates) but the centre of the party had now shifted from the Far Right to the sensible Left.  I always knew Cruddas could not win (he had upset too many on the Hard Left and he had unnnerved the Party Establishment), but I am very pleased that Harman got the job and that Cruddas reached third place.  On this occasion, it was very good to be wrong.

Tags: culture, politics
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: satisfied