Concentrating the Mind Wonderfully

 

Let me instance the case of General Ulysses S Grant (1822-85) lieutenant-general in charge of the Union forces in 1864-5 after a number of significant and decisive victories in the southern theatre and ultimately the military victor of the American Civil War. He was subsequently the 18^th President between 1869-77. Brilliant and focused in military command, Grant was, however, an inept president whose administration became a byword for corruption, though he was not corrupt himself.

After his presidency, he became bankrupted over financial affairs: in those days there was no presidential pension and Grant – now dying of throat cancer - sought to save the situation by writing his autobiography. It turned out to be one of the most incisive and readable autobiographies in history and became a triumphant best-seller, though Grant himself did not survive to enjoy the fruits of his literary success.

Until the Civil War Grant was a failure on almost all counts. Graduating bottom of his class from West Point military academy, whose superintendent was Robert E Lee, Grant fought indifferently in the Mexican War of 1848-9 after which he left the army and tried his hand unsuccessfully at farming and storekeeping. By contrast his rise as an officer in the army he re-joined on the outbreak of the Civil War was meteoric, if not without occasional setbacks. When Lincoln (‘I like this man, he fights’) finally placed him in charge directly against Lee in the closing stages of the war Grant turned out to be the only Union general Lee could not outfox or outfight. Though unlike Lee, Grant was entirely non-charismatic, even prosaic by comparison.

Prosaic or otherwise, there is no doubt about Grant’s greatness as a general. And in a special sense the American Civil War was ‘his’ war. Though reluctantly on his part, it has to be said, Grant spilt a hell of a lot of blood in his time. Yet without him the United States might have gone on drowning in it in hopeless stalemate.

After the war was over life went downhill for him even as he reached the pinnacle of American power. And then just on down and down – until the autobiography. By re-fighting the war in his memoirs, Grant regained his former iron resolution. Saving his family from destitution became the new purpose of what remained of his life, into which he poured his latent and elusive genius.  Yet again Grant ‘rose to the occasion’, as we might say. The backwoods life and footling war of his earlier years, and then the dispiriting corruption and cynicism of the post-Civil War period seem to have brought out an old enemy of lethargy in him. But he had an instinct for what mattered and did not fail that. One spark flew up from within his doleful presidency. By the late 1860s white southerners, including those who formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1868, were terrorising the southern countryside with the brutal murders of thousands of blacks in the dead of night. President Grant acted decisively by sending in the Union army to disperse and destroy these gangs, including the Klan, which did not rise again until 1915. It was his one signal service as a president-general, so to speak.

We have here a figure who needed certain circumstances and a certain kind of power of command to gainsay an irresolute nature – against the odds. Without the Civil War Grant would have ended his days as a man without purpose or even a unifying identity. He would have died a nonentity. This looks like a vivid historical demonstration of the fact that without purpose to unite the will, irresolution and ‘do-lessness’ prevail.

I am reminded of old Grant, curiously enough, when I look at the state of political polling in this country, the UK, at the present time.

Quite frankly, no one knows how to interpret the confusing signals coming from views polled on Brexit, Remaining, Single Market-till-whenever. Although adhering to Brexit out of respect for the referendum result and knowing that swathes of Labour may turn away if the Party sneaks in some kind of Remain as party policy, Jeremy Corbyn in acceding to a transitional Single Market has been lambasted as a treacherous hypocrite by the Daily Mail (itself a strong – even demented – advocate of Brexit) and at the same time is criticised by the Communist-orientated Morning Star for going wobbly on Brexit, for the Star is in the somewhat awkward position of being on the same side as the Mail regarding Brexit, though for entirely opposed reasons. Both the main political parties are in a state of confusion and internal dissension over this issue.

This merely reflects the state of public opinion taken as a whole. In other words, if we do not ourselves lead, we fall into emotional and ideological disarray. We believe contradictory things at the same time, because to us individually it really doesn’t matter what we think. And that is because, as a people, we do not hold the reins in deciding what to do in the face of the problems afflicting both this country and late capitalism in general. There is only one alternative to leading, and that is being led. But if we seize the opportunity to get to grips and decide – in forceful discussion with each other – on the plan of action to do what is to be done, lethargy of this collective divisive kind will evaporate against an all-too-necessary purposeful act, with each doing what each can and wants to do. Through purpose, power and means, our instinct for what matters revives. As it is, we have become so used to being led that through the polls we have infected our ostensible leaders in their ability to lead. And so capital, not people high and low, makes the running.

 

 

MODERATION IN ALL THINGS?

 

If hypothetically you had been a moderate in Germany and aware of the Nazi Holocaust, where would you have stood on the issue?

Let’s see. Well, social stability at all costs, but perhaps only 3 million instead of 6 million Jews and others might have been killed? Or: conditions in the concentration camps could have been more humane, while calling them something like ‘rest resorts’ or ‘temporary accommodation centres’ might have been pleasanter.

Plot to overthrow the Nazi government? Assassinate Hitler? Hide Jewish strangers? Be active in a secret underground to subvert the system? All these would be extremism!

Look the other way perhaps, but don’t get involved!

Ironically, perhaps, it is moderates who exist to give support to genuine extremism.

‘Moderate’ Republicans in the US Congress abhor Trump to be sure, but they are neoliberals down to the last politician, and wish to see free medical care stripped from twenty million Americans, as well as turning the directing of America over to Wall Street and the Pentagon – sane, rational entities unlike that blustering buffoon in the White House.

Socialism and human equality? Extremism!

Even hostility towards further military adventures to end the 16-year Afghan war?  Extremism!

Being against doing the same thing over and over again even if it doesn’t work (Einstein’s definition of insanity)? Extremism!

Long ago King Solomon (knowing the likely outcome) proposed a moderate solution to the custody battle over a baby child between two women: cut the child in half and give half the child to each. So: cut Afghanistan in half? Partitioning countries has always been a great moderate solution.

Black Lives Matter? What about: half of black lives matter? Or better still: ‘Black lives matter except in certain circumstances’?

The anti-Marxist Karl Popper moderately proposed ‘piecemeal social engineering’ to improve society as against what he considered to be rabble-rousing, fanatical, Marx-inspired revolution. Unwittingly – and oddly for such an eminent intellect - Sir Karl thus tacitly acknowledged the powerful forces of the establishment right: that is, he bowed to the existence of a class war that he never openly acknowledged as being with us.  Hence the moderation of ‘piecemeal’, moving very cautiously and almost invisibly towards progress if any progress was to occur at all. But why ‘piecemeal’ if the strategy was not to defend the power of the controlling upper class? Why not ‘all-out’? And how inevitable was it that ‘piecemeal’ would be broken down into ever-tinier pieces when the class war intensified? Never mind. Just keep doing piecemeal – insanity.

Erich Fromm wrote a book in the 1950s called The Sane Society. I suggest a slight adjustment to that title to describe the moderate one we live in today.

Jeremy Corbyn has been under constant, sustained attack by ‘moderates’ in the Labour Party, but at least Owen Jones in the Guardian (17.8.17) in an article headlined ‘Centrists attack the left, but they are the true extremists’, has seen the light. As Jones concludes:

It is my own view that centrism has no answers, and that if the left fails, the vacuum will be filled by a populist, hateful right. It was the extremism of the economic order that centrists defended – not its moderation – that left Britain here. Centrists will dispute this, and find it almost inconceivable that they have been thrust into the political wilderness once inhabited by the left. But until they come to terms with their own failures, they will surely never rule again.

 

Or perhaps they are already going mad in Einstein’s sense.

CARDIGAN RIGHTWINGER STRIKES AGAIN

 

          Thus Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail for 3^rd August 2017: ‘I’ve not got a socialist bone in my body, but I’d tax the rich’s empty homes’, says his headline. So, surprises from the Mail’s resident cardigan reactionary. But more surprises to come:

          ‘I’m not shocked because of what happened at Grenfell…’ Wot? Not at the deaths of at least 80 people and the maiming and personal distress and loss of hundreds? This seems not just anti-socialist but anti-human. I believe even Mrs May was shocked. Perhaps it should be placed in context:

I’m not shocked because of what happened at Grenfell, whose recently refurbished flats were seemingly much sought after. That appalling inferno seems to have been the result of flawed building regulations and huge incompetence on the part of the council and its agencies.

Poor Stephen still doesn’t tell us if he was shocked about what actually happened to these people: perhaps by the end of the passage he forgot what he’d written at the beginning. What he does is surmise the how of the tragedy while conveniently ignoring the why: the rooted, probably criminal indifference at the base of the ‘incompetence.’  We have just seen reports of fires in Dubai tower blocks from which there was little human loss of life or limb because of more than one functioning staircase, a top-grade lift system and an army of flunkies on tap. The safety of the rich is well provided for on high; Grenfell shows that no one in authority had bothered much about the safety of the poor at great heights. But for Glover all that is ‘a separate issue’.

          Yet the predominance of super-rich homes that are empty because they are being held as assets in a city with a severe housing shortage ‘will stoke understandable resentment and envy among moderate people – feelings that will be cleverly exploited by zealots like Corbyn and McDonnell.’  I doubt if it takes a lot of cleverness to ‘exploit’ what Glover already refers to as ‘understandable resentment’; I doubt if it takes any at all.

          Meanwhile, ‘ordinary middle-class people, who may own a modest second home, [will be] penalised because of the excesses of the super-rich’. Notice that the actual victims at Grenfell were and are not exactly ‘ordinary middle-class people’ and few are likely to have owned ‘a modest second home’, perhaps a key reason for those who do to be ‘moderate’. Glover leaves all the victims behind as ‘a separate issue’. (Ask the Welsh or the Cornish what they think of ‘modest’ second homes displacing the needs of their own young.)  We see here that Glover is appealing to his own middle-and upper-middle-class readership. That is, to the core of the Conservative vote. No point in wasting one’s polemical time on the hoi polloi who are unlikely to vote Tory whatever happens.  

          The zealotry of Corbyn and McDonnell does, however, lead to a fear that even some ‘moderates’ in the middle-classes might be drawn to Labour: that is the real danger.

          Hence we turn populist and demand that the super-rich be taxed more on their empty homes. Not, of course, that they be dispossessed of them, for they have the same right to property as anyone else. But: ‘Can it be right that, in Kensington and Chelsea, the owner of a property worth £325,000 pays the same rate of council tax as a billionaire living in a house worth £50 million?’ (Or not living in it, as the case may be?) That leads me to w9onder how much council tax should be paid by someone who owns a £50 million house as compared to that paid by someone owning a £325,000 house. What should an equitable ‘top rate’ of council tax be in this instance? Surely £1 million would be more than just, but to impose this as council tax would surely distort the council tax system out of all recognition. So that is what Glover’s radical tax-the-rich amounts to: an increase in their council tax of some unspecified amount, and surely not that onerous a one for a billionaire to pay.  As Glover himself admits:

A little legitimate squeezing (sic) of the absent super-rich might not make much practical difference. But it would at least show that Theresa May’s Tory Party has the right moral priorities, and that its heart is in the right place.

In other words, don’t do anything much but show that you have the right moral priorities. To be a bit blunter: bring in a fig-leaf policy to keep the Tories in power and able to continue pursuing the politics of inequality, in including that of housing. Earlier on Glover gave the game away when he wrote:

Surely one lesson of the last election is that housing is a toxic issue.  If the Tories are planning to be elected next time round, they had better build a lot more homes than the Coalition ever achieved.

Thus, not a social policy but an election strategy. People may, however, find this a rather unsatisfactory – not to say hypocritical - stance to take as opposed to ‘zealots’ who seek to implement basic social justice (i.e. in housing): build houses in order to get elected. And how many of those, when push comes to shove?

         

We see the same sort of rather obvious realpolitik in an Observer interview (6 August 2017) with Will Tanner, ‘formerly deputy head of the Downing Street policy unit’, who says at one point that ‘If Conservatives want to win the next election, they to need to build a radical new prospectus’. (Note: not that ‘a radical new prospectus’ is the right thing to do.) When then follows from Tanner’s position is a Goldilocks list of things Tories should promise – indeed whether they were to carry them out or not – and this involves various ‘shoulds’ about what needs to be done. ‘These things are easy to say, hard to translate into policy and more difficult still to deliver,’ says Tanner with admirable frankness. Though who said anything about actually delivering on election promises? It will certainly be ‘difficult’ for a party consisting of Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, David Davis and Liam Fox. Unfortunately Pitt the Younger, Robert Peel, Disraeli, Butler and Macmillan do not appear to be available to help out.