SAVING THE PLANET

 

          Unusually for me it is an article of 14 December 2018 in the (London) Daily Mail that gives me pause for thought.

          Headlined ‘Why organic plants may be WORSE for the planet’, researchers led by Stefan Wirsensius of Chalmers University of Technology  in Sweden have published a report based on the calculation of the amount of carbon dioxide stored in forests that could be released into the atmosphere as an effect of deforestation to make room for more organic farming. Their finding is that up to 70% more carbon dioxide is emitted from this source as forests are cleared to provide more land for organically–grown crops: without chemical fertilizers more land is needed to grow the same quantity of food because the soils yield less otherwise. Wirsensius claims that ‘Organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 per cent bigger climate impact than conventionally-grown peas…With winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 per cent.’ While even organic meat and dairy products are worse than their conventionally produced equivalents, from ‘a climate point of view.’

          Although vegan diets are not in themselves to blame for anything, it is true that some features of faddish food markets have proved highly detrimental to ecological and social balance.  The avocado market is in some crisis; apart from the fact that growing avocados requires vast amounts of water from a planet that’s drying up, it has been overwhelmed by demand from Waitrose shoppers and their kindred around the world, a demand it cannot hope to meet long-term. And those who eat quinoa as part of a locally-sourced natural diet are denied it by a market driven by its popularity amongst self-same Waitrose shoppers and others. Yet we have a ready supply and rich variety of fresh vegetables and fruits that are locally-grown relative to ourselves, both in greengroceries and in farmers’ markets all around the country. Could demand not lead also to the encouragement of vegetable and fruit varieties locally-sourced that have become rarities because they are no longer fashionable (or even very appetising without some knowledgeable preparation)?  It is true also that much of our fruit and veg displayed in supermarkets – and flown or driven in from great distances - is only this side of manky, rather older than we may have thought. Amongst anything else, wrapping produce up tightly in plastic gives this stuff a sheen it would not otherwise deserve.

          We also have a strange and ambiguous attitude towards energy use, which is related to environmental factors such as CO2 because ever-greater energy demand also produces undesirable environmental effects. It is true that we utilise energy much more efficiently than we used to, and it is also true that solar, sea and wind are going to provide a much higher percentage of energy sources than at present. But the need for more energy itself is ever greater, and we are still predominantly dependent upon fossil fuels, including the dreaded fracking (the latter has made the USA virtually energy self-sufficient).

          Electric cars on the road are not polluting in the way that internal combustion engines so notoriously are, but the production of requisite batteries does present environmental issues, and the National Grid presently does not even know where all the much-greater demand for electricity for our traffic is to come from.

          Then we have smartphones whose increasing miniaturisation has raised their energy consumption level to an all-time high: the more sophisticated and miniaturised the instrumentation the more energy it consumes – far more than any ‘old-fashioned’ equivalent, such as a land-line phone. A DAB radio gobbles up fantastic amounts of energy compared to a conventional radio: so much so that customers are encouraged to purchase battery-packs as well so as to save on their household electric bills. Do we need electric carving-knives? Have we forgotten the art of winding up alarm clocks? Why do I need an electric shaver or a single-use throwaway plastic razor instead of a good old safety-razor with a supply of blades? It’s true that hot water is used but not very much. Speaking of which, and allowing for certain occupations where it is a necessity, do we really need to have a hot shower or bath every day? Why not an all-over wash plus a shower or bath once a week? I’ve done this for years and I’ve never noticed people distancing themselves from me, though I may be insensitive.  Obviously not for blogs, which must be typed electronically, but for the drafting of blogs (and for letters I send in the post or any off-line forms) I use my manual portable typewriter. A typewriter is very hands-on – you have to adjust the paper physically and correct errors with certain aids, change ribbons from time to time, stick in carbon paper if you want copies without a photocopier, and manually adjust margins, etc. – but if it’s a manual (as opposed to electric or electronic) it will not have a ‘machine’ look about the results, but rather a human one. It also uses up no energy whatsoever, except human energy – and I have to eat anyhow. Imagine an office block once full of manual typewriters and then think of the same office block years’ later, stuffed with PCs and other devices: and then  imagine the huge increase in that block’s hunger for daily energy since the changeover.  I’m no luddite. By all means use and improve the performance of powered devices that we really need to be powered. But surely we are duplicating perfectly adequate human effort with electrified effort which is just not necessary except in the cases of special needs. Well, our planet has special needs, too.

          We are going to have to alter, radically, our long-held view of what constitutes technological ‘progress’. I don’t see why it can’t be a mix of mechanical with powered. The wind-up radio in the third world has been a great success. (And typewriters are used in many parts of the third world because of the erratic nature of electricity supplies with blackouts that could hamper computer work disastrously. Typewriters are also very secure since they aren’t on the internet.) And we are going to have to eat less and drive and fly less too. We might end up healthier along the way.

          Of course the rich cannot deny themselves any and every ‘labour-saving’ device and electronic gadget available because using up energy is - in fact - what being rich is about.  But that to one side, there is virtually no point in writing or talking about all this unless we engage with the central issue of socialism – socialist democracy and socialist planning. All the demonstrations around the world about global warming will achieve nothing unless capital is appropriated and capitalism as a system destroyed. Look at any capitalist proposal for saving the planet and you will find a list of exceptions to this proposal a mile long.

SEASON’S GREETINGS!

 

          A bit early, though I think ‘Christmas’ actually started around 15^th August, but nevertheless, my greetings to everyone.

          News is moving along so fast that one has a tough time keeping up with it if one is not a seasoned journalist: at present Mrs May looks in deep do-do with even the Daily Telegraph against her: who knows what colour the chameleon Conservative Party will turn into even in just a week’s time? I am not sure whether the British public, taken as a whole, wish to be governed by chameleons, though they are fascinating to watch on natural history programmes, clinging to thin branches and swivelling their eyes.

          So just a general remark here. It looks as if Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, and possibly the US of A are all coming apart at the seams.  Britain and France are falling apart in their own characteristic ways: in France they burn buses; here MPs wave and throw order paper about; in Spain they bring out the army as required. In Germany a predictable fascism Mark II gains mass support in the streets. In Italy a bit of all four is likely; meanwhile Ukraine is trying to start a war engulfing NATO and the whole world so that its economy won’t collapse and its present billionaire president will be able to cling to power. Trump faces a bit of opposition – at long last - for supporting the deaths of tens of thousands of Yemeni children (as does Mrs May) while declaring war on refugees from his government’s own policies in Nicaragua and all points south, a trade war on China and total war on the future of the planet. Perhaps the new Brazil will help him out on the latter here.

          As for the gradual disintegration of various Western European nations, the proverbial slow-motion train-wreck, if not so slow as all that, we might say: ‘So much for austerity!’ And more frankly, ‘So much for fucking up Africa and the Middle East over the past century or two.’

          Happy Christmas, folks, as I said….

 

THE QUAGMIRE

 

          Students of the relationship between the economic base and the political superstructure should be finding these interesting times – even if the rest of us are hiding under our beds. Whether or not we are witnessing the death of the Conservative Party we are certainly seeing a rift among sections of ruling class, at the very least over the details. While the dominant financial side may be optimistic over the latest ‘deal’ proposed by Mrs May which effectively leaves us where we were before if not somewhat disempowered here and there (plus the prospect of a four-year stalemate), there are other levels of business as represented roughly by Tory ‘rebels’ that reckon a cleaner break with the EU will mean wholesale elimination of regulations and the freedom to impose such conditions on a labour market as will render higher profits: to them ‘Brexit’ means a ‘business’ Britain of the more buccaneering kind not seen in this country for perhaps a hundred years and more, and perhaps not since Sir Francis Drake. At the same time, whatever the views on immigration made clear by the ‘Tommy Robinson’ end of the Tory Party, agricultural interests worry at the prospect of a drain on cheap imported labour to pick the fruit, etc. (gone are the days when the urban working class was transported en masse to the countryside for picking ‘holidays’), retail outlets facing for example a severe shortage of better-class chefs, while higher education is confronted by penury without a steady stream of EU (‘foreign’) and well-paying students. On the Labour side, the Right is fearful of the return of a ‘garrison state’ mentality if the Left continues to be determined to have the freedom to nationalise this and that through deficit spending, which cannot be done under increasingly neoliberalised EU law: the former clamours for a dubious ‘people’s vote’ while the latter holds to the referendum long since determining a decisive vote for Leaving: that showed us the ‘people’s will’ truly enough.  Not only would a second referendum conform to the EU practice to force countries to keep holding referenda until the ‘correct’ voting takes place (and there is a view that a second referendum will require a third in time, and so on), but polls indicate that a second referendum might well produce much the same result as the first. At the same time, how practical is the creation of ‘socialism in one country’: how long would it last, how deep would it penetrate our society of capitalism in the long run? A Labour government could – and is likely to - renationalise the Bank of England but it can’t nationalise Goldman Sachs, or (e.g.) Facebook. The Irish ‘problem’ is actually a British one, as it always was. The border question only shows further that a Northern Irish statelet was always a death-trap anomaly and that Ireland as a whole should be a different country. Apparently most British (non-Unionist) voters are almost entirely indifferent to the fate of Northern Ireland and would be glad to be rid of it if it meant a workable settlement overall. As for Northern Irish voters, they voted in the majority (not wanting a hard border) to Remain, as did the Scots, whose interest lies in an EU connection for a semi- or even (possibly in time) Scottish independence.

          Britain is facing the consequences of a nation that sort of ‘growed’ like Topsy whose unity was kept in being by absolutism, later by empire and by a large economy that embraced a country also sustained in spirit by foreign threats of conquest from Philip II, Napoleon, the Axis powers, and possibly the Soviet Union during the Cold War. National unity is cossetted along by a continuing strange obsession over 1940 and the image of Winston Churchill with cigar and tommy-gun, along with Royalty worship, while revivifying the Cold War with Russia today is plainly an attempt by British leadership to prop up national unity in the face of increasingly formidable odds. Faced with world recession and the fact that large parts of Britain are on the wrong side of what is happening globally, with a government either entirely indifferent to domestic massive poverty and hunger or else keen to see through a broken-backed working class, the country is actually crumbling before our eyes like a slow-motion landslide. And, by the way, Spain and Italy are also crumbling, in more spectacular fashion. Not all nation-states were meant to be, or not forever! Pot was calling the kettle black when this week Spain – with Catalonia on its hands – suggested there was no reason why Scotland should not become independent! And Germany has been a fractured country since 1989.

          One plausible scenario is that London should be in reality what it is de facto: in other words, instead of dragging an unwanted country behind it, London should form its own state in which it could be a more free-market version of wealthy Singapore, another breakaway entity. I think this is rather a good idea in some ways. London weighs on England like a stone. Apart from anything else, its ‘independence’ would give Birmingham and Manchester elbow-room to become again the dynamic cities they once were, this time assuming the leadership of at least much of the rest of Britain outside London. Indeed, we could make a packet in negotiated trade relations with London instead of being sucked in by her.  All that finance funnelled into a native British economy instead of being whisked off abroad (and even worse, into tax havens – though the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are that as well!) – at least, up to a point. Scotland would become a natural ally to the non-London English. I don’t think Scotland hates England. I think it hates London. Indeed the British map could come to resemble something like a map of this isle at the time of Alfred the Great (leaving aside the later impact of the Industrial Revolution). Am I joking? Perhaps. If only now were the time for jokes. But something along these lines is serious. We are already well familiar with the term ‘devolution’ and there could well be a build-up of steam behind the idea like nothing seen before, leading to something well beyond it. Major political configurations have been changed in response to recalcitrant circumstances in the past. Although perhaps in many ways an unfortunate example, it remains true that Versailles in 1919 altered the maps of Europe and the Middle East, with lasting effects.      

          Socialism in a country that no longer has any purpose or unity is likely to be a nonstarter. Imagine trying to bring socialism about in the similarly nostalgic and obsolete Austro-Hungarian Empire! But given more localised sovereign entities built on popular loyalty (and immigrant groups are as loyal to their communities as the rest), the possibility of socialism from the ground up and connecting with that of other such sovereign entities around the world is not unthinkable if one sees that socialism, like previous modes, works its way forward in dialectical stages of one kind or another. Marxists need to think out politics more – in relation to economics. This is just a mischievous stab if you like.

A RADICAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD

By Neil Faulkner

(Pluto Press – Left Book Club 2018)

          Latest, in the worthy successor series to the first Left Book Club (1936-48), this is outline history at its best, itself a worthy successor to that pioneer of the genre, HG Wells’ The Outline of History (1920) and various others since. Outline history is far from hack-work from secondary sources. It is the art of significant – and comprehensive – compression and interpretation. Neil Faulkner’s is the only modern one I know of that deals with this from an explicitly revolutionary Marxist viewpoint. It shows, for example, that it is perfectly possible to demonstrate an historical materialist analysis of (say) Sumerian civilisation, as of Roman, Medieval European, Japanese and contemporary Western history. Above all, to draw Marxist analysis from facts, and not facts from Marxist analysis. It is fact-driven Marxism that I hope non-Marxist historians will respect. Its attitude is that there is no validly ‘neutral’ history (whoever claims neutrality is putting up a front for one ideology or another) and no reason to be ‘neutral’ in this case especially as historical materialism provides an unparalleled basis of understanding of historical processes and developments.

          It takes its cue from Hegel’s saying: ‘The truth is the whole’. Whatever bourgeois historians have made of it, history is not a ragbag of disparate and unconnected happenings in a process described by Henry Ford as ‘one damned thing after another’. History has meaning only when all of history is taken into account, not some of it left out or ignored.

          Faulkner pauses, in his chapter on the first class societies, to outline just exactly how history works, and all of the subsequent book convincingly proves his (and Marx’s) thesis by encyclopaedic examples (33): ‘Three engines drive the historical process. First, there is the development of technique. Progress can be defined as the accumulation of knowledge that makes possible better control over nature, increases in labour productivity, and a bigger store of economic resources available for the satisfaction of human need….

          ‘The second engine is competition among rulers for wealth and power. This takes the form of conflict within ruling classes – among rival aristocratic factions, for example – and conflict between ruling classes, as in wars between rival states and empires…

          ‘The third engine of the historical process is the struggle between classes. In the ancient world, competitive military accumulation required the ruling class to increase the rate of exploitation and extract more surplus from the peasantry. But there were two limits to this process. First, the peasantry and the economic system had to be able to reproduce themselves: over-taxation would – and sometimes did – destroy the material foundations of the social order. The second was the peasants’ resistance to exploitation.’

          Faulkner shows how these three interrelate, combine, or dominate unevenly against one another at one conjunction of circumstances or another. On rare occasions all three have combined together to bring down particular socio-economic orders.

          One thing I had not realised was that mass environmental degradation at the hands of human beings is nothing new, though it has become progressively all-encompassing and planetary. The very reason for the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ of around 10,000 years ago and the widespread abandonment of hunter-gathering after countless centuries was that all the game were eventually hunted down to virtual extinction, which meant that human survival would have gone the way of the game had the domestication of animals and the planting of seeds not sprung up virtually everywhere – except in isolated areas where hunter-gathering continues today.  Farming was no picnic: compared to the relatively easy life of hunting and gathering it was – and as it remains especially for more than a billion or so poor peasants – ceaseless heavy toil and exposure to the dangers and disasters of drought, disease or blight, hailstorms and all sorts. And before the discovery of self-manuring by the use of draft animals in ploughing, whole tracts of land were abandoned when the soils gave out. Faulkner implies that humankind did not take up farming by choice but through crucial necessity. Farming especially as it expanded through the use of heavy ploughs drawn by oxen or  horses also signalled the growth of patriarchy after a previous aeon of matriarchy, since women had not the strength for the new ploughing and in any case were burdened with child-raising and other concerns, whereas in previous cultures (the Iroquois provided the most recent well-known example) women were either politically equal with men or in some areas dominant over them because they produced as much of the food wherewithal as men did – and sometimes more when the hunting was poor. With farming men became the dominant food producers. It is interesting that we see in our times a return to women’s empowerment (in part, anyhow) with the situation of society not being wholly dependent on one sex or the other and women in modern times being fully able to ‘bring in the bacon’ as effectively as men.

          A constant feature of the rises and falls of civilisations is that increases in productivity are invariably accompanied by claims on its fruits by one ruling class or another. And without effective resistance on the part of the producers the empowered rich come to grab more and more of the spoils, thus forcing extreme poverty on the have-nots while engaged both in conspicuous consumption of one kind or another or in the huge wastage of military expenditure due to conflicts and potential conflicts over potential spoils with rival ruling classes or nations. Only in polities where the lower-downs have managed to garner a significant portion of the goods have the systems stabilised, at least until the further demands from ruling classes become once again insatiable – the result of the politico-military failure of a working class or middle class (or alliance of the two) to corral and safeguard to themselves sufficient of the necessities of life. In our own time the extreme lop-sidedness of wealth versus poverty on a global scale simply repeats the pattern of old, and will continue to do so unless there comes to be a decisive superiority in the power and willpower of those in the majority determined to beat back the very rich. If there is not, the given society will tend to end in stalemate and in ossification, as happened with unerring frequency in the past. As for example to the Roman Empire (making the Roman Empire easy pickings for the northern barbarians in the end); but it has happened innumerable times in other civilisations and seems to be happening in our present global civilisation. It lies at the root of modern economic depressions and recessions. Only for us the crucially emerging reality out of the ceaseless plunder for profit is wholesale environmental destruction which may – and certainly will – lead to our extinction unless before then we can overpower those in the minority who expropriate too much of the social product. This would appear to have been the fate, for example, of the ancient Mayans of Mexico, and possibly of the Easter Islanders and others.

          These are my extrapolations from Faulkner, not Faulkner himself though I would hope he would not feel I had misrepresented him too much!

          I have been a lifelong student of history, and at one time or another a professional in the field myself, and I am no stranger to Marxist takes on the past, from Marx and Engels themselves onwards. But this highly accessible book by Neil Faulkner provides a genuine grasp on the whole mighty subject.

 

 

POLITICAL APOLOGIES

          An item from the Morning Star October 25^th 2018:

          The leader of the European Conservative and Reformists group in the European Parliament, Syed Kamall – MEP for London – took offence when the German MEP leader of the Socialists and Democrats group warned of the rise of right-wing extremism in Europe, responding thus:

          ‘I would remind you, when you talk about right-wing extremists,that the Nazis were “national socialists” – it is a strain of socialism. Let’s not pretend.’ When heckled, Mr Kamall continued: ‘It’s a left-wing ideology. They wanted the same things as you, let’s be clear. You don’t like the truth, do you?’

          The resulting uproar forced Mr Kamall into a tactical retreat: ‘I get tired of people saying Nazism is a right-wing ide0logy. I believe in freedom of speech, but if I have offended you – and clearly I have – I apologise unreservedly.’

          This F-grade in political science comes from the man who leads our Tories and other conservative parties in the European Parliament. No doubt Mrs May continues to give him her ‘unreserved’ endorsement. Yes, the Nazis were indeed the NSDAP: National Socialist German Workers Party, a cynical catch-all intended for confusing ordinary German voters of the time, reflecting no views that Hitler, Goebbels, Goring or other Nazi leaders, backed by major industrialists, ever gave the slightest thought to except in terms of victimisation.  After the Nazi Holocaust - which included the mass deaths of socialists, communists, trade unionists and even liberals on top of the Jews, Romany, gays and others – does all this have to be said again? In the light of the phony kerfuffle over alleged mass anti-Semitism in the Labour Party this past summer, it apparently does.

          But it is the nature of Mr Kamall’s ‘apology’ that sticks in the craw. The more so as such public ‘apologies’ are becoming common: that is, not to apologise for acting or saying what one has done or said but for the ‘distress’ it has caused in some offended parties. It’s not an apology at all, but a dog-whistle statement implying that really it was not wrong to say what one said even if the offended snowflakes can’t bear the truth. Not ‘we are sorry to have done/said this,’ but ‘we are sorry it upset you’. ‘Fly-By-Night Rail apologises for the upset that delays may have caused some customers’ is not an apology for the delays but for the (alleged?) unhappiness they caused. The delays go on – the company never said they wouldn’t. No doubt at some point in the future the fracking company Cuadrilla will have to apologise to local Lancastrians over 27+ earthquakes for having disturbed them. But there will never be any apologies for fracking in the first place. Looked at one way, the first type of apology is a kind of insult, not to say tacit justification. Mr Kamall’s ‘apology’ was a further attack, inasmuch as it intimated that his opponents don’t believe in ‘freedom of speech’ as he does, and so living up to their socialist/Nazi character by objecting to what he said.

          We find that various right-wing commentators viewing those who object to such as Steve Bannon or ‘Tommy Robinson’ being allowed to give talks at universities accusing the objectors of failing to endorse ‘freedom of speech’. And by all means give them ‘equal time’ on fair-minded BBC current affairs debates. Hitler and various runners-up like Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell got their own kind of ‘equal time’ in their day. Fighting for a platform in mainstream media has never been a problem for the far Right. A consistent liberal can always be counted upon to help give fascists a leg up.

          For those who fear expropriation of their wealth, socialists and Nazis may be much of a muchness – but if anything the socialists are much worse. The one thing the National Socialists did not do in Germany in the 1930s was to expropriate non-Jewish capitalists, which makes Nazism – as it always was – the preferred option in any choice between the ‘two evils’.

         

         

         

         

AN ELDER STATESMAN RUMINATES –

 

We shall fight them in our britches

We shall fight them in our trews

We shall fight them in the ditches

We’ll fight them bloody well how we choose!

 

          So much for the froggies etc. And, as my co-Americans would say, E Pluribus Unum, which jogs the old brainbox to remind myself to remind you of my scheme for a bridge spanning the North Atlantic connecting London with New York and Washington DC, thus binding together ever more closely what my predecessor in the affairs of state Winston Churchill called the two ‘English-speaking peoples’ (leaving aside the odd watermelon-eating piccaninny imported from Pago Pagoland here and there, spouting his own colourful gibberish). This astoundingly epochal bridge will be the Great Flyover, though when the magnificent President Trump inaugurates it by travelling here from America for our bromance love-in, it’s somehow already got fixed in his mind that it will be the Great Walkover. And it’ll be festooned with gardens and those tea-shoppe places as along our motorways which our ordinary people call something-or-other. I couldn’t say as I never travel on motorways. The old bike and my shorts aren’t allowed, and in any case I prefer the soaring silver birds of the skies that have whisked me, when in office, to Afghanistan and all points wherever, and for short hauls those whirligig thingies that make a hell of a racket but by golliwogs they land you right where you want to go! Carbon footprint, my bum. We’re all made of carbon anyhow, so what’s the stink?

          What this country needs from its leaders is leadership. Everyone knows I have that by the shedload, leaving the details to the policy wonks and bean counters. Winston knew I had it, even back when I sat as a wee nipper on his venerable knee. Winston didn’t know who I was, or had momentarily forgotten, but even so I’m sure he instinctively knew I showed a precocious potential for leading this imperial 2.0 nation in its darkest hour of need in the decades ahead. Great men of any time of life think alike, although ‘thought’ is a humongously overrated commodity. What matters is an instinct for survival, as I told the vice-president or vice—minister or whoever of the aforesaid Afghanistan when I paid him a flying visit to pass up an unimportant and inconvenient House of Commons vote on some runway or other in west London. Although I stand foursquare behind our present fragrant Incumbent with absolutely no intention of staging the old coup, heaven forfend, unless the need becomes so pressing that the vox populi clamour for a true leader becomes so unstoppable that I am whirlwinded into high office, as in the dark days of 1940 when England Stood Alone, of which I have scribbled at enormous and authoritative length. Cripes! You’ll see some changes then! Stand aside, I shall command:

          There are bridges to be built!

Below this:

FEAR AND TREMBLING….

Comics, movies, TV, internet and Moral Panics….

 

SNEAKY TORIES?
(corrected)

          I’ve written critically of Stephen Glover, the Daily Mail columnist, in the past. His views, say, on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Left, are fairly blood-curdling, as one might expect from this quarter. Strangely, however, Mr Glover becomes the voice of reason and balance where the topic is – as it was on October 11, 2018 - climate change. (‘Here’s my prediction on climate change: wild warnings that prove false only make us more sceptical’.) Forget Mr Glover’s own ‘wild warnings’ of the past, for over the subject of climate change we must be above all moderate and balanced. It isn’t as if the world is coming to an end, is it? But unlike Nigel Lawson (say) or Mr Glover’s Mail colleague Christopher Booker, Stephen Glover is not a climate-change denier. Perish the thought. ‘Let us agree,’ he writes, ‘that man-made climate change presents a serious challenge to humanity which should be urgently addressed by every government.’ I’d have preferred it if he’d written ‘must’ instead of ‘should’, but let that pass.

          His target is the IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a United Nations body. Its latest prediction is that carbon dioxide emissions ‘must virtually halve within twelve years to avoid a calamitous loss of coral reefs and Arctic ice, as well as intense floods and droughts.’ Pointing out, by the way, ‘though Britain has cut its own by 43 per cent since 1990’, Glover says that not only will such a halving in such a short time be virtually impossible, but bodies like the IPCC have got it wrong in the past. The World Wildlife Fund stated in 2005 ‘that all Arctic ice might melt within five years. It’s still there.’ He cites the International Energy Agency ‘informing us in 2011 that we had five years to start slashing carbon emissions, or give up the game. They weren’t cut, and now the IPCC says we have another 12 years.’

          These warnings may have been (partially) mistaken but they are not ‘wild’, as in: ‘Repent! The end of the world is nigh!’ I am assuming that they resulted from computer projections based on the available data. But have methodologies and detailed information been improving over the years? Are the predictions becoming more accurate as experts learn more and improve their means of assessing the data? Mr Glover should know that scientific study is always provisional and never ultimate truth, which makes scientists the bane of politicians and those who believe truth should always come wrapped in a box with pink ribbons. Science questions: politics demands answers. Mr Glover has become himself sufficiently impressed by the scientific advances in climatology thus far to accept that climate change ‘should be urgently addressed by every government’. So he must believe that the basic science is right even if the various predictions can be a bit wonky. Something is very wrong and something else needs to be done about it – and soon. Meanwhile scientists do not see themselves as prophets, which is unscientific. Of course if they are forced into the role of prophets, with perhaps a glass of champagne or two pressed into their hands, they might very well rise to the prophetic occasion. But this would not be done ex cathedra, so to speak.

          What causes scepticism more – being alarmist or being sanguine? Does apathy result because we become too afraid to face the implications of the known data or because we really don’t believe all this nonsense? Mr Glover thinks the alarmists are effectively making us sceptical whereas it would appear that this is the intended effect of his article.

          But Mr Glover does accept the implications, in broad outline. He does believe urgent governments’ responses should follow (whenever). Personally I would act on the best knowledge available to be on the safe or safer side. And I don’t think casting doubt on the efforts of the best people we have in this field is likely to help in galvanising public opinion and politicians to get something done, whether what’s coming happens in 12 years or 20 or 50.  We have ample evidence for global warming and are already witnessing (with millions suffering) some of its early climatic effects. I doubt if Mr Glover wrote his piece in Indonesia, or in Florida, the Carolinas or near the raging forest fires in northern California. Or even at Klosters, which is starting to run out of snow.

          Nevertheless, thinking of my own skin I really do wish Stephen Glover’s approach was the right one. And he aims a good blow at a pontificating IPCC scientist who ‘had just flown to the IPCC conference in South Korea with hundreds of colleagues, generating a sizeable amount of carbon dioxide.’ He mentions Al Gore, a former US Vice President, whose ‘powerful film [‘An Inconvenient Truth’] warned of the terrible dangers of global warming’ but who is accused of living in a mansion consuming more electricity in a month ‘than the average US household uses in a year’. Not to speak of all the Royal Flights of Prince Charles, also preaching at us, at least once, ‘that we had 50 days to save the world’. Mr Glover is quite right to castigate the astounding hypocrisy of some of our more privileged doomsayers. Though perhaps Mr Gore’s mansion houses rather more people than ‘the average US household’.

          But this may present an ‘inconvenient truth’ to Mr Glover. In another context I am sure he believes that the rich have a perfect right to enjoy the fruits of all their ‘wealth creation’. If, as a CEO, I earn £10 million a year plus stock options, what am I supposed to do with it? Keep a rowing boat on the Medway? Live on a council estate? Only about 15% of the British public are extensive, regular users of long-distance jet aircraft because that’s the way you get about if you are high-powered, rich and run things. The rich as individuals throw out more carbon dioxide than the average partly because they have to, or else live like Ebenezer Scrooge.  And where does Mr Glover stand on a third Heathrow runway for them?

          What Stephen Glover is in danger of hinting at is that the rich will have to be forcibly expropriated as at least one measure in saving the planet. Meanwhile, it seems, it is only the wealthy exponents of our facing up to climate change who should be giving up their CO2-creating lifestyles. And of course the Chinese, who are communist capitalists! But leave our rich alone! The IPCC’s air miles are one thing, but those for the Davos World Economic Forum are quite something else.

          Perhaps, being wary of expressing such an argument too openly, Mr Glover prefers a more gradualist and ‘reasonable’ approach to the death of the planet, for at least in that event, capitalism might still be in business right to the very end.

           

FEAR AND TREMBLING…

          When I was a child there was a widespread moral campaign against comic books, prominent in the United States and vigorously endorsed by various child psychologists especially by Dr Frederick Werth (satirised as ‘Werthless’ by Mad Magazine). Comics were said to undermine the mental and moral health of America’s children, though of course children (and many adults) continued to read them. Perhaps we would have turned out better if we hadn’t, but there’s no way of proving that now. Comics were especially feared because – unlike the movies with their elaborate codes of viewing-age – comics consumption was impossible to control. Though my wife remembers that as a small girl she and others of her age stood outside any cinema showing what we now call a PG, approaching adults about to go in and asking if they could go in with them. My wife recalls that adults so approached were always obliging, if one had one’s own ticket money. Goodness knows what today’s moral guardians would imagine if it was still common practice for children to ‘solicit’ outside cinemas! Obviously something that didn’t cross the minds of those on the British Board of Film Censors.  In any event, comic books are now collected with something like reverence having also become transmogrified first by Roy Lichtenstein’s massively telling panel blow-ups for the art gallery, and latterly into the art-form of the graphic novel.

          With television in the ascendant we had more moral campaigners fearful of its dire effects on ‘young minds’: one recalls (in the UK) Mrs Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association whom TV executives and the BBC ignored at their peril. And so we had the ‘nine o’clock watershed’ which is still more or less intact though I doubt if it had much effect after many children acquired their own bedroom TVs. But it was useful for parents to be able to take a stand when wanting their offspring out of their hair by nine o’clock. The TV moral panic came and went, with the world and its children much the same as before, except for a steep decline in the viewing by older children at least of TV-as-such what with so many alternatives becoming abundantly available.

          It’s easy to poke fun at these moral crusaders of yesteryear: the ‘threat’ they were attacking just came and went. Perhaps children’s problems had less to do with the media they were imbibing and more with matters closer to home. But with these moral crusades there may have been other things going on.

          Just as English revolutionaries of the 1640s wrapped biblical expressions around their social and political dissent because the Bible was the common currency of 17^th-century Protestants, so moral campaigners of our time may have used the language of child psychologists to vent a more profound social unease by focussing rhetorically upon the ‘corruption’ of children. For where did this putative ‘corruption’ come from? The children didn’t make it up themselves; it issued from forces out of the reach of popular control, as represented by the comic-book publishers and distributors, and the film and (later) television corporations, public and privately-owned. Did this indicate something much more mysterious and sinister?

          Socialists would call these manifestations of capitalism, the all-controlling and out-of-reach control ‘system’ not effectively beholden to democratic governance. And so to the simple equation: capitalism + children = manipulation, through tempting and addictive fads and crazes. And beyond the control of parents, educators and youth workers.

          The use in moral panics of the emotive and sensitive phenomena ‘children’ was also the most provocative and fear-making: ‘children’ here would seem to be the surrogates for the helplessness of us all in the face of menacingly anonymous and powerful forces of control and manipulation, and a word with an immediate populist appeal. The only problem in this case is and was that ‘children’ have never by themselves been an easily-identifiable socio-economic category. There are all kinds and ages of children, children from differing backgrounds, educations and social classes, children – in addition – as comprising humans in various phases of transition, physically and mentally, emotionally and sexually.  ‘Human nature’ is another such non- category: what, exactly, is ‘human nature’, and how can such a vague expression be in any way useful when theorising on society and trying to put theories into practice?

          And ‘women’ in all their many manifestations are a problematic for identity politics, though advances in consciousness and belatedly in practice have been made through a sharper focus on sexual and economic exploitation of women in general.

          Meanwhile, children may be diverse but they all have to breathe. Surely we should making it a priority to get the air cleaned up and at least lessening pollution to the extent that we can actually deal with presently rising levels of childhood asthma? Why are people seemingly more concerned with children’s morals than over whether their breathing is a danger to them or not?

          A newer moral panic has arisen over the exploitation of children on the internet. There are differences of concern between the current panic and previous ones, though the moral tone is much the same. The reason is that the newer media have something that comic books, films and TV (not to speak of radio) never had: they are interactive. If one chooses to, one may interact with TV and radio personalities in shows emphasising audience participation. But social media are interaction, and once children enter into it they are open to what can be, for them, distressing exposure. Like the rest of us children’s natural social range is limited to those they integrate with personally in the same space; when they find themselves potentially interacting with the entire world this is something many will find bewildering and frightening as these ‘relationships’ progress. It is the interactivity that allows for the toxicity of social media, but basically they are still uncontrollable.

          For another feature of the newer media is that whatever controls are eventually introduced they will only be effective for a time before other controls have to be brought in, and then others still. The war between those who create systems and those who subvert them is forever escalating. There is no end to it. Important crime is cyber crime, as with industrial espionage and war. Everything is potentially hackable, or soon will be. It is the whole principle of the medium that this be possible. Children appear to learn how to evade blocking, but blocking as such may turn out to be impossible, and for a plausible reason:

          Potential mega-rich investors might rub their hands, but I find the following truly frightening:

“Whoever gets the quantum computer first will have access to that unlimited power that will nullify classic cryptography,” says Colin Wilmott, a quantum computing expert at Nottingham Trent University. “Classic computers would be under extreme strain with quantum computing. Whether it is secure web browsing or digital signatures, they need to be aware that there is a tech out there that could put all this at risk.” In short, the online world as we know it would be transformed. (‘Tech giants battling to make the quantum leap’, by Natasha Bernal, Daily Telegraph Business 8 October 2018.)

The ‘giants’ referred to here include Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and IBM. I would hesitate before calling all this wishful thinking: it is already in hand as a real project backed up by vast resources in turn backed up by the limitless craving for lots more profit. Something that, as the article concludes, could ‘possibly put supercomputers out of business’.

          Of course such tech would not become immediately affordable – down to the likes of children. But give it time.

          And what is rarely mentioned if we return to the environment we are in along with our children, is that the more sophisticated and complex systems become, the more energy-hungry. Our smartphones of today use up huge amounts of energy, far more than the old mobiles; miniaturisation only increases the rate of their consumption. Where is all the energy for all the hoped-for endless and global ‘quantum’ expansion, on top of the energy we are already using (and wastefully) supposed to come from?  There may come a time when we will have more to preoccupy us than the moral security of children. But I believe that the moral concern shown so far is – as in earlier times – a means of unconsciously obscuring very much bigger anxieties, anxieties which are all too plausible.

          My hope is that a democratic, global socialism will have us harnessing the new powers in the interests of the planet, not in the interests of profit, and this – though people are strangely slow to realise it – is in the interest of us all.

          Meanwhile, if you worry about children on the games front, I would indulge in the one generalisation that children of all ages usually get bored in time with any current novelty and move on, for better or for worse! And if children find themselves in thrall to strangers on the Web, I suggest (1) that we stop being their adult role-models in this respect, and (2) coach children towards a fuller life away from screens altogether. One step (utopian?) would be clearing neighbourhood streets of cars. I did most of my playing and mooching with the gang in the street, as had countless generations before me.  All this tempered with discipline: as Silicon Valley executives deny their children easy and constant access, we have been warned!

What Kind of Socialism Is This?

 

          It’s high time this blog was more forthcoming on the position from which it comments, often satirically, from time to time.

          This is more easily said than done. For there is very often a tension, even a (seeming) contradiction, between past and present, between present and future, and between future and future-future.

          To give a simple example, Jim was a pacifist socialist in the 1930s till Franco came along in Spain to fight and destroy the Spanish Republic. So Jim - feeling that a stand was necessary to save the world from fascism, and it had to be here - joined the International Brigade on the side of the Loyalists, fought, and lost. His experiences toughened him, so he was opposed to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 because he’d spent some years fighting Nazis and fascists even though many hoped this pact would preserve peace. And then, of course, Jim joined up again, this time to fight Nazis (and Japanese imperialists) for the next five years. But by the end of that time and the creation of the United Nations, Jim felt a new era of peace might be upon us, and he returned to something of his old pacifism, albeit not entirely without some caveats. Was Jim inconsistent, or was he at any rate true to himself and his feelings throughout these changes of attitude?

          To start with the (immediate) past and present, we here believe it is the duty of satirists – and thus this blog - to point out the various fantasies and self-serving propositions, printed usually in the Right-wing Press, that cannot escape ridicule and at least implied condemnation. This is very short-term and since most of those we criticise are pre-eminently of the British Conservative Party and the New Labour Blairites who shadow it, it will be assumed that we are therefore with Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Left. In current politics, we certainly are. Labour is presently a sort of Dyno-Rod to flush the drains of Conservatism, thus getting rid of the sludge in order to face the realities of today and tomorrow. And we sympathise with millions who will vote Labour to save their jobs or in one way or another get their lives back. But though emotionally we warm more towards Corbyn and the Labour platform than we do towards a now-absurd party of inequality, the party for the wealthy 1%, snobbery and scarcely-concealed racist bigotry (what’s not to like here?), we are at the same time under no illusions about what Labour in power may actually achieve, whatever the size of the electoral backing, if elected it is. Against the policies now being put forward by John McDonnell, under Labour there will be a ‘capital strike’ the likes of which were never known by Attlee or even Wilson. Investment could and probably will flow out of this country like water, a country already vulnerable in the light of having left the EU on whatever terms. This is how capital works in defending what it failed to defend when it lost any election. It votes with its money – ironically, just as workers vote with their feet when they go on strike. Thus the Labour government, so previously full of hope, finds itself struggling, like the present-day Syriza in Greece, to maintain some semblance of socialism as it eliminates large parts of its programme to suit the capitalists. It is possible that Corbyn/McDonnell will be tolerated so long as they can ‘hold the fort’ for capital against an alienated population, thus finding themselves doing capital’s political job for it, which politicians always do anyhow. But capital will be satisfied with nothing less than total dominance and will sooner or later jettison what’s left of a Labour government when a groomed and heavily financed Right-winger comes along to entirely reverse the whole Corbyn project and bring back a ‘natural party of government’. Such will be the feeling of loss among so many that widespread cynicism about any kind of socialism at all will be prevalent, perhaps for more decades.

          In fact, it seems that social democracy (Labour) is doomed, and that is because the capitalist system itself is in crisis. Social democracy worked fine when there was plenty of money in the kitty to be shared around a bit – as bargained for by social democrats with the capitalists if all this was absolutely necessary, but denied social democracy’s ‘useful idiocy’ a cash-drunk capital will thus be unopposed, apparently supreme and everlasting – and so widening even more the gap between worker aspirations and capital’s maximal profits into a chasm. In other words, social democracy has to die before socialism can live.

          Because one outcome of a chasm truly unbreachable by means of capitalist/bourgeois type politics will necessarily have to be socialism: that is, socialism of the popular will throughout the world, for the popular will is socialism. Socialism may be inevitable in these terms, but the nearer we are on the side of history the harder we will have to fight for it. So it’s not going to be a pushover even if capitalism as a polity is wholly dead. Commandeering the apparatus and advanced technology will mean socialism can be a reality where it could never be in early Soviet Russia or any other poverty-stricken and primitive country.

          This is largely the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, in being and intact since 1904, a part of world socialism in its alliance with its ‘companion parties’ all around the globe. In other words, no socialism actually exists in the world and never has. For one thing it must be global or it is not possible. Socialism in one country does not work, not only because of opposition from other countries but also because the national state as such is a heap of capital and the instruments of its dominance. Capital and the nation-state must be expropriated and dissolved together.

          All other socialist parties, and Labour, maintain the illusion that socialism is possible on a country-by-country basis, generally by allowing at least some capital to operate. But capital and socialism are inimical, like oil and water, or chalk and cheese. To have ‘ a little bit’ of capital in a socialist society would be like saying of a baby born out of wedlock in times gone by (in order to explain it away) that it was ‘only a small baby’. ‘Only a little bit of capital’ will not do.

          We on this blog are not members of the SPGB, for two reasons:

1. We don’t want to give the impression that this blog is somehow an SPGB ‘front’ – therefore our independence from the party must be clear, and
2. We sometimes write of matters that as such are of no particular interest to the SPGB anyhow.

All these things may constitute contradictions in our approach, but we prefer to think of them as fateful paradoxes, the kinds of things Jim encountered in a lifetime of trying to be on the ‘right’ side. Although Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ (that which works behind conscious intentions) may be a myth, what its material manifestation is on earth will not be done with us for a long time yet.

‘WHAT NEXT AS THE TORIES STRUGGLE TO DELIVER A MEANINGFUL BREXIT?’

 

          Jeremy Warner, along with his colleague Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is one of the two most acute and farsighted economics writers for the Daily Telegraph. Mr Warner’s latest piece, title above, is for 26^th September 2018. In it he delivers a wide-ranging and frank appraisal of the May government’s dismal prospects regarding Brexit. Things don’t look too good.

          Be that as it may (no pun intended), Warner doesn’t exactly warm to the plans of Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell, enunciated in a major speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week. Mr McDonnell as we know is a bit of a Red though seemingly more of a potential political trimmer than his leader Jeremy Corbyn. Warner quotes McDonnell as follows: ‘The greater the mess we inherit, the more radical we will have to be. The greater the need for change, the greater the opportunity we have to create that change.’

          But Warner’s logic in this case appears to slip, so eager is he to get in a shot at McDonnell and Labour in an article meant to be aimed at the Conservatives. ‘This kind of stuff is straight out of the Leninist handbook,’ Warner comments, ‘which has it that to drive radical change, you must first create chaos.’ (Not a direct quote of Lenin.) This certainly bears no relation to anything said by McDonnell.

          I doubt if McDonnell has been combing through the pages of Lenin’s works to find his inspiration. In any case McDonnell is referring to the mess inherited from the Conservatives over the past few years: there is no plan here to ‘create chaos’ once in office. And I doubt if Lenin ever said this as a matter of record, since ‘creating chaos’ would not have gone down well as a programme of action with party associates let alone the masses. Nor were the Bolsheviks responsible for the ‘mess’ that the Kerensky government had got the country into. Political agitation only benefits from a chaos already there, as Lenin knew better than anyone.  Historically the Bolsheviks are usually condemned for bringing in too much order at the expense of democracy.

          The other slip in Warner’s reasoning is in regard to the so-called Canada Plus trade plan favoured by the extreme Brexiters in Parliament, with the slogan ‘Freedom to Flourish’. Warner says, ‘Personally I don’t doubt that what the report calls “Freedom to Flourish” could indeed bring significant economic positives, but first you have to create the political will and majority for it’, Warner’s assumption being that both these are embarrassingly lacking today.

          As against the tone of sober realism in most of the rest of Warner’s piece, this statement flies in the face of reality. After, with the rest of us, living through years of economic neoliberalism in conjunction with austerity, which has indeed brought lots of ‘freedom to flourish’ especially to the financial community, Mr Warner is in favour of maintaining economic free-for-all but sadly many others appear not to be – as a result of suffering from the self-same neoliberalism. It is ‘political will’ we need, however, to remedy that.

          Once again – and I have written this before – when economics writers are driven into a corner they blame politicians. As ‘hard-headed’ business is much more important than politics, the mostly tame politicians are irrelevant to it, until business gets us all in such a pickle that the politicos have to be brought back into the picture to play the role of Aunt Sallys.

          In fact I suggest that B. Johnson (also a Telegraph writer) has plenty of ‘political will’, if his sort is what is seen to be needed at this time.

 

'WHAT IF'

‘WHAT IF?’

          Let’s hear it for:

Teleology: Philosophy  the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes. (Oxford Concise Dictionary)

          The wittiest example of teleology is Voltaire’s that the nose was created for the spectacles. (Purpose or ultimate function is Aristotle’s  Final Cause for an entity or phenomenon.)

          Respectable historians will thus be somewhat chary of invoking teleology in their explanations of historical phenomena. In fact to many of them ‘teleology’ is a dirty word, not used in public. So they tend to adopt what we could call the proscriptive as opposed to the retrospective approach. That is, start from the beginning of a process and take it from there. This creates certain problems for them. It gets them into difficulties in trying to work out what was and was not of historical significance. What, indeed, is an historical ‘fact’? EH Carr’s What Is History? which remains something of a classic is still recommended to students by way of introducing the whole subject. The book indeed ponders much on all this.

          ‘The prospective interpretation is hopeless because there is no way to show that a shape that is the successor to another is somehow uniquely necessary.’ (JM Fritzman, Hegel, 2014, 45.)

Some histories I have read get so engrossed in impedimenta that they end up explaining away that which is the purported subject. Such as histories of the Industrial Revolution concluding that it sort of never took place. The historian taking this approach is then unable to say why the early 19^th century was so very different from the early 18^th. The dynamic of history eludes them. Or that the French Revolution was all spectacle and no substance: that is, that many Frenchmen thought there was a revolution but in fact there was not. So, again, why were things different in late 18^th-century France from what they had been in the late 17^th?   EJ Hobsbawm likens this to a person who says of a desert that it’s not really a desert. There are animal species living in it, as well as plants, some that hold water. So in fact the desert isn’t a desert at all.  Meanwhile crashed aviators have died of thirst in it. These are extreme, but by no means uncommon, instances of wood-for-the-trees thinking. Avoiding the very idea of historical transformation becomes almost obsessional with certain types of conservative pedant. And it is a result of a severely anti-teleological position. One ends up with a history in which it seems nothing really happened at all, except perhaps by accident. This in turn can lead to the despairing view of history as being just a matter of one-damned-thing-after-another: the forlorn belief expressed by the disillusioned liberal historian HAL Fisher in his pre-World-War-II History of Europe. That is, after the Whig Interpretation of History (i.e. ‘progress’) was looking so thin in the 1930s. But opposition to the idea that all history is part of God’s Great Plan doesn’t necessarily require one to think that history is either meaningless or else doesn’t really exist as such, which is where being doctrinally anti-teleological gets you. Which means rejecting Aristotle’s notion of a Final Cause for phenomena entirely. These non-teleological approaches are not without political motive for the preservation of the social status quo; remember Orwell’s Big Brother dictum in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘He who controls the past controls the future.’

          Another problem for anti-teleological historians is that human beings, who think and plan and develop strategies and policies, create their own teleologies, and not only conceptually if certain powerful ones  have the ability to put them into actual effect, or in some cases almost or temporarily. We can scarcely leave out the personalities and how they changed things by sheer will of such as Napoleon, or Bismarck, or Hitler, or Lenin etc. There is the history of mass movements of protest showing that teleological purpose works through popular as well as individual will. So purpose enters into the fabric of history, which leads to teleology (which is ‘purpose’) or attempts at one. At the same time the whole scene is littered with setbacks, mistakes and accidents, not to speak (for example) of the possibility that Gavrilo Princip might have missed his Royal targets altogether back in Sarajevo in 1914. For all the actual assassinations there must have been hundreds if not thousands of tries that never came off. So chance seems to play a role as well.

          So are things both global and personal created by necessity or by accident and purely meaningless chance? Or by how much of the former and how much the latter? This makes the whole issue irresolvable. Fortunately, however, we need not worry ourselves unduly over such matters. As the American saying goes, where there’s no solution there’s no problem.

We can go retrospective.

          Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The outcome of this decision was that in time he became Dictator of Rome. And the outcome of that was his assassination, which brought Rome into civil war.

          Caesar might have been killed along the way to Rome if a wheel had fallen off his chariot going downhill. But it didn’t and he wasn’t.

          The decision of advancing upon Rome was a necessary cause in this sequence, while even if there were accidents along the way they too formed part of the outcome.

          It turns out that in the light of the outcome there can be no distinction made between necessities and accidents. In retrospect, everything was necessary.

          The proscriptive approach demands that we continue to ponder now-irrelevant imponderables after they have had their effect. However, the necessity of all the elements can only be identified by the outcome, by what was there at the end: provable by the outcome.

          It was not wholly certain that a significant outcome would have been the result when Caesar started out. His expedition might have ended ingloriously in some swamp or other. Thoughts, actions and serendipidous circumstances are contingent at the time. The fact of the result turns them all into historical actors, making them all necessary in the light of what happened, that is, necessary to the existence of what did happen. This existence, in turn, reaches back to what made it possible, in other words identifies the previously unidentifiable, or alters its previous identity.

          A woman bystander in a crowd of pedestrians being shot at by rampaging terrorists narrowly avoided a bullet while several others around her were shot dead.  By sheer contingency she survived intact. Some years later she gave birth successively to two children. To the children, from their viewpoint as living children, it was absolutely necessary for their mother to have escaped death, necessary for their very existence. But at the time her survival was purely contingent. An action’s  significance can be changed depending on what it ultimately led to. So we view it from the Final Cause, not the First Cause proscriptively. This is where teleology is a vital element, and where it really does not matter whether the vital moments in the lead-up were accidental or necessary.  Prince Arthur’s untimely death was very sad and the nation mourned, but purely by itself it was of little historical importance. Except that it paved the way to the succession of his younger brother Henry VIII – and we all know the various outcomes of that –including not least what amounted to a religious revolution in England! The contingent death of Prince Arthur becomes the necessary death vital in respect of all that subsequently transpired.

          The ‘Cleopatra’s Nose’ theory of history which instances that had her nose been a bit longer she would not have entranced the ageing Caesar and so not won him over, with vast political implications – is whimsically misleading. It seems her nose as well as the rest of her was just right, and so history proceeded accordingly: otherwise it would have turned out differently. And so (according to this account) had her nose been too long there would have been a different history. But there wasn’t, and that’s the point!

 ‘What If’ history is not history. Counterfactual history, hypotheses on what e.g. would have happened if one element or other had been missing, can be useful in understanding what really happened; it is that which the counterfactual historian is driving at, i.e. in emphasising the importance of what was there.

          Artists will be the first to know that serendipity played a major role alongside both purpose and artistic ability in the creation of the final work of art or music or poetry in question. But the work itself is indisputable truth, in the making of which each of these elements had very different facets from one another, but within which all have been turned into a unity that is indissoluble in the resulting work. The outcome determines the natures of all that went into it. Just to pick out one at random, Sibelius was an intermittent alcoholic. When his immortal violin concerto was due for its premiere but was unfinished, a frantic search through the boozers of Helsinki was the only means of locating him and sobering him up sufficiently to put the last touches on the work. He was so drunk when arriving to conduct the premiere of his Sixth Symphony that he stopped the orchestra in the middle of the first movement, thinking it was a rehearsal, and had to be led off the stage. Would Sibelius have been as great if he hadn’t taken to drink? Or would he have been greater? The question is ultimately irrelevant. The work stands, real and unarguably. It puts everything that led up to its realisation in its place.

          Outcomes don’t just happen! They are determined. In the lead-up it didn’t seem possible to fathom all the contingencies that made something happen. Your thoughts and actions count, though, (along with those of your opponents if you have any) because they DO play their part in shaping the outcome. Meanwhile we can do our best to lessen –or make use of – the impact of the accidental.  In any case the outcome, I repeat, does not shape itself.

          In his preface to The Philosophy of Right Hegel wrote: ‘The owl of Minerva [philosophy] spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.’ In other words, the understanding of truth is only realised after its object has manifested itself entirely (in the preceding daytime, so to speak). The Final Cause realises itself in revealing the nature and impact of the previous Causes.