‘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.

         

HIS DARK MATERIALS

 

          My Uncle Gerald has reached a dangerous time: approaching 78, and in reasonably good health, he is not old enough to be gaga but of an age to consider himself authoritative by dint of all the years he has lived. To compound this Gerald is a widower and so now denied the moderating (i.e. sceptical) voice of many years that gave him pause before uttering his more idiosyncratic statements. When his beloved was alive Gerald could opine freely only down at the pub but under doctor’s orders he found that ginger beer and the tendency of his ageing male companions to nod off before he had come to the point had an alienating effect: now, with her gone and he more or less alone at home, he is a free agent once more – but with only the occasional respectful visitor to fall back in wonder at his profundity. Such am I, the devoted nephew. At his urgent request, I blog the following:

          Uncle Gerald’s researches have become prodigious if unselective. Just recently he discovered through extensive reading that John Milton (1608-74) may have learned the art of divination from Nostradamus (1503-66) and what’s more concealed this in various passages of his later verses. ‘As with Nostradamus,’ says Uncle Gerald, ‘ the divinations of Milton are not literally exact but one soon gets the gist.’ For instance, in Samson Agonistes there is this passage describing Donald Trump:

          As to his own edicts, found contradicting,

          Then give the reins to wandr’ng thought,

          Regardless of his glory’s diminution;

          Till by their own perplexities involved

          They ravel more, still less resolved,

          But never find self-satisfying solution.  (Lines 301-307)

But Uncle Gerald’s real treasure-trove is Paradise Lost, particularly the earlier Books. Himself absorbed in the twin convoluted debates surrounding both Brexit and internal Labour Party opposition to Jeremy Corbyn, Uncle Gerald has uncovered (I hope, for his sake) some remarkably prophetic passages. Let me begin with Milton’s alleged description of Tony Blair:

          …in act more graceful and humane;

          A fairer person lost not heav’n; he seemed

          For dignity composed and high exploit:

          But all was false and hollow, though his tongue

          Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear

          The better reason, to perplex and dash

          Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;

          To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds

          Timorous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear….  (Book II l. 109-117)

 

With Jeremy Corbyn’s elevation to the Labour leadership a formidable group of Labour Right MPs came together to oppose his dangerously Leftwing agenda and restore the Party to its proper place in the Centre within which they had either held  high positions of responsibility or sought to re-create the means to get them; in this they were as one, the question being only of tactics:

                   With this advantage then

          To union, and firm faith, and firm accord,

          More than can be in  heav’n, we now return

          To claim our just inheritance of old,

          Surer to prosper than prosperity

          Could have assured us; and by what best way,

          Whether of open war or covert guile,

          We now debate…                                                   (II  l. 35-41)

 

There have been some, however, who feel a guilty conscience over what they are planning to do, as one plotter, reflecting on Jeremy’s leadership thus far and not unmindful of his popularity both inside and outside the Labour Party, has conflicting thoughts: that is, thoughts that conflict with his own sense of morality, namely of ambition:

                   …He deserved no such return

          From me, whom he created what I was

          In that bright eminence, and with his good

          Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.

          What could be less than to afford him praise,

          The easiest recompense, and pay him thanks,

          How due! Yet all his good proved ill in me,

          And wrought but malice, lifted up so high

          I sdained subjection, and thought one step higher

          Would set me highest, and in a moment quit

          The debt immense of endless gratitude,

          So burthensome still paying, still to owe;

          Forgetful what from him I still received,

          And understood not that a grateful mind

          By owing owes not, but still pays, at once

          Indebted and discharged; what burden then?   (IV  l. 42-57)

         

          Meanwhile, on the Brexit front and what with storm-clouds gathering over any sort of worthwhile ‘deal’ with the EU while our exit creeps on apace, dreams of a new British ‘empire’ of free trade are somewhat marred by the likelihood that not only will we depend utterly in the long run on the United States, but also that its ‘King of Heav’n’ Donald Trump is playing somewhat fast and loose with swingeing tariffs on foreign goods without any particular regard for one country or another but only to appease his hard-hat voters at home whatever the economic outcome:

                   …For so the popular vote

          Inclines, here to continue, and build up here

          A growing empire; doubtless! While we dream

          And know not that the King of Heav’n hath doomed

          This place our dungeon, not our safe retreat

          Beyond his potent arm, to live exempt

          From Heav’n’s high jurisdiction, in new league

          Banded against his throne, but to remain

          In strictest bondage, though thus removed,

          Under th’inevitable curb, reserved

          His captive multitude…                               (II, l. 315-323)

 

Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with terrorist backlash, come into this:

          War hath determined us, and foiled with loss

          Irreparable; terms of peace yet none

          Vouchsafed or sought; for what peace will be giv’n

          To us enslaved, but custody severe,

          And stripes, and arbitrary punishment

          Inflicted?                                                             (II,  l. 330-336)

 

So whether in terms of Brexit or Trump, it seems to be a matter of crossing our fingers (‘supreme Foe’ here might be either Trump or the EU):

                             …This is now

          Our doom; which if we can sustain and bear,

          Our supreme Foe in time may much remit

          His anger, and perhaps, thus far removed,

          Not mind us not offending, satisfied

          With what is punished; whence these raging fires

          Will slacken, if his breath stir not their flames.

          Our purer essence then will overcome

          Their noxious vapour, or inured not feel,

          Or changed at length, and to the place conformed

          In temper and in nature, will receive

          Familiar the fierce heat, and void of pain;

          This horror will grow mild, this darkness light,

          Besides what  hope the never-ending flight

          Of future days may bring, what chance, what change

          Worth waiting, since our present lot appears

          For happy though but ill, for ill not worst,

          If we procure not to ourselves more woe…    (II,  l. 208-227)

 

          Nor does Milton omit from his prophecies a dig at the ever-present commentariat: representatives of the chattering classes whether as economists, think-tanks, philosophers, psephologists, psychologists, clergy, political journalist hacks, denizens of Question Time and Today etc., specialising

          In thoughts more elevate and reasoned high

          Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,

          Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

          And found no end, in wandr’ng mazes lost.

          Of good and evil much they argued then,

          Of happiness and final misery,

          Passion and apathy, and glory and shame,

          Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy;

          Yet with a pleasing sorcery could charm

          Pain for a while or anguish, and excite

          Fallacious hope, or arm th’obdured breast

          With stubborn patience as with triple steel.    (II, l. 558-569)

 

          In his remarks about one of the lesser devils in Satan’s entourage, Belial, we gain from Milton a broad description of the morals of our time, taking in the clergy of various faiths and a measure of sexual abuse from high and low:

          Belial came last, than whom a Spirit more lewd

          Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love

          Vice for itself. To him no temple stood

          Or altar smoked,  yet who more oft than he

          In temples and at altars, when the priest

          Turns atheist, as did Eli’s sons, who filled

          With lust and violence the house of God?     

          In courts and palaces he also reigns

          And in luxurious cities, where the noise

          Of riot ascends above their loftiest tow’rs,

          And injury and outrage, and when night

          Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons

          Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

          Witness the streets of Sodom, and that night

          In Gibeah when the hospitable door

          Exposed a matron to avoid worse rape.  (I, l. 490-505)

 

          In Book II Satan, needing to get out of hell in order to pursue his ambition to conquer heaven, arrives at its gates – mighty and built of six layers of metal – through which he must pass; but the gates are locked against him, and, as he discovers, only the gatekeeper has the key. The gatekeeper is a fearsome yet beguiling creature, half woman and half snake, whom he learns is his daughter of long ago (and later his lover) and whom he persuades to open the gates for him. As he and his devilish throng pour through they are met with smoke and ‘ruddy flame’.

          Before their eyes in sudden view appear

          The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark

          Illimitable ocean without bound

          Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,

          And time and place are lost; where eldest Night

          And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold

          Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise

          Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.    (II, l. 890-898)

 

Uncle Gerald contends that Milton was the (poetic) founder of quantum theory; what we have here is a depiction of no less than the quantum or subatomic world of endless and seemingly chaotic activity, the stuff out of which all our familiar matter is made. It took mathematics and the more prosaic figure of Max Planck to give the idea scientific flesh, 200-odd years later. (Of course atomic theory had been around for centuries, since Democritus in fact: but Milton appears to have stumbled upon a vision of quanta for the first time, according to my eager Uncle Gerald.)

                   …Chaos umpire sits,

          And by decision more embroils the fray

          By which he reigns; next to him high arbiter

          Chance governs all. Into this wild abyss,

          The womb of Nature and perhaps her grave,

          Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,

          But all these in their pregnant causes mixed

          Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,

          Unless th’Almighty Maker them ordain

          His dark materials to create more worlds…          (II l. 907-915)

 

But Uncle Gerald has another gloss on this, for the anarchic rule of Chaos and Chance is also the rule of capitalism, which must engender endless fighting and war, until socialism comes to prevail with a rational and ordered society built on co-operation for the common good rather than insatiable greed and endless ‘growth’ which in the end will destroy the planet we know. In Milton’s terms, unless or until God is prevailed upon to use ‘His dark materials’ – presumably these ‘dark materials’ – to create more – and better? – worlds. And do not scientists theorise on the existence of ‘dark matter’ in the universe?

          At this point I steady my Uncle Gerald who is almost foaming at the mouth with excitement over these and other discoveries, calming him with another ginger beer. Thus Milton, whom we thought merely our co-greatest poet along with Shakespeare turns out to have been seer, quantum physicist and socialist visionary as well.

          The ageing process notwithstanding, Uncle Gerald is going to write a book. Reader, I love him. In the words of Mr Spock: ‘Live long and prosper.’

 

 

BREAKING FAKE NEWS ON JEREMY CORBYN

 

          The ‘historian’ Dominique Sandbank of the Daily Moil came up with an article the other day denoting an early work by Jeremy Corbyn’s god Karl Marx of 1843, On the Jewish Question, as an anti-Semitic tract. Odd that this insight has been overlooked by both Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars for the past 150 years, and since the works of Marxologists are voluminous this is a striking discovery indeed.  In fact the young Marx’s article is both critical of the-then German backwardness and anachronistic politics that rejected Jewish emancipation (Marx’s father was a Jewish convert to Christianity, a prudent move in those days to – apart from anything else – allow for a middle-class professional career in Rhineland Germany) and a study of the role of Judaism in the history of capitalism. It will be recalled that the medieval Catholic proscription of usury, as opposed to a token interest on loans, meant that only Jews were permitted to charge more interest on them. Thus providing the spearhead for the growth of banking and merchant capital prior to industrialisation. Marx parallels the alienation of Jews from gentile society with capital as the alienating factor in modern life. It is a remarkable feat indeed on the part of Ms Sandbank to interpret discussion on all this as ‘anti-Semitic’.

          But wait! Is Jeremy Corbyn a Marxist? Does he pour over Das Kapital or even the Communist Manifesto on a regular basis? Does he adhere to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? (For example.) If the latter then he and John McDonnell would scarcely be advocating policies for preserving the present private enterprise system with government intervention – and even state capital is still capital. To all appearances, Corbyn is about as ‘Marxist’ as was Clement Attlee, and that was not very much.  So, Ms Sandbank’s attack on Marx to get at Corbyn is beside the point. But was Marx  a Marxist? ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist,’ he once said to his friend and collaborator Engels, in rueful response to various shenanigans that French ‘Marxists’ were getting up to at the time.

          So we may have to play another card, for if showing that Corbyn is both a communist and a fascist (who may be growing cannabis on his allotment) and who does not respond respectfully towards Ms Hodge’s judgment to his face that he is ‘a fucking racist’, we must resort to informing the world that Corbyn is in point of fact a paedophile as well. For he has had sexual relations with girls as young as 36, marrying the Mexican bi-sexual Frida Kahlo, previously married to the communist wall-painter Diego Rivera who stabbed Leon Trotsky to death in Mexico on Stalin’s orders in 1940: that is, a mere ten years before Jeremy Corbyn was born. But there’s more. Corbyn once rode on a Central Line Tube train that also carried three Muslim terrorists (Ms Sandbank does not mention that this was on different days on different trains), so we may add terrorist  to his perfidious infamy.

          Anything – please – anything!