Play It Again, Sam?

          If you own virtually the whole of the known world, you have to be on constant watch on every front all the time to keep possession of it. Thus the greater in extent the Roman Empire became, the more permanent its military crisis – whether on the German, Dacian or Parthian fronts. Roman emperors (‘emperor’ = ‘imperator’ or military leader) were little more than military commanders, moving from one end of the empire to the other in the cause of ceaseless defence. It was this, linked to economic decay through the ever-more extensive importation of slaves,  that brought Rome down in the end. Late capitalism is in somewhat an analogous situation. Now entirely global, its leaders in both politics and the economy must be ever-vigilant for any sign of any trouble anywhere, prepared for a quick heading-off/pre-empting of ‘trouble’ by disembowelling  before it gets out of hand. Thus the guardians of the long and impregnable-seeming dike that in fact is very leaky and becoming more so.

          In the case of the ‘serious’ threat of Jeremy Corbyn and the possibility that Conservatives will lose political control over the UK to him and his Labour Party, we are experiencing, in the run-up to the local elections in May, wave upon wave of media-co-ordinated ‘fake news’ about JC: anything will do and it requires no proof: first, his apparent secret relations with a Czech ‘spy’ in the 1980s, and after that fizzled out a focus on his failure to condemn Russia immediately for an apparent poisoning in Salisbury until the facts were such as to substantiate a prima facie case: needless to say, no such facts have come to light as yet (so far as we know) and indeed the whole thing is very mysterious, but none of that bothered Mrs May and her otherwise beleaguered government from getting an international bandwagon rolling to  condemn Russia on all sorts of grounds but based on Salisbury, with the mass withdrawal of diplomats (‘intelligence agents’) from various embassies. And then we have had a return of the anti-Semitism-rife-within-Labour canard (though the vast majority of anti-Semites dwell in the Tory Party and UKIP) all down to Corbyn and a ridiculous insinuated anti-Semitism of his own. No distinction is made between anti-Semitism and Corbyn’s lifelong disavowal of support for an ultra-Right Israeli government illegally seizing Palestinian lands to which it holds no right. You are either for Netanyahu and Likudism or you are anti-Jewish per se.  All this is now being increasingly denounced in articles and letters to editors by an increasingly sceptical public. All it remains for me (and for the rest of us) is to await the bringing of criminal charges for anti-Semitic incitement against various members of the Labour Party, though this seems unlikely even if such charges have recently been successfully prosecuted against two British fascists. Let’s see the accusers put their money where their mouth is. Then to see if Corbyn can continue to be reviled for ‘failures of leadership’ in refusing to condemn Russia for the Salisbury poisoning; my latest news is that the head scientist of the relevant division at Porton Down says that (at least from a scientific perspective) it is not possible to name Russia as the culprit. This does not stop No. 10 Downing Street from insisting that Russia is to blame: the Tories have gone so far in all this as not to be able to go back on it for mere lack of evidence. It seems obvious, doesn’t it?,  that Putin would launch such foreign assassinations on the eve of the Moscow World Cup just so various nations would boycott it. Interesting to note that the British government is careful to allow the British Team to go: imagine the furore if England players were refused entry to the World Cup by their own government!  (But everybody else should stay home, thus rendering terrific support for their team from the Moscow stands.) And finally I look forward to seeing the evidence that Corbyn passed ‘secrets’ to a former Czech agent back in the 1980s (no matter that he had protested as long before as 1968 when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to regain their control over the country). And now I find that Corbyn has been celebrating Seder with Marxist-socialist Jews in his constituency, and been widely denounced even by some Labour MPs – out to get him anyhow – for mixing with the ‘wrong kind’ of Jew. Apparently there are ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews’ and you are ‘anti-Semitic’ if you like the bad ones. Aren’t these accusers displaying no end of stupid anti-Semitism themselves? After all, even the Nazis had their ‘good’ Jews: one or two, like General Milch, former head of Lufthansa,  in high positions of military power. As someone recently said: there is no Pope in Judaism, no ultimate unitary authority over the whole faith. Indeed the Jews are about as herd-like and conformist, said this writer, as a herd of cats.

But never mind: all the JC ‘fake news’ will go rolling on and on, courtesy of the Daily Mail etc., at least until after the local elections in May.  

          I can’t be doing with this anymore just now: so I turn to what for me is some welcome light relief:

 

A ‘great line’ is the characteristic or otherwise wholly appropriate emblem and theme of the whole movie.

          So-called ‘great lines’ from movies are not noted for their literary or philosophical depth. They are not even witty bon-mots. So why are they remembered and cherished? It is because of what they stand for: the whole movie they are in. ‘Great lines’ are rare and seem to be a matter of chance. Even if they are often no more in themselves than hand-me-down shop-worn phrases, their genius lies in their compression of a whole story into a single line.

(NB: As I cite from memory I hope am at least 90% accurate!)

‘You weren’t supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’  Essence of a plot in which a caper so exquisitely planned falls apart due to unforeseen circumstances. Not the bloody doors, but the line foreshadows the kind of mishap that may be just around the corner…

‘Make my day, Punk!’ sums up Dirty Harry’s frustration with a corrupt, crime-ridden society and his violent gut-instinct – likely futile if not complicit – to do something about it.

‘Play it, Sam, play it!’ The grip of nostalgia for a thwarted love must be loosened. Casablanca is suffused in great lines: ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ ‘The Germans wore grey; you wore blue.’ Captain Renault’s shifty ‘I’m shocked, shocked…’ and Bogart’s ‘This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!’

‘Top of the world Ma!’ The last ringing words of a mother-obsessed psycho mobster as he bestrides a gasometer about to blow him up. The film in a phrase.

‘Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.’ Groucho here epitomises Marxist surrealism at its purest. Note the comedic inversion: ‘Either my watch has stopped or this man is dead’ would have been about as funny as a funeral.

‘I’ll be back.’ The inexorable robot is as good as his word. And true to Arnie’s form, for in real life Arnie has been coming back ever since.

‘You’re gonna have to get a bigger boat.’ Man’s puny pretensions in combatting a demonic natural force. (Mind you, they didn’t need the bigger boat in the end.)

‘Well, nobody’s perfect!’ A cheerful response to male cross-dressing and an advocacy of more live-and-let-live in a world of freedom. Ushers in the 1960s.

‘Who is that guy?’ Film chiefly about inscrutable Nemesis and how she stalks our two happy-go-lucky robbers relentlessly, and perhaps the rest of us, for everything we’ve ever done wrong.

‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ (Line taken from the original novel.) The response to a woman who cannot tell real from histrionic emotion, linked to the futility of the Old South as an ideal that now can never be.

‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’ Al Jolson’s ad lib at the beginning of the Talkies may have been meant ironically: what he was really saying was: ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’

‘Where’s the rest of me?’ What you say when you wake up legless after a double amputation. Since this is hardly a comedy (King’s Row);  the banality is breath taking, but deeply honest at the same time: what else could Ronald Reagan say?  (He went on to become the US chief executive lampooned with ‘the president’s brain is missing!’ – Spitting Images.)

‘Rosebud.’ The single word (uttered by the dying Citizen Kane at the beginning of the film) that sums up the plot and the drive behind it. And tells us that we will view the whole thing unfolding in retrospect. A word repeated in the penultimate shot as a burning image on a child’s sled whose natural element was snow.

‘The stuff dreams are made of.’ Last line of the film about the plaster of a fake bird-object everyone was chasing after thinking it was priceless.

‘Last night I dreamt I was at Manderley again.’ Also the opening line of the du Maurier novel on which the film is based: not a great novel (or film) but surely the greatest opening line in English-language fiction? Devotees of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities may be inclined to differ.

          Some notable lines are in fact both pseudo-deep and misleading. ‘This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind’ (Olivier’s Hamlet, 1948) degrades both the film and the play, an embarrassment in an otherwise outstanding picture. Like those portentous narrators at the beginnings of (sometimes) quite spectacular sword-and-sandal epics: ‘Rome! Empire of triumph and tragedy, of magnificence and mayhem…’ and so on. It would have been more seriously impressive if he had just shut up and let the clanking legionaries march past us dragging their slaves and exotic booty behind them. A composer like Miklos Rozsa could  easily do the rest…

          Some great lines never even got said: ‘You dirty rat!’ (Cagney) and, of course, ‘Play it again, Sam.’

 

 

 

         

 

A MODEST PROPOSAL…   (a fable for our times)

 

                    Major employers in Britain greeted with enthusiasm a leaked proposal from an unnamed minister at the last Cabinet meeting that the problem of inequality of  pay between men and women in the UK  would be easily solved by reducing men’s pay to the average present level of women’s. (That is, excepting boardroom remuneration, since that is a private matter for individual companies.)

          The T.U.C. is predictably opposed to what it calls ‘an outrageous idea’, but certain other interests also expressed concerns: leading retailers have spoken of falling consumption levels as a result and HM Treasury officials have anonymously voiced worries about any major national wage reduction adversely affecting income-tax receipts. It was, however, pointed out that reduced tax intake could be compensated for by raising the existing lowest rate of tax. Meanwhile retailers need only compensate loss in sales volumes by raising prices, thus counteracting potential deflationary pressures.

          Women’s groups were divided as to how to react: some feminists were of the opinion that ‘it would teach the men a jolly good lesson’. Others more radically inclined referred to the proposal as leading to ‘a race to the bottom’. They were supported by economists demurring over a further downslide in productivity if everyone were low-paid. The Guardian’s position was, as usual, equivocal.

          The principal conundrum is, however, the electoral effect, since reducing the level of men’s wages to that of women’s would likely make doorstep canvassing somewhat challenging. But since all the biggest financial and business interests would be overwhelmingly in favour the Conservative Party could expect campaign contributions on a massive scale, swamping Labour’s funding, providing all Tory canvassers with protective gear and ultimately determining the tenor and direction of the next election decisively, what with near-blanket rightwing control of mass media; while social media ‘fake news’ about Jeremy Corbyn’s father having boiled babies for breakfast and the Labour Party intending to build a ring of concentration camps for Jews might – taken together – be sufficient to swing enough support to the Tories to deny outright socialist victory. But electoral Tory victory would be more securely ensured by the prior reintroduction of pre-1867 ‘property qualifications’ for voting along with excluding those who had served prison sentences of over two years, together with re-zoning constituencies (known in America as ‘gerrymandering’) through which an estimated 50 Labour constituencies could be abolished.

          One Daily Mail columnist, noting the likely expansion of food banks and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s rapturous approval of their altruism, wrote that ‘self-denial’ on the part of Britain’s male workers would strengthen the nation’s moral fibre: enough to see it through Brexit with determination and vigour, pointing out that personal sacrifice on such a scale had won the war.

          Whatever; the universal lowering of male wages has become the ‘new normal’ in political debate. As one rightwing politician put it: ‘We can take it from there.’

In case you think the above is make-believe, I would refer you to the lead letter in Mail on Sunday ‘Letters’ for March 11^th, 2018: ‘Easy way to end the gender gap – pay men less’.

The letter points out that with men earning on average 18% more than women, business simply can’t afford to bring women’s pay to level-pegging, so the only answer is to pay men less, if we want equality.

Any more than business not so long ago said it could not ‘afford’ to pay a national ‘living wage’ of £7.50 an hour: in other words, barely enough to live on. If business is in this parlous state, what is it for? And ask why women doing the same work should of necessity subsidise even greater company profits, just for being women. One option might be to change sex.

Long ago Nassau Senior argued strenuously against the 10-Hour Act limiting the working day to 10 hours on the grounds that this would impoverish business. (He apparently saw nothing wrong in children working 14 hours a day, which in some countries they may still do.) In other words we should only row back a bit on people worked to death for 24 hours a day on no pay at all.  Jeff Bezos on his £112 billion over at Amazon has shown eloquently how this kind of approach does indeed maximise profitability, at least for the CEO.

Of course, as Marx pointed out, the parliamentary limiting of the working day forced manufacturers to become more inventive in how to maximise worker productivity within a 10- and later an 8-hour limit: through advancing technology per worker per hour. Result was that manufacturers made more money than ever. But today, with ever-cheaper labour reserves available for one reason and another, Nassau Senior may live again.  

         

 

         

 

 

WHO OWNS THE PRESS?

 

Just a brief breakdown of the obvious: for those who argue that there should be no restrictions on press ownership in the name of ‘press freedom’. But how ‘free’ a press is it? Let’s have a look:

National Dailies:           Political outlook                              Proprietors:

FINANCIAL TIMES – centre-right                               Nikkei Inc. (Japan)

THE TIMES – right                                                   Murdoch – News Corp.

DAILY TELEGRAPH – far right                                         Barclay brothers

DAILY MAIL – far right                                                Viscount Rothermere

GUARDIAN – centre left                                                         (trust)

i – centre right                                                                           Johnston Press

DAILY EXPRESS – far right       Trinity Mirror (soon ’Reach’)/Desmond

THE SUN – far right                                                   Murdoch – News Corp.

THE MIRROR – centre left                                                        Trinity Mirror

DAILY STAR – far right                                          Trinity Mirror/Desmond

MORNING STAR – left                                    Peoples Press (not for profit)

National Sundays:

SUNDAY TIMES  - right                                                 Murdoch – News Corp.

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH – far right                                        Barclay brothers

MAIL ON SUNDAY – far right                                     Viscount  Rothermere

OBSERVER – centre/left/right (‘liberal’)                                (trust)

SUNDAY EXPRESS – far right                               Trinity Mirror/Desmond

THE SUN ON SUNDAY - far right                             Murdoch– News Corp.

SUNDAY MIRROR – centre left                                                    Trinity Mirror

THE PEOPLE – centre left                                                           Trinity Mirror

DAILY STAR ON SUNDAY – far right                   Trinity Mirror/Desmond

 

So I would class 10 of these nationals as ‘far right’, two as ‘right’, two as ‘centre right’, four as ‘centre left’, and one as ‘left’. That’s fourteen as ‘far right’ or ‘right/centre right’, with five as ‘left/centre-left’. Plus the Observer, which expresses views across the whole spectrum, but is never more than very cautiously left. (Or cautiously right, come to that.)

Unfortunately the present-day Fleet Street lacks a DAILY HERALD, a mass-circulation title once the platform for the TUC which could, at least, be depended upon to express the views of organised labour. Its place has been taken by the MORNING STAR, once a Communist-run newspaper and with continuing close links to the Party (formerly the DAILY WORKER) but now more broadly-based across the whole left spectrum, including Labour and Green party members, and run by a co-operative that reflects this spectrum. The MORNING STAR, very conscious of being the only paper reflecting trade union views (for example in regard to disputes) is thus the only paper which is reliably leftwing and as it lacks the resources of commercial advertising it is dependent upon day-to-day crowdfunding. It has become of major importance since the moment it became the ONLY national daily to support the candidature of Jeremy Corbyn (a STAR columnist then) and which continues to be the only paper that reliably reports his views and policies.

 

The print medium isn’t what it was, what with social media and news on the Web, and all print circulations (insofar as we know) have dropped. It seems likely that in a country in which the Conservative Party membership is some 130,000 while that of Labour under Corbyn is well over 600,000, the predominant press bias does not in any way reflect the views of the country taken as a whole: a fact which keeps the well-paid hacks of the rightwing press going through enormous populist contortions  in which only the truth suffers.

I have not mentioned the SOCIALIST WORKER, organ of the Socialist Workers Party which if anything is larger than the (main) Communist Party and with a paper-circulation to match. SOCIALIST WORKER stands at the head of myriad left weeklies of infinitely less circulation. This is because the SOCIALIST WORKER comes out weekly only and so really ought to be classed alongside weekly periodicals. It is not commonly found on sale at newsagents, either, but relies upon a web presence plus – for the print version - both membership subscriptions and hawkers.

 

 

 

 

 

SPINOZA WAS RIGHT!

 

The human body is a body that thinks, a thinking body (Spinoza). Bodies do not have thought in the sense of owning a possession, any more than bodies have walking rather than doing walking. Human bodies act by thinking (amongst other things) which in fact they do all the time, even in sleep. Certain drugs may alter this activity just as an excess of alcohol will alter the action of walking. Human bodies are thinking ones just as they are walking ones, sitting-down ones and manually-using ones. Thinking indeed animates and accompanies all these, together with reflexes which involve the brain but function also to varying degrees below the consciousness of thinking.

          This consciousness of thinking, incorporating self-awareness, is a natural and social development out of a lengthy evolution. But there is no rigid or sharp division here between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Higher animals have memories and can reason beyond pure instincts, often learning by specific imitation, though they function largely by instinct, specialising in their reciprocations with their environments. Wild animals are tied to their natural habitats, a chief distinction from humans, who have learned to live in virtually all environments partly by altering them though some animals have – in some cases for millennia – thrived in big cities – one thinks immediately of various rodents, plus foxes and birds of prey, for example. But it was humans who built the cities in the first place and have largely altered countrysides by industrial means. Humans are not sufficiently biologically specialised to survive without making up societies developed through labour, commencing with the freeing-up of the hands through an upright posture and bipedalism. And so over a lengthy evolution (though in one phase not so lengthy: farming is only 10,000 years old) we have developed elaborated thinking, reasoning, imagining and all through necessary social co-operation and thought-sharing in speech, work, dance, ritual, art, writing and electronic communication – in the service of the reproduction of human social life.

          Just as there is no rigid division between humans and animals, so there is no such thing as ‘thought’ per se. There is always thought about something.  

          ‘Thought’ is not a spiritual ‘implant’ inside a corporeal human body. There is no division of an existential kind between a corporeal human body and his/her thoughts, for the thoughts as such are an activity of that body: something the body does rather than has.   

          ‘Thought’ in isolation is non-existent, an abstraction or reification. It is impossible to think ‘thought’ as such because as a mythical entity in isolation, thought does not exist and by itself is unimaginable. Only thinking exists, as a bodily extension.

          Thoughts are Nature thinking about itself. That is, because human beings are natural beings, a development of Nature itself through humanoid biological-social evolution. In our terms evolution in Nature tends to be slow, though with ‘qualitative leaps’. Biologically we are pretty much the same as our homo sapiens Stone Age ancestors. It is via a further tool-using sociality that we have developed far beyond them. And because all creatures and plants reciprocate with environments, more especially with humans thinking – being a social action and indeed storing social images when not directly socialising – mental activity is  manifested ‘out there’ as much as ‘in here’. Human beings as social beings are consciously purpose-driven, we live our lives by intending to get to work (and coming home again), by working out how to build a house (or reading the instructions), by deciding to sit in this chair rather than that one, by deciding to have children, or at any rate to deal with that situation whether intended or not. As classes emerge in human societies, or in the relations of production and reproduction of human life, so class-struggle is grounded in the natural needs of humans as natural beings, in a struggle over wherewithal in terms of shelter, food and other needs. Thus it is a perpetuation of Nature but in the human socio-political context of the inequalities that deprive the many and over-fulfil the few who rule over them. Class struggles have been endemic in societies of slavery, despotism, feudalism and capitalism. Categorising actions strictly in terms of whether they stem from emotions or from intellect or instincts is unhelpful because purpose towards something is the activity-driven impetus, even if it comes from no more than to relieve oneself of pain or the burden of excrement. The whole natural body is purpose-driven by means some of which are physiologically beyond our immediate control – hunger, contractions, infections, scabbing and so on; but in humans thinking is in overall charge, aided by the more advanced thinking of, say, medical practitioners, not to speak of chefs.

          Mental health has profound implications for thinking bodies, and mental illness is if anything more painful and terrifying for a thinking body than physical illness, something the mass of us even now are only just beginning to realise.

          It might have been better all round if Descartes, back in the 17^th century, had inaugurated modern philosophy by saying: ‘I am, therefore I think’ rather than ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Thinking was not prior to corporeal existence. But for Descartes the dilemma would then be how to posit a basic ‘I am’ without some sort of Divine postulate or intervention, outside a construction of rational thinking as such, Darwin not having been around in the 17^th century, pace Spinoza. Indeed Descartes resorted to Divine intervention to explain the conundrum of mind-body separation or dualism, (in humans only: dolphins, chimps and bonobos need not apply: Descartes thought of animals as automatons; evidently he had never seen a sleeping dog dreaming) which has bedevilled philosophy ever since. Thus dualism holds that consciousness and physicality are separate domains, but no one has figured out how the supposed corporeal domain and the incorporeal domain interact. The only possible answer seems to have been that God made it so, and you don’t go about questioning Him!

          There is a downside. Because thinking is so all-encompassing in human life it leads us to be the only creatures who are aware of the imminence of their deaths. Animals instinctively know the fear of danger but nothing of their own deaths, though higher animals will mourn the losses of their kind, most poignantly elephants with their exceptional memories. But we know that we ourselves are not exempt in a single instance from personal extinction – danger notwithstanding – and this may be hard to bear.

          What is harder to bear is the sheer nastiness, terror, pain and filth of much dying (not death itself) and the yearly deaths of hundreds of thousands of children across the world: truly shocking such that this essay is powerless to address it adequately. And then the cutting down of the youthful, still in their early prime, tragically and often violently.  All this for me, and I think most others – is much harder to bear than our personal extinction (at least until we are brought to realize the latter’s actual oncoming). Ironically death itself is easier to give thought to and respond to, and so it is this that we will focus on here. Death is piffling compared to dying.

          To meet this eventuality we have developed down the ages a ‘cure’ that might be considered worse than the ‘disease’: a belief in our individual immortality. Probably the majority of people even outside the church believe in a personal immortality of some sort. The irony of this is that it is the corporeal body that is ‘immortal’ (never mind souls) since matter even as transmuted into energy is inextinguishable.

          The living body is not a can of beans, vacuum-sealed and sufficient unto itself. It is continuously nourished and sustained by that which is outside it - including the air we breathe almost every second of our lives or die. The foci and objects of our hopes and fears, our plans, our images, our emotions and our actions – our minds, in short – are ‘out there’ not ‘in here’. Our brains are not the source but the instrument, the two-way transmitter. We, and all living organisms, are as much ‘out there’ as ‘in here’, and for humans this includes their thinking minds. Without ‘out there’, there would be no minds. Even purely mental, immaterial images – not viewable in brain scans – and however internalised, are not wholly internal but a response to the world we live in. And this includes the picturised, compulsive thinking we know as dreams, which may lack everyday logic but not sense, however ‘nonsensical’. Those who instinctively grasp our essential being-in-the-world are, I believe, the more inclined to give back what they take in, perhaps the more inclined to protest against air pollution because they know that ‘air’ is ‘us’ – us as much as our arms and legs and incredibly more vital. Those who are intent on emulating cans of beans will likely be complaisant over killing their own and other peoples’ children on this account. Meanwhile, I suggest, if I cannot prove, that those who give freely of themselves will give freely of their lives when their time comes. Death, this last act of rendering, giving up, can make sense to those who have ‘given’ all their lives. Even solitary artists know the intensity of giving, and the martyred saints of old gave up their lives not only for the bliss to come but also because they had been giving for all or much of their lives. But the need to give today does not require a fanaticism of the old kind, only a realistic assessment of where we and the world are presently heading if we continue to respond by feeding ourselves at the expense of feeding and freeing others.  The personal immortality alternative is not justifiable on virtually any grounds. That is no more than a patchwork of half-baked egoistic ideas needing ever more patching and mending to give (in our time) cover to narcissistic capitalism, itself upholding – in reality – only the immortality of money: the fetish twinned with idealised personal immortality. So twinned, they shore each other up.

Far from the older conservative values of a traditional and organic society, Tory ideology today is focussed on the belief in the self-achieving individual whose freedom is threatened by ‘collectivism’. We are all materially better-off (even the poor) than we used to be, but better-off as separated individuals, not in collective, environmental and social terms. Regardless of whether or not polar bears are on the brink of extinction through our efforts to warm up the globe, the higher and stouter the wall of protection around our house, large or small, the better. Even transport must be insanely individualised with results in our death-dealing pollution and five-mile tailbacks, not to speak of the material waste involved in a world of depleting resources. Unless we can successfully complete this individualist paradise with either an irrational dismissal of imminent personal death or the clinging to the shreds of a faith – long since abandoned otherwise – in a personal immortality, this solipsistic emphasis on extreme separated individualism  makes the thought of one’s own death horrifying in its inconceivability. What can ‘nothing’ mean to one who is ‘everything’ there is? The ‘cure’ of belief in a personal delivery through an inner immortal soul is worse than the ailment if the religion backing this up is not otherwise very robustly believed, and so contributes in its fragile way towards a rubbing raw of the knowledge of death. (Strictly speaking, the biblical Christian dogma is ‘the resurrection of the body’ on the Day of Judgment: see e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:52. As for Buddhist reincarnation, if there is no individuality in Buddhism, what is being ‘reincarnated’?)

          To sum up. No neurologist has ever detected ‘thoughts’ in the brain. Neural firings are not themselves thoughts: the apprehended world (including other bodily functions) creates thoughts. Because we are purpose-driven (common at various levels to all organisms – even, so it seems, trees), our thinking applied to purpose (not found in other organisms except for rudiments in the higher animals and birds), known as ‘mind’, is ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here’. However secret or fanciful or mistaken thoughts may be, or in dreams during sleep, their existence is predicated on the outside world of objects and purposes to do with objects including other human objects, and our own body as an object. Remove all that, remove all stimulus of content and purpose, and there is no ‘thought’ at all. In that state one is either dead or deeply drugged or in a coma in which whole physical systems are shut down.

          In a new book The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (2017) psychologist Riccardo Manzotti of the University of Milan (‘who has written 50 papers on the basis of consciousness’) considers that our consciousness is of the same stuff physically as the objects it encounters. I would go along with this inasmuch as air and all the rest of the ‘outside’ are integral to us as individual bodies. It is promising that Professor Manzotti mounts a comprehensive and vehement attack on Cartesian mind-body dualism, but despite protestations he cannot ultimately detach himself from the age-old materialist doctrine of physicalism, i.e. that the only real world is the physical world, (a doctrine diametrically opposed, like a fractious twin, to Bishop Berkeley’s theory that the world is immaterially engendered in us by God). Oddly, Manzotti comes to at least partially embrace his twin in the sense that his own doctrine appears to edge towards the Bishop’s view when logically worked out.

          Essentially this is because Manzotti’s focus is on a consciousness passively observing objects (in his case a red apple, so often cited throughout the text as to seem obsessional), just as with virtually all the conventional materialist philosophers.

          Here it is useful to bring in Marx and Theses on Feuerbach, viz.:

‘The chief defect of all previous materialism (including that of Feuerbach) is that things, reality, the sensible world, are conceived only in the form of objects of observation, but not as human sense activity, not as practical activity, not subjectively….’ (I)

‘The standpoint of the old type of materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new materialism is human society or social humanity.’ (IX)

Or this from the 1844 Manuscripts:

‘Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process.’

And this, from the German Ideology:

‘We begin with real, active men, and from their real life-process show the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. ..Life is not determined from consciousness but consciousness by life.’

          Deriving theses on consciousness from the peaceful contemplation of apples or anything else means ultimately reaching a dead end persisting in this frame of thinking.

Hence my stress on the modality of purpose-driven thinking social beings as the developers of consciousness as an actively-used tool, long ago commencing with the freed-up hands. It is in this active sense that as aspects of our material bodies,  our minds are as much ‘out there’ as ‘in here’. When we are released from purpose we will not think anyhow, and so death is nothing to worry about when we no longer have the means by which to worry. But if we have given out some good, at least enough to be missed and remembered to whatever extent, our ‘out there’ will survive us. Buddhists and Hindus would call this our karma, the sum total of all our actions when alive that survives us. I think this is perfectly reasonable in a humanist-materialist sense, as outlined in this blog. It is by this ‘karma’ that Mozart, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Jane Austen, Annie Jones, Steve Wilkinson and that sharp-minded old chap down the pub survive. Or if we’ve done more than our fair share of bad, our ‘out there’ will most likely be shunned, despised and figuratively spat upon. Or perhaps more likely  it will be a mixture of both. So: a heaven, a hell and a purgatory exist after all, though you need not concern yourself with them unless you want to! In this case it really is your survivors who agonise, not you.

 

 

         

 

“Whatever Happened to…?”

 

          It is no sin to be forgotten. Judging by a perusal of back-numbers of the Times Literary Supplement, nobody ever is.

          But there is a sense in which being largely forgotten is a kind of judgment. Forgottenness in the list below may have something to do (in many cases) with overblown pretensions, and with the hype of the time for which the subject may or may not have been chiefly responsible.

          Being dead is no excuse. Where would history and biography be if persons became forgotten because they had died? Indeed, as in the case with artists, death often leads to enhanced reputations and escalating asset-values. I hasten to add that a number listed below are still very much alive.

          The list covers the public realm generally – authors, cultural pundits of the day, one-time radicals and experimentalists, thinkers and doers across a wide range of the social, cultural and political, philosophers, psychologists, economists, theologians. All or most were once widely followed with avidity, their next works looked forward to with baited breath, and argued over interminably. They were household names at least amongst the literati and often somewhat beyond. Some made headlines.

          I’ve deliberately left out popular/pop/rock stars, scandal figures and fashion icons – surely the most ephemeral? Not really. Mandy Rice-Davies and the late Christine Keeler are ever with us. John Profumo is the only member of Macmillan’s government anyone can recall, offhand. Cecil Beaton was a certain kind of high-fashion icon but is strangely immortal. So is Coco Chanel, amongst others. Buddy Holly never reached the 1960s. Mario Lanza never reached the Sixties either but still sells albums. This year Frank Sinatra would be 103. Elvis lives. These and others have a tendency towards permanency  denied all too many in ‘the higher culture’. As the saying goes: when in doubt go on tour. Even as a hologram.

          If some of the names listed below are entirely strange to you, they really have been forgotten. Others are ‘in the process of’, so to speak. Meanwhile aficionados are going to be furious…

(Sir) Richard Acland

John Arden

Hannah Arendt 1

(Sir) Isaiah Berlin

Brigid Brophy

Norman O Brown

Frank Buchman

Anthony Burgess 2

(Dame) Barbara Cartland

Carlos Castaneda

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Regis Debray


John Dos Pasos

Laurence Durrell 3

HJ Eysenck

Francis Fukuyama

Buckminster Fuller 4


Anthony ('Third Way') Giddens

Graham Greene 5

Abby Hoffman

Ivan Illich

Eugene Ionesco 6

CEM Joad

James Jones

Alfred Kinsey 6

Hans Kung

Arthur Laffer

RD Laing


Harold Laski

Sinclair Lewis 7

Claude Levi-Strauss

Mary McCarthy

Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marcuse

W Somerset Maugham

Henry Miller

Jonathan Miller

Malcolm Muggeridge

Lewis Mumford

Iris Murdoch

Timothy O’Leary

Vance Packard 6

Laurens van der Post

Anthony Powell 8

John Cowper Powys

Dorothy Richardson 9

Harold Robbins

Lionel (Lord) Robbins


Robert Ruark

Ken Russell

James Saunders

(Sir) CP Snow

Susan Sontag 10

Donald (Lord) Soper

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

DM Thomas

Paul Tillich

Arnold Wesker

Huw Wheldon

Angus Wilson

Colin Wilson

Boris Yeltsin

 

1. More recently a revival of interest in her thought.
2. Known now largely via association with the notoriety of Kubrick’s film of ‘A Clockwork Orange’.
3. Was my personal god when I was twenty.
4. We still have geodesic domes but the philosophy has been cast aside.
5. ‘The greatest novelist of his time’? Don’t worry: ‘We’ll always have Vienna – and the zither…’
6. Regrets in some cases. I rate Eugene Ionesco as one of the 20^th century’s most penetrating and disturbing playwrights but he refuses to be revived.  Ivan Illich in the 1960s was an inspired anarchist and teacher whose De-schooling Society, amongst other books, we yet have much to learn from. Alfred Kinsey statistically liberated us all in terms of sexual enlightenment only to be posthumously and disgracefully denigrated by his latter-day peers. Vance Packard in the 1950s and 60s did much to heighten our awareness of the insidious power of advertising. Alas, advertising survived him to go on to even greater triumph, riches and supremacy.
7. America’s first literature Nobel prizewinner. Both Babbit and Elmer Gantry prove to be far-seeing and relevant to today. His death in 1951 made the headlines and the radio news but he seems all but forgotten today.
8. A new biography may well revive public interest.
9. As a pathbreaking novelist stylistically, Richardson was once ranked alongside Virginia Woolf.
10. Has now made a comeback with a new book (2017) of reflective prose.

There are no set rules for being remembered, and the following are not necessarily relevant to all those just listed, but they might act as a sort of guide to the aspirant.

Don’t go in for false dawns. Choose your sunrises with some care.

Don’t make claims you can’t really substantiate.

Don’t confuse creative eclecticism with originality.

Be basically, not superficially, subversive.

Remember that our works are either symptoms or solutions. Too often  a proposed solution is really only a symptom of the problem or situation under consideration. Symptoms of a social era are rarely in a position to initiate big change of that of which they are such an intimate part.

Be lucky not to be taken up and hyped beyond the possibility of enthusing posterity.

Don’t watch this space for – Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Kristeva et al. Better observers than I have been taking them apart for some years but not before too many university students were confusedly bedazzled.

     Then there are those who were virtually unknown until sometime after their deaths. Think of Copernicus. Or, in modern times, the late Hyman Minsky, these days very much ‘the man of the Moment’ in economics. Not to mention Jesus of Nazareth, who was not much ‘hyped’ when in the corporeal state.

 

Bootle’s Wand

 

          From ‘Defending bank chiefs’ profligate pay will just add fuel to Corbyn’s ire,’ Daily Telegraph Business 4^th December 2017 let Roger Bootle, chairman of Capital Economics, start us off:

A note last week from analysts at Morgan Stanley suggesting that the election of a Labour government could be a bigger risk to the City than Brexit has prompted Jeremy Corbyn to give a disarmingly direct response: “When they say we’re a threat they’re right. We’re a threat to a damaging and failed system that’s rigged for the few.”

 

Of course, according to Mr Bootle, Jeremy’s occupation of No. 10 would be an unmitigated disaster for all kinds of reasons,  more especially that he ‘misses many crucial points and pays scant regard to the consequences of proposed actions.’  Well, perhaps he has, perhaps he hasn’t. Mr Bootle is never very clear or precise. It could be that Jeremy Corbyn has indeed paid regard to ‘the consequences of proposed actions’  but they don’t weigh as heavily on him as they might on Mr Bootle’s particular readers.  But let that pass. For, stunningly, Mr Bootle concedes that ‘Yet he does have a point.’ Jeremy Corbyn has a point? What is going on here?

          It turns out to be a politically-charged point, since Jeremy also mentioned that the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, James Gorman, was paid (in sterling terms) £16.7 million in salary last year, which Roger Bootle accepts as true. This is dangerous territory we are getting into, and Mr Bootle is wary: ‘It may be difficult for senior bankers to comprehend this,’ he writes, ‘but there is a widespread feeling in society that they have not earned the huge sums of money that they are paid.’

          If you didn’t know this before, you read it here.

          What’s more, ‘Rage against bankers is not just a UK phenomenon.’ It seems that if anything Americans are even more splenetic over them. But there is an even wider problem: ‘The excesses of capitalism are by no means confined to banking.’ Has Bootle borrowed from a Morning Star editorial? (Our only Marxist daily here, for the uninitiated.) Roger Bootle qualifies this by stating that ‘the privatisation of large swathes of the British economy, first begun under Mrs Thatcher, and disparaged by Mr Corbyn, was an enormous success.’ Some might differ. How ‘successful’, other than in moneymaking terms, have the privatisations of electricity and gas, water and railways, public housing (hence our present desperate housing shortage) and schools actually been? Parents of schoolchildren, as well as probation and prison officers, the homeless and Southern Rail commuters might demur. Not much is left after all these. Bootle has the good sense to concede: ‘But not all privatisations were equally successful. In some cases, what is essentially a natural monopoly is now operated for the benefit of the senior executives and shareholders…This is not proper capitalism, which thrives on competition. This is the capitalism of the robber barons.’

          Odd. I always thought the old robber barons – Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt et. al – were intensely competitive, to the point of buying out or ruining all who stood in their way.

          Be that as it may, apparently the only proper capitalism is that which thrives on competition, including that of James Dyson and – Bill Gates, whose Microsoft has thrived on competition, surely not on acquired monopolistic patents. We admire them (and positively adore Rupert Murdoch) but not the likes of bankers, who have simply been making money out of money, not profiting productively. Though, Bootle says, a propos  something-or-other,  it is not the market’s fault that public bodies like the NHS and the BBC have been in effect hollowed out by capital. ‘This is surely for the public sector to sort out.’ Mr Bootle cannot be blind to the fact that such public bodies are publicly accountable, which means to whichever government is in power at Westminster. Perhaps he did not notice, for example, that it is the governments of New Labour and beyond that have forced PFI on public organisations, and Health Ministers who have imposed the ruinous costs on the NHS of internal private enterprise – meanwhile, of course, holding the purse-strings of all these organisations. So a bit of sleight of hand here, as we come to learn of Mr Bootle’s powers and pretentions as a magician.

          So we shall get a Corbyn-led administration, which will virtually destroy the economy. (It’s in great shape now, of course.) but ‘If this happens, it will be largely the fault of the Conservative Party.’

So far, Jeremy Corbyn has been playing the best tunes. This Government needs to make the case for capitalism, including banking, making clear how beneficial it is for the living standards of ordinary people, while highlighting the disastrous performance of most, if not all, socialist governments abroad and most Labour governments here at home.

In other words, better spin like Tony used to do.

          I wish Bootle had been more specific. What does he mean by saying that ‘most, if not all socialist governments abroad’ have performed disastrously? Are we supposed to conjure up Gerhard Schroeder, Mao Zedong, Julius Nyerere, Hugo Chavez, Deng Xiaoping, Franklin Roosevelt, Leonid Brezhnev or Francois Mitterand? Which of these and possibly other ‘not alls’ were the successes? Can socialism in any guise ever have been successful? Surely not in the Daily Telegraph! What, according to Bootle is socialism?  As for ‘most Labour governments’, which are the ‘not alls’ that succeeded? Did the administrations of MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson-Callaghan and Blair-Brown not all end in disaster? (For God’s sake don’t mention Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Ted Heath, John Major or David Cameron!) If not which succeeded? We don’t know. Bootle won’t tell us.

          What Bootle pleads for is making the case for an enlightened capitalism which still allows decent, hardworking rich people to make a lot of money provided ‘they obey the law and pay their taxes’.  (Though they can avoid doing the latter if they choose to be non-domiciled, and if they wait around long enough the highest tax-rates will continue to be lowered.) So here is the solution:

The promotion of capitalism includes restructuring the system to minimise abuses and excesses. Ensuring effective competition holds the key. Unless the Conservatives find a way of pulling this off then we may be destined to appreciate the merits of capitalism only by experiencing its demise.

And that’s it. I can imagine an email winging its way to Roger Bootle from Downing Street: ‘Er, Rog, could you maybe give us some idea of how we could go about this? The Party would be broke without donations from bankers and hedge funds, and from your “robber barons”.’  For Mr Bootle has provided no solution whatever except the magic wand that seems to be passed about from one Telegraph columnist to another.

          And so the best Roger Bootle can offer is that the Conservatives ‘find a way of pulling this off.’ Thanks for nothing, Tories might reply. In any case the government interference of ‘restructuring the system’ sounds a bit socialist to me. What Mr Bootle proposes in generalities looks much like the rather more detailed Labour Party programme which has already been announced and publicised.  Why not take this further?

          Thus I can see now the Tory posters for the next election: ‘Vote Labour, for strong and stable government!’

          This isn’t so silly. During Jeremy Corbyn’s first contest for the Labour Party leadership, the Daily Telegraph mischievously advised Conservatives to sign up for Labour by paying the £3 entry fee in order to vote for Jeremy and so help install an unelectable Labour leader. All they need do now is forget their worries, vote for Jeremy again and then let a victorious Prime Minister Corbyn take the blame for everything that happens subsequently. Much easier than rallying to a clapped-out ideology and cheaper than trying to get the Tory Party elected in these increasingly unelectable times for it. That’s how I would ‘pull this off’!