Pared-back living and the modern male

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I uneasily venture into a realm that seems utterly foreign to me…….

An essay in Toronto Life by a 31-year-old named “Tony” who earns $130,000 a year, lives at home with his parents and proudly forgoes material possessions in order to spend his money on “wild, rare, unforgettable experiences”. His boasts about drinking fine wines and patronising “the rooftop restaurant featured in The Hangover Part II” are insufferable, but what makes it worse is the trite assumption that, by valuing experiences over “stuff”, he’s living a more meaningful existence. This has become “our era’s reigning banality”. It’s true, of course, that eating a meal with a loved one is “more spiritually uplifting than ordering shoes online”. But overweening pride in non-ownership grates when it comes from people who are cadging off others.

There’s “something subtly sexist” about modern celebrations of pared-back living, too. For men, it always seems to be about fulfilling dreams and not being “tied down”, whereas for women it always seems to be about achieving Zen-like calm by decluttering the home. Or as the writer Ruth Whippman recently put it, while men are conditioned to “see their happiness in terms of adventure and travel, sex and ideas and long nights of hilarity, women are now encouraged to find deep fulfilment in staying home to origami our pants”. (Phoebe Maltz Bovy, New Republic, published in The Week)

The men seem selfish to me, but maybe I am just out of date.  I do perceive a somewhat general preoccupation with the self.  Life seems to be all about “Me, Me, Me”.  All too often one can get through an evening asking questions of the person next to you, and realising on the way home that he or she had asked not a single question about you and  left not knowing a single thing about you, except possibly your first name.  This modern style of social interraction was once explained thus: “I thought that if you had something to say about yourself you would interrupt me and tell me what it is”.   Epicurus would be appalled.   Certainly it is charmless.  I personally would simply use an old Saxon word – rude.  My father once told me, ” If you want to charm somebody, ask questions about them, their lives, their likes, their dislikes and their views on just about anything”.  Good advice.

Are the English anti-Irish again?

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Teresa May’s pay-off of  the Democratic Unionist Party  in Northern Ireland, in return for support for the deeply dovided and non- functional Conservatives in parliament, is not popular anywhere, and there are claims that it is stirring up old anti- Irish prejudices.

One thing I learned when I was doing consulting in Northern Ireland was that there are two Northern Irelands – the businessmen and the educated people, whose attitudes you couldn’t tell apart from their Southern opposite numbers (or anywhere else in Europe) and the people still living in the 17 Century. I also became aware of the chip that a lot of people there have on their shoulders. They think they are looked down upon by Brits, which is not true. There is no anti-Irish feeling left in England, just irritation about the silly amount of money being paid to NI at the expense of the National Health Service and other claimants.

The DUP are opposed to same- sex marriage and abortion and are tied up with the Orange Order, which deliberately provokes Catholics. Ordinary Irish citizens are as impatient with these old divides as are most English people. Indeed, they look forward to an influx of new jobs with companies fleeing a Britain soon (?) to be outside the EU.

Every year the media focus on the Apprentice Boy marches and the bowler hats and the old- fashioned prejudices (on both sides of the religious divide), and this gives NI a bad image, but if there is prejudice it is against the antidiluvian religion, not against the Irish per se. I do think there are a lot of people who, before the NI agreement that Clinton helped get, dearly wished NI could by carved off and floated away to a spot just south of Greenland. But then it was Cromwell and King Billy who caused the problem in the first place, so one somehow has to live with the tribal stuff.

(Provoked by an article by Gen Patterson, Irish Times, 28 June 2017 claiming that the English were becoming anti- Irish again)

 

Is the US going the way of the Soviet Union?

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Slowly, seemingly inexorably, the U.S. is becoming more like the former Soviet Union. Just to begin the list of similarities: too many resources are being devoted to the military and the national security state; too many over-decorated generals are being given too much authority in government; bleeding-ulcer wars continue unstanched in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere; the infrastructure (roads, bridges, pipelines, dams, and so on) continues to crumble; restless “republics” grumble about separating from the union (Calexit!); rampant drug abuse and declining life expectancy are now American facts of life. Meanwhile, the latest U.S. president is, in temperament, authoritarian, even as government “services” take on an increasingly nepotistic flavor at the top.

Given the list of symptoms, here’s one obvious 10-step approach to the de-sovietization of America:
1. Decrease “defense” spending by 10% annually for the next five years. In the Soviet spirit, think of it as a five-year plan to restore our revolution (as in the American Revolution), which was, after all, directed against imperial policies exercised by a “bigly” king.
2. Cut the number of generals and admirals in the military by half, and get rid of all the meaningless ribbons, badges, and medals they wear. In other words, don’t just cut down on the high command but on their tendency to look (and increasingly to act) like Soviet generals of old. And don’t allow them to serve in high governmental positions until they’ve been retired for at least 10 years.
3. Get our military out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war-torn countries in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Reduce that imperial footprint overseas by closing costly military bases.
4. Work to eliminate nuclear weapons globally by, as a first step, cutting the vast U.S. arsenal in half and forgetting about that trillion-dollar “modernization” program. Eliminate land-based ICBMs first; they are no longer needed for any meaningful deterrent purposes.
5. Take the money saved on “modernizing” nukes and invest it in updating America’s infrastructure.
6. Curtail state surveillance. Freedom needs privacy to flourish. As a nation, we need to remember that security is not the bedrock of democracy — the U.S. Constitution is.
7. Work to curb drug abuse by cutting back on criminalization. Focus instead on providing better treatment programs for addicts. Set a goal of cutting America’s prison population in half over the next decade.
8. Life expectancy will increase with better health care. Provide health care coverage for all using a single-payer system. Every American should have the same coverage as a member of Congress. People shouldn’t be suffering and dying because they can’t afford to see a doctor or pay for their prescriptions.
9. Nothing is more fundamental to “national security” than clean air and water. It’s folly to risk poisoning the environment in the name of either economic productivity or building up the military. The citizens of the former Soviet Republics still struggle with the fallout from the poisonous environmental policies of Soviet days.
10. Congress needs to assert its constitutional authority over war and the budget, and begin to act like the “check and balance” it’s supposed to be when it comes to executive power.

(William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, published in TomDispatch regular. His personal blog is Bracing Views)

What can one add to this positively Epicurean set of answers to the American dilemma? Living in the nation’s capital the problems Col. Astore outlines are painfully evident, even if some people will have near-apoplexy reading them.  It sometimes takes an outsider to clear-headedly analyse the problems.

 

 

Lying and cheating

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Lying, says the New Scientist, is a vital, smoothing part of the social fabric. We develop the skill young: most 3-year-olds will lie quite naturally when it suits them. The average UK adult admits to lying 10 times a week – even if these tend to be little white lies, like inventing reasons for not answering a phone call.

Robert Feldman of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of “Liar: The truth about lying” says that shifty eyes or showing anxiety – behaviours commonly associated with lying – aren’t consistent indicators. We are hopeless at detecting lies, for a good reason. “Most of the time we assume that people are telling us the truth. It’s really cognitively exhausting to always be assessing whether other people are telling the truth or not,” says Feldman.

The best liars are “natural performers”, says Aldert Vrij, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK. They “exhibit behaviours that observers associate with honesty, such as making eye contact, smiling and smooth speech lacking in ‘ums’ and ‘ers’, even when they are lying”, he says. Many successful liars also mask signs of thinking hard – and it seems good-looking people are more likely to be believed when telling fibs, along with lovable rogues (e.g Clinton). Human beings are also adept at serious deception, such as creating Ponzi schemes and leading double lives, and good at keeping secrets, compartmentalising our lives, and developing different personas at work and at home. ( adapted from part of a New Scientist series  of articles on human behaviour).

I think lying has to be looked at and judged by the motivation of the liar.  What  I would call fibbing  convincingly is an important skill that greases the wheels of friendship and social intercourse.  How many times have you, say, received a present that makes you groan?  Does the normal, civilised person blurt out his or her dismay? Are you really honest if you go to a dinner party where the food is awful and the host performs a two hour monologue?  No, to these and a thousand other social embarrassments or dilemmas, you feign delight and proffer thanks in  order not to offend.  This behaviour is so pervasive and normal as to be common sense. Life would be most unpleasant if we all told the unvarnished truth all the time.

Lying starts when you deliberately lie to someone over a major matter in order to avoid punishment, legal entanglements, and the desire not to offend becomes a desire not to end up in a police cell.  It is all a matter of context. You certainly cannot have a successful marriage or keep a job for very long if you are consciously deceiving the other person to protect yourself .  Epicurus, who believed in openness and getting on well with everyone around him, would have said that honesty is the basis of friendship, the ability to hold nothing back and  to do so with charm, a smile and an apology where necessary. You shouldn’t have to lie to a real friend, or to a member of your family.

 

 

Is Corbyn really all that different from Blair?

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Sorry for yet another long post on British politics. This will be the last one for a while, I promise. Starting with this Sunday’s Best of the Week, I’m going to be less political for the time being. 

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters love to differentiate themselves from the legacy of former British prime minister Tony Blair, and to a lesser extent, his successor Gordon Brown. For the so-called ‘Corbynites,’ Blair represents neoliberal economics, an aggressive and even neo-imperial foreign policy agenda, as well as social policies which were excessively tough on crime and invasive of privacy.

Now by no means are Blair and Corbyn exactly the same. There are plenty of differences between the two, the greatest of which is that Blair places far greater faith in the international world order, and its capacity to bring peace and prosperity to the world. For Blair, supranational institutions like the IMF, the EU and NATO are crucial to ensuring a stable balance of power amidst the rise of new superpowers such as China, India and Brazil. For Corbyn, these institutions represent Western overreach. The West should not be trying to impose its values on the rest of the world, as to do so would be a form of post-colonial oppression. Corbyn also sees supranational institutions as products of global capitalism, which try to impose neoliberal economics on individual nations, particularly in the developing world.

But in many ways, Corbyn and Blair are actually quite similar, particularly relative to the general population. The obvious area of similarity is immigration: they are both vehemently pro immigration. Perhaps for slightly different reasons- Corbyn’s defence of immigration is essentially humanitarian and rights-based, whereas Blair would place a greater emphasis on the economic case for immigration. But both are very comfortable with Britain’s increasing multiculturalism, they both see a more multicultural society as an inherent good.

Immigration is just one example of both men’s social liberalism. Both support rights for homosexuals and the transgendered. Both are pro-choice on the abortion issue, though Blair’s Catholicism may affect his personal views on the matter. Both seem to support constitutional reform, and aren’t as wedded to the monarchy, the House of Lords or other aspects of the British constitution that could be seen as anachronistic. Corbyn has gone as far as to say he would consider legalising marijuana.

On economic issues, Corbyn is seen as being to the left of Blair, and this is largely true. But the two are far closer than either would like to admit. Far from being a Soviet-style communist, Corbyn is essentially a passionate social democrat. Labour’s manifesto didn’t promise to abolish the rights of inheritance, nationalise the means of production, or anything else genuinely Marxist. The vast majority of Labour’s policies- renationalising the railways, raising levels of corporation tax and healthcare spending to the OECD average, making universities free- would be seen as centrist or even Christian Democrat in most of the EU. Equally, Blair is much further to the left on the economy than Corbynites perceive him. He rapidly increased government spending in almost every area during his tenure. Particularly on the NHS and education, Blair increased spending at a far faster rate than what Corbyn proposed in 2017. In fact, the only discernible difference between Corbyn and Blair on economic views is that the former sees public ownership of key utilities as vital, the latter views the issue of ownership as secondary to having appropriate regulations and ensuring fair competition.

What unites Corbyn and Blair above all, is that they both see themselves as being on the right side of history. They believe that they are on the side of social justice, along with the likes of civil rights activists in America, the pro democracy advocates in the Middle East, and the anti-apartheid fighters in South Africa. For both, a sense of moral duty comes before loyalty to one’s country. It is why both have talked to the IRA and Hamas despite them being terrorist organisations that hate Britain and its alliance with the United States. This is a profoundly unconservative disposition. Its why I’m very uncomfortable with Blair being labelled a ‘Red Tory,’ I believe his outlook on life is fundamentally different. Corbyn and Blair believe history is a progressive teleology towards greater freedom and social justice. They may perceive the means by which justice should be attained; Blair believes the West ought to spread the Western notion of freedom around the world, by force if necessary, whereas Corbyn would rather a desire for justice emerge organically in the polities of the extra-European world. But the progressive ideology is at its heart the same.

The common outlook of Corbyn and Blair has as many weaknesses as it does merits. One the one hand, it’s perfectly reasonable to place ideas and values above nationalism, which both men see as a bourgeois tribalism. Both men are acutely aware of the need to prioritise human rights and basic human needs in politics, even if it means violating national sovereignty- which neither man rightly sees as absolute. Their view of history is comforting in its optimism, even if the recent rise of authoritarian populism and illiberal democracy around the world would lead one to believe that such optimism is misplaced. Similarly, both men may be too positive in their view of human nature, which is far more self-centered and parochial than anyone in Labour would like to admit.

The crucial flaw in the mentality of Corbyn and Blair is that they both believe there is such a thing as the public interest. Both men’s policies are aimed at pleasing everyone, which in reality, isn’t possible. Corbyn is slightly better than Blair in this regard. The Labour manifesto in 2017 admitted that the top 5% of earners would have to pay more taxes if the welfare state and public services are to be sufficiently funded. But the manifesto also included middle class giveaways such as free university tuition fees and subsidised social care for everyone, not just the poor, because Corbyn was trying to please everyone. In reality, this can’t be done. University graduates, who will earn more, will benefit from free tuition fees at the expense of those who don’t go to university. Regarding taxes, far more people will have to pay far more in tax than Labour admits if they are to fund everything they want. Most significantly, Corbyn’s deliberate fudging of Labour’s Brexit position will come back to haunt him: Remainers will be angry that Labour wants to leave the Single Market, and Leavers will be angry that Labour doesn’t want to reduce immigration. If Corbyn were truly honest, he would admit that you can’t please everyone and take definitive positions in the class war and on Brexit, rather than pretending there’s a common ground we all share.

Blair was just as bad. He increased public spending rapidly, claiming it was in the public interest. The reality was that the new spending wasn’t evenly distributed. Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and to a lesser extent London and the North, got the vast majority of the new funding. The rural South and Midlands were left with relatively little. At the same time, the effects of the Thatcher-era deindustrialisation were allowed to fester, while the expanding financial sector was a boon to the richer parts of London and the commuter belt. This created two economies with very different interests: one half of the country that loved all the new spending and in some cases, devolution, but ultimately lacked private sector growth. And another half, that grew wealthy from financial deregulation, but resented the unnecessarily high deficit and public spending that was being intentionally directed elsewhere. Rather than uniting the country, Blair made it even more divided than when he first came to power.

Finally, it would really help the Labour Party if both men admitted how much they had in common. It would unite the party behind the common cause of promoting the public interest, even if in reality it can’t be done. Freed from the politics of internal division, Labour could operate with frightening effectiveness. Faced with a hopelessly divided and ever-incompetent Conservative Party, achieving power would be relatively straightforward. But as ever, the issue of Europe may prove to be their downfall. Blairites are unlikely to unequivocally support a movement that backs leaving the Single Market, which they see as crucial to the doing business with ease across borders. And however privately, Corbyn views the Single Market as a Thatcherite, neoliberal construct that prevents Britain from being a true socialist nation. Britain’s unique degree of Euroscepticism is not only dividing the country as a whole, it is dividing every major political movement within it. Given that the Article 50 clock is ticking fast, the country’s future is looking as gloomy as ever.