The Heathen Manifesto

Many religious citizens will be grateful to Baggini for marking out some promising shared ground, but the devil is in the detail

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• • Jonathan Chaplin
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 April 2012 09.00 BST 
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A man walks past the golden-domed Alexander Nevski cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photograph: Petar Petrov/AP

Living in a heathen state might not be as bad as religious believers had feared. If I've understood article eight of Julian Baggini's heathen manifesto correctly, many religious citizens should be able to affirm quite readily three features of the secular state that he summarises.

First, religion has a legitimate place in politics. Unlike those on the control-freak wing of secularism, Baggini has no desire to banish religious or other worldviews from public life or to stop their adherents invoking such beliefs in policy debates. So presumably it's fine, then, for Operation Noah's recent Ash Wednesday Declaration not only to cite the familiar grim statistics about climate change, but also to quote ancient Jewish sacred texts and lobby the government accordingly. By implication, it's equally legitimate for secular humanists seeking the legalisation of assisted suicide not just to confine themselves to the prosaic legal language of rights, but also to appeal to deeper and more expansive convictions such as that human dignity ultimately resides in the capacity for moral autonomy (a view represented in chapter 2 of the Falconer commission report).

Second, while democratic debate should thus not be arbitrarily hampered by restrictions on religious or other worldview-based ideas, the state "should not give any special privilege to any particular sect or group, or use their creeds as a basis for policy". Actually, the two parts of that claim are distinct. One is that the state should treat groups holding various worldviews even-handedly, for example by avoiding funding or granting access to one while arbitrarily excluding others. The other is that the state should refrain from officially invoking any worldview or creed in publicly justifying any of its policies. So state officials shouldn't quote the Bible as official justification for the 2008 Climate Change Act, and nor should they cite a humanist doctrine of the primacy of moral autonomy in support of a law allowing assisted suicide. In other words, while we citizens can appeal to such grounds, ministers and civil servants shouldn't, even if they personally endorse them.

Third, in democratic politics, people should "formulate and justify policy in terms that all understand, on the basis of principles that as many as possible can share". Christian philosopher Christopher Eberle calls this the "obligation to pursue public justification" and commends it as part of a wider "ideal of conscientious engagement". That is, citizens who respect each other as equals should do their best to appeal to public norms their fellow citizens can affirm or at least acknowledge as valid, and not just for the obvious pragmatic reason that they might actually be listened to.

Many religious citizens will thus be grateful to Baggini for marking out some promising shared ground. But when we try to specify the precise meaning of the second and third features of his secular state, we rapidly find ourselves in territory that is hotly contested both within and between religious and secular worldviews. "State neutrality" implies some notion of equal treatment. But while it plainly rules out the official "establishment" of a worldview – Christianity in the Roman empire, Islam in Iran, or atheistic communism in the USSR – it is far from obvious what else it implies. Does it exclude all and any state funding of faith-based schooling, as in the US, or does it require a pluralistic European model in which several religious and worldview-based schools are funded proportionately? Does it mandate equal recognition of all conceptions of "marriage" or only those honouring the equality of men and women (or men and men, and women and women)? Appealing to "neutrality" doesn't solve questions like these, but merely prods at a hornets' nest of vigorous disagreement. Neutrality itself is an empty concept that is parasitic upon a prior social ontology that takes a view on the nature of the entities among which the state is supposed to be neutral.

Specifying what "public justification" amounts to is no less demanding. After an exhaustive analysis of what the term might actually require of participants in democratic debate, Eberle concludes that both religious and secular citizens may, despite their best efforts, find themselves coming up with justifications that turn out to seem invalid by many members of the public. And this isn't a sign of epistemic failure, only of the inherent limits of rational communication in a morally fragmented culture. The problem isn't unintelligibility: any passably educated secular humanist can make sense of an appeal to an ancient Hebrew text, just as a reasonably well-informed Muslim can make sense of a Kantian conception of human dignity. The problem is incompatibility; the deep chasm separating one citizen's deepest worldview commitments from another's.

More troublingly, the requirement to justify one's policy commitments only in terms of supposedly "shared principles" can serve to entrench the discursive hegemony of whatever happens to be the current majority position – such as the stubbornly persistent yet irrational faith, shared by every party except the Greens, that endless growth of GDP is the only way out of recession and even the only route to address global warming. Marginalised minorities know all about the power of such hegemonic convictions when their dissenting demands run up against what a complacent majority takes as self-evidently true.

The high principle of article eight of the heathen manifesto has flagged up an important debate. Let's now take up the difficult work of analysing what it might actually mean on the ground.

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Atheists, please read my heathen manifesto

Atheists are too often portrayed as bishop-bashing extremists and any meaningful debate with the religious becomes impossible. How can this be remedied? At the Guardian Open Weekend, Julian Baggini presented his 12 rules for heathens

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• • Julian Baggini
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 March 2012 17.00 BST 
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Atheists protest in Tacoma, Washington. Photograph: Joshua Trujillo

In recent years, we atheists have become more confident and outspoken in articulating and defending our godlessness in the public square. Much has been gained by this. There is now wider awareness of the reasonableness of a naturalist world view, and some of the unjustified deference to religion has been removed, exposing them to much needed critical scrutiny.

Unfortunately, however, in a culture that tends to focus on the widest distinctions, the most extreme positions and the most strident advocates, the "moderate middle" has been sidelined by this debate. There is a perception of unbridgeable polarisation, and a sense that the debates have sunk into a stale impasse, with the same tired old arguments being rehearsed time and again by protagonists who are getting more and more entrenched.

It is time, therefore, for those of us who are tired of the status quo to try to shift the focus of our public discussions of atheism into areas where more progress and genuine dialogue is possible. To achieve this, we need to rethink what atheism stands for and how to present it. The so-called "new atheism" may have put us on the map, but in the public imagination it amounts to little more than a caricature of Richard Dawkins, which is not an accurate representation of the terrain many of us occupy. We now need something else.

This manifesto is an attempt to point towards the next phase of atheism's involvement in public discourse. It is not a list of doctrines that people are asked to sign up to but a set of suggestions to provide a focus for debate and discussion. Nor is it an attempt to accurately describe what all atheists have in common. Rather it is an attempt to prescribe what the best form of atheism should be like.

1 Why we are heathens

It has long been recognised that the term "atheist" has unhelpful connotations. It has too many dark associations and also defines itself negatively, against what it opposes, not what it stands for. "Humanist" is one alternative, but humanists are a subset of atheists who have a formal organisation and set of beliefs many atheists do not share. Whatever the intentions of those who adopt the labels, "rationalist" and "bright" both suffer from sounding too self-satisfied, too confident, implying that others are irrationalists or dim.

If we want an alternative, we should look to other groups who have reclaimed mocking nicknames, such as gays, Methodists and Quakers. We need a name that shows that we do not think too highly of ourselves. This is no trivial point: atheism faces the human condition with honesty, and that requires acknowledging our absurdity, weakness and stupidity, not just our capacity for creativity, intelligence, love and compassion. "Heathen" fulfils this ambition. We are heathens because we have not been saved by God and because in the absence of divine revelation, we are in so many ways deeply unenlightened. The main difference between us and the religious is that we know this to be true of all of us, but they believe it is not true of them.

2 Heathens are naturalists

Heathens are not merely unbelievers: we believe many things too. Most importantly, we believe in naturalism: the natural world is all there is and there is no purposive, conscious agency that created or guides it. This natural world may contain many mysteries and even unseen dimensions, but we have no reason to believe that they are anything like the heavens, spirit worlds and deities that have characterised supernatural religious beliefs over history. Many religious believers deny the "supernatural" label, but unless they are willing to disavow such beliefs as in the reality of a divine person, miracles, resurrections or life after death, they are not naturalists.

3 Our first commitment is to the truth

Although we believe many things about what does and does not exist, these are the conclusions we come to, not the basis of our worldview. That basis is a commitment to see the world as truthfully as we can, using our rational faculties as best we can, based on the best evidence we have. That is where our primary commitment lies, not the conclusions we reach. Hence we are prepared to accept the possibility that we are wrong. It also means that we respect and have much in common with people who come to very different conclusions but have an equal respect for truth, reason and evidence. A heathen has more in common with a sincere, rational, religious truth-seeker than an atheist whose lack of belief is unquestioned, or has become unquestionable.

4 We respect science, not scientism

Heathens place science in high regard, being the most successful means humans have devised to come to a true understanding of the real nature of the world on the basis of reason and evidence. If a belief conflicts with science, then no matter how much we cherish it, science should prevail. That is why the religious beliefs we most oppose are those that defy scientific knowledge, such as young earth creationism.

Nonetheless, this does not make us scientistic. Scientism is the belief that science provides the only means of gaining true knowledge of the world, and that everything has to be understood through the lens of science or not at all. There are scientistic atheists but heathens are not among them. Science is limited in what it can contribute to our understanding of who we are and how we should live because many of the most important facts of human life only emerge at a level of description on which science remains silent. History, for example, may ultimately depend on nothing more than the movements of atoms, but you cannot understand the battle of Hastings by examining interactions of fermions and bosons. Love may depend on nothing more than the physical firing of neurons, but anyone who tries to understand it solely in those terms just does not know what love means.
Science may also make life uncomfortable for us. For example, it may undermine certain beliefs about free will that many atheists have relied on to give dignity and autonomy to our species.
Heathens are therefore properly respectful of science but also mindful of its limits. Science is not our Bible: the last word on everything.

5 We value reason as precious but fragile

Heathens have a commitment to reason that fully acknowledges the limits of reason. Reason is itself a multi-faceted thing that cannot be reduced to pure logic. We use reason whenever we try to form true beliefs on the basis of the clearest thinking, using the best evidence. But reason almost always leaves us short of certain knowledge and very often leaves us with a need to make a judgment in order to come to a conclusion. We also need to accept that human beings are very imperfect users of reason, susceptible to biases, distortions and prejudices that lead even the most intelligent astray. In short, if we understand what reason is and how it works, we have very good reason to doubt those who claim rationality solely for those who accept their worldview and who deny the rationality of those who disagree.

6 We are convinced, not dogmatic

The heathen's modesty about the power of reason and the certainty of her conclusions should not be mistaken for a shoulder-shrugging agnosticism. We have a very high degree of confidence in the truth of our naturalistic worldview. But we do not dogmatically assert it. Being open to being wrong and to changing our minds does not mean we lack conviction that we are right. Strength of belief is not the same as rigidity of dogma.

7 We have no illusions about life as a heathen

Many people do not understand that it is possible to lead a meaningful, happy life as a heathen, but we maintain that it is and can point to any number of atheist philosophers and thinkers who have explained why this is so. But such meaning and contentment does not inevitably follow from becoming a heathen. Ours is a universe without guarantees of redemption or salvation and sometimes people have terrible lives or do terrible things and thrive. On such occasions, we have no consolation. That is the dark side of accepting the truth, and we are prepared to acknowledge it. We are heathens because we value living in the truth. But that does not mean that we pretend that always makes life easy or us happy. If the evidence were to show that religious people are happier and healthier than us, we would not see that as any reason to give up our convictions.

8 We are secularists

We support a state that is neutral as regards people's fundamental worldviews. It is not neutral when it comes to the shared values necessary for people of different conviction to live and thrive together. But it should not give any special privilege to any particular sect or group, or use their creeds as a basis for policy. Politics requires a coming together of people of different fundamental convictions to formulate and justify policy in terms that all understand, on the basis of principles that as many as possible can share.

This secularism does not require that religion is banished from public life or that people may not be open as to how their faiths, or lack of one, motivate their values. As long as the core of the business of state is neutral as regards to comprehensive worldviews, we can be relaxed about expressions of these commitments in society at large. We want to maintain the state's neutrality on fundamental worldviews, not purge religion from society.

9 Heathens can be religious

There are a small minority of forms of religion that are entirely compatible with the heathen position. These are forms of religion that reject the real existence of supernatural entities and divinely authored texts, accept that science trumps dogma, and who see the essential core of religion in its values and practices. We have very little evidence that anything more than a small fraction of actual existent religion is like this, but when it does conform to this description, heathens have no reason to dismiss it as false.

10 Religion is often our friend

We believe in not being tone-deaf to religion and to understand it in the most charitable way possible. So we support religions when they work to promote values we share, including those of social justice and compassion. We are respectful and sympathetic to the religious when they arrive at their different conclusions on the basis of the same commitment to sincere, rational, undogmatic inquiry as us, without in any way denying that we believe them to be false and misguided. We are also sympathetic to religion when its effects are more benign than malign. We appreciate that commitment to truth is but one value and that a commitment to compassion and kindness to others is also of supreme importance. We are not prepared to insist that it is indubitably better to live guided by such values allied with false beliefs than it is to live without such values but also without false belief.

11 We are critical of religion when necessary

Our willingness to accept what is good in religion is balanced by an equally honest commitment to be critical of it when necessary. We object when religion invokes mystery to avoid difficult questions or to obfuscate when clarity is needed. We do not like the way in which "people of faith" tend to huddle together in an unprincipled coalition of self-interest, even when that means liberals getting into bed with homophobes and misogynists. We think it is disingenuous for religious people to talk about the reasonableness of their beliefs and the importance of values and practice, while drawing a veil over their embrace of superstitious beliefs. In these and other areas, we assert the right and need to make civil but acute criticisms.

And although our general stance is not one of hostility towards religion, there are some occasions when this is exactly what is called for. When religions promote prejudice, division or discrimination, suppress truth or stand in the way of medical or social progress, a hostile response is an appropriate, principled one, just as it is when atheists are guilty of the same crimes.

12 This manifesto is less concerned with distinguishing heathens from others than forging links between us and others

Our commitment to independent thought and the provisionality of belief means that few heathens are likely to agree completely with this manifesto. It is therefore almost a precondition of supporting it that you do not entirely support it. At the same time, although very few people of faith can be heathens, many will find themselves in agreement with much of what heathens belief. This is what provides the common ground to make fruitful dialogue possible: we need to accept what we share in order to accept with civility and understanding what we most certainly do not. This is what the heathen manifesto is really about.

Just because you're an atheist doesn't make you rational

Once you make it your primary aim to refute the existence of God, you miss what's really fundamental

Mark Steel

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Having followed the latest debate about religion, I'd say the conclusion is obvious that the only thing as disturbing as the religious is the modern atheist. I'd noticed this before, after I was slightly critical of Richard Dawkins and received piles of fuming replies, that made me think that what his followers would like is to scientifically create an eternity in laboratory conditions so that they could burn me there for all of it.

It's not the rationality that's alarming, it's the smugness. Instead of trying to understand religion, if the modern atheist met a peasant in a village in Namibia, he'd shriek: "Of course, GOD didn't create light, it's a mixture of waves and particles you idiot, it's OBVIOUS."

The connection between the religious and the modern atheist was illustrated after the death of Christopher Hitchens, when it was reported that "tributes were led by Tony Blair". I know you can't dictate who leads your tributes, and it's probable that when Blair's press office suggested that he made one to someone who'd passed on, he said: "Oh, which dictator I used to go on holiday with has died NOW?"

But the commendation was partly Hitchens's fault. Because the difference between the modern atheist and the Enlightenment thinkers who fought the church in the 18th century is that back then they didn't make opposition to religion itself their driving ideology. They opposed the lack of democracy justified by the idea that a king was God's envoy on earth, and they wished for a rational understanding of the solar system, rather than one based on an order ordained by God that matched the view that everyone in society was born into a fixed status.

But once you make it your primary aim to refute the existence of God, you can miss what's really fundamental. For example, the ex-canon of St Paul's, presumably a believer unless he managed to fudge the issue in the interview, was on the radio this week expressing why he resigned in support of the protesters outside his old cathedral. He spoke with inspiring compassion, but was interrupted by an atheist who declared the Christian project is doomed because we're scientifically programmed to look after ourselves at the expense of anyone else. So the only humane rational scientific thought to have was "GO Christian, GO, Big up for the Jesus posse."

Similarly, Hitchens appears to have become obsessed with defying religion, so made himself one of the most enthusiastic supporters for a war he saw as being against the craziness of Islam. But the war wasn't about God or Allah, it was about more earthly matters, which the people conducting that war understood. And, as that war became predictably disastrous, they were grateful for whatever support they could find. And so a man dedicated to disproving GOD was praised in his death by the soppiest, sickliest, most, irrational, hypocritical Christian of them all.

So the only thing I know for certain is that I would become a Christian, if I could just get round the fact that there is no GOD.

Is modern science Biblical or Greek?

By Spengler

The "founders of modern science", writes David Curzon in Jewish Ideas Daily [1] of October 18, "were all believers in the truths of the opening chapter in the Hebrew Bible. The belief implicit in Genesis, that nature was created by a law-giving God and so must be governed by "laws of nature," played a necessary role in the emergence of modern science in 17th-century Europe. Equally necessary was the belief that human beings are made in the image of God and, as a consequence, can understand these "laws of nature."

Curzon argues that the modern idea of "laws of nature" stems from the Bible rather than classical Greece, for "ancient Greeks certainly believed that nature was intelligible and that its regularities could be made explicit. But Greek gods such as Zeus were not understood to have created the processes of nature; therefore, they could not have given the laws governing these processes."

Is this just a matter of semantics? Is there a difference between the "Greek" concept of intelligibility, and what Curzon calls the biblical concept of laws of nature? After all, the achievements of Greek science remain a monument to the human spirit. The Greek geometer Eratosthenesin the third century BCE calculated the tilt of the earth's axis, the circumference of the earth, and (possibly) the earth's distance from the sun. Archimedes used converging infinite series to calculate the area of conic sections, approximating the calculus that Newton and Leibniz discovered in the 17th century.

An enormous leap of mind, though, separates Archimedes' approximations from the new mathematics of the 17th century, which opened a path to achievements undreamed of by the Greeks. Something changed in the way that the moderns thought about nature. But does the rubric "laws of nature" explain that change? Curzon is on to something, but the biblical roots of modern science go much deeper.

Before turning to the scientific issues as such, it is helpful to think about the differences in the way Greeks and Hebrews saw the world. The literary theorist Erich Auerbach famously contrasted Greek and Hebrew modes of thought [2] by comparing two stories: the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, and the story of Odysseus' scar told in flashback (Odyssey, Book 19).

Homer's hero has returned incognito to his home on the island of Ithaca, fearful that prospective usurpers will murder him. An elderly serving woman washes his feet and sees a scar he had received on a boar hunt two decades earlier, before leaving for the Trojan War, and recognizes him. Homer then provides a detailed account of the boar hunt before returning to his narrative.

Homer seeks to bring all to the surface, Auerbach explained in his classic essay. "The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships - their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations - are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths."

Auerbach adds, "And this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground - that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute. One might think that the many interpolations, the frequent moving back and forth, would create a sort of perspective in time and place; but the Homeric style never gives any such impression."

Stark and spare, by contrast, is the story of God's summons to Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Where Homer tells us everything, the Bible tells us very little. God speaks to Abraham, and Abraham says, "Here I am." Auerbach observes, "Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told."

Abraham and Isaac travel together. Auerbach writes, "Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead, and which yet is measured: three days!" Auerbach concludes:

On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and "fraught with background".

Literary analysis may seem an unlikely starting-point for a discussion of science. But the Hebrew Bible's embodiment of what Auerbach called "the indeterminate and the contingent" has everything to do with the spirit of modern science. This emerges most vividly in the difference between the Greek and Hebrew understanding of time, the medium through which we consider infinity and eternity.

What separates Archimedes' approximation from Leibniz' calculus? The answer lies in the concept of infinity itself. Infinity was a stumbling-block for the Greeks, for the concept was alien to what Auerbach called their "perpetual foreground." Aristotle taught that whatever was in the mind was first in the senses. But by definition infinity is impossible to perceive. In the very large, we can never finish counting it; in the very small (for example infinitely diminishing quantities), we cannot perceive it. Infinity and eternity are inseparable concepts, for we think of infinity as a count that never ends.

For the Greeks, time is merely the demarcation of events. Plato understands time as an effect of celestial mechanics in Timaeus, while Aristotle in the Physics thinks of time as nothing more than the faucet-drip of events. That is Homer's time, in Auerbach's account. Biblical time is an enigma. That is implicit in Genesis, as Auerbach notes, but explicit in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Greek time is an "absolute temporal present."

In Hebrew time, it is the moment itself that remains imperceptible. Here is Ecclesiastes 3:15 in the Koren translation (by the 19th-century rabbi Michael Friedländer): "That which is, already has been; and that which is to be has already been; and only God can find the fleeting moment." As I wrote in another context, [3] Rabbi Friedländer's translation probably drew upon the celebrated wager that Faust offered the Devil in Goethe's drama. Faust would lose his soul will if he attempted to hold on to the passing moment, that is, to try to grasp what only God can find. The impulse to grab the moment and hold onto it is idolatrous; it is an attempt to cheat eternity, to make ourselves into gods.

A red thread connects the biblical notion of time to modern science, and it is spun by St Augustine of Hippo, the 4th-century Church father and polymath. His reflection on time as relative rather than absolute appears in Book 11 of his Confessions. And his speculation on the nature of number in time takes us eventually to the modern conceptual world of Leibniz and the calculus Aristotle's description of time as a sequence of moments, in Augustine's view, leads to absurdities.

To consider durations in time, we must measure what is past, for the moment as such has no duration. Events that have passed no longer exist, which means that measuring past time is an attempt to measure something that is not there at all. Augustine argues instead that we measure the memory of past events rather than the past itself: ''It is in you, my mind, that I measure times,'' he writes. Our perception of past events thus depends on memory, and our thoughts about future events depend on expectation. Memory and expectation are linked by ''consideration.'' For ''the mind expects, it considers, it remembers; so that which it expects, through that which it considers, passes into that which it remembers.''

Time is not independent of the intellect in Augustine's reading. Expectation and memory, Augustine adds, determine our perception of distant past and future: ''It is not then future time that is long, for as yet it is not: But a long future, is 'a long expectation of the future,' nor is it time past, which now is not, that is long; but a long past is 'a long memory of the past.''' This is the insight that allows Augustine to link perception of time to the remembrance of revelation and the expectation of redemption.

A glimpse of what Augustine's theory of time implies for mathematics appears in his later book, Six Books on Music. I argued in a 2009 essay for First Things: [4]

In De Musica, Augustine seeks to portray ''consideration'' as a form of musical number, that is, numeri judiciales, ''numbers of judgment.'' These ''numbers of judgment'' bridge eternity and mortal time; they are eternal in character and lie outside of rhythm itself, but act as an ordering principle for all other rhythms. They stand at the head of a hierarchy of numbers that begins with ''sounding rhythms'' - the sounds as such - which are in turn inferior to ''memorized rhythms.''

Only the ''numbers of judgment'' are immortal, for the others pass away instantly as they sound, or fade gradually from memory over time. They are, moreover, a gift from God, for ''from where should we believe that the soul is given what is eternal and unchangeable, if not from the one, eternal, and unchangeable God?'' For that reason the ''numbers of judgment,'' by which the lower-order rhythms are ordered, do not exist in time but order time itself and are superior in beauty; without them there could be no perception of time. Memory and expectation are linked by the ''numbers of judgment,'' which themselves stand outside of time, are eternal, and come from God.

That is an intimation of a higher order of number. Because it is buried in a treatise on musical time, Augustine's idea about "numbers of judgment" has elicited scant scholarly interest. But it is clear that his "numbers of judgment" are consistent with his much-discussed theory of "divine illumination." He wrote in Confessions, "The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, Lord."

Descartes' "innate ideas" and Kant's "synthetic reason" descend from Augustine, although Kant recast the concept in terms of hard-wiring of the brain rather than divine assistance. The founder of neo-Kantian philosophy, Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) built his career out of the insight that the fact that infinitesimals in the calculus add up to a definite sum proves the existence of something like synthetic reason. That is why Kant triumphed in philosophy and the Aristotelians were reduced to a grumpy band of exiled irredentists.

Augustine's idea finds its way into modern science through Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Theologian and mathematician, Cusa noticed that musicians were tuning their instruments to ratios that corresponded to irrational numbers. The "natural" intervals of music tuning clashed with the new counterpoint of the Renaissance, so the musicians adjusted (or "tempered") the intervals to fit their requirements.

The Greeks abhorred the notion of irrational number because they abhorred infinity. Aristotle understood that infinity lurked in the irrational numbers, for we can come infinitely close to an irrational number through an infinite series of approximations, but never quite get there. And the notion of an "actual infinity" offended the Greek notion of intelligibility. To medieval mathematicians, the irrationals were surds, or ''deaf'' numbers, that is, numbers that could not be heard in audible harmonic ratios. The association of rational numbers with musical tones was embedded so firmly in medieval thinking that the existence of an irrational harmonic number was unthinkable.

The practice of musicians, Cusa argued, overthrew Aristotle's objections. The human mind, Cusa argued, could not perceive such numbers through reason (ratio), ie the measuring and categorizing faculty of the mind, but only through the intellect (intellectus), which depended on participation (participatio) in the Mind of God.

Cusa's use of Augustinian terminology to describe the irrationals - numbers ''too simple for our mind to understand'' - heralded a problem that took four centuries to solve (and, according to the few remaining "Aristotelian realists," remains unsolved to this day).

Not until the 19th century did mathematicians arrive at a rigorous definition of irrational number, as the limit of an infinite converging sequence of rational numbers. That is simple, but our mind cannot understand it directly. Sense-perception fails us; instead, we require an intellectual leap to the seemingly paradoxical concept of a convergent infinite series of rational numbers whose limit is an irrational number.

The irrational numbers thus lead us out of the mathematics of sense-perception, the world of Euclid and Aristotle, into the higher mathematics foreshadowed by Augustine (see my article, ''Nicholas of Cusa's Contribution to Music Theory,'' in RivistaInternazionale di Musica Sacra, Vol 10, July-December 1989).

Once irrational numbers had forced their way into Western thinking, the agenda had changed. Professor Peter Pesic [5] recently published an excellent account of the impact of irrational numbers in musical tuning on mathematics and philosophy. [6]

Another two centuries passed before Leibniz averred, ''I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its author.'' Theological concerns, one might add, also motivated Leibniz' work, as I sought to show in ''The God of the Mathematicians'' (First Things, August-September 2010).

Unlike Archimedes, who still thought in terms of approximations using rational numbers, Leibniz believed that he had discovered a new kind of calculation that embodied the infinite. Leibniz' infinitesimals (as I reported in ''God and the Mathematicians'') lead us eventually to George Cantor's discovery of different orders of infinity and the transfinite numbers that designate them; Cantor cited Cusa as well as Leibniz as his antecedents, explaining ''Transfinite integers themselves are, in a certain sense, new irrationalities. Indeed, in my opinion, the method for the definition of finite irrational numbers is quite analogous, I can say, is the same one as my method for introducing transfinite integers. It can be certainly said: transfinite integers stand and fall together with finite irrational numbers.''

Gilles DeLeuze (in Leibniz and the Baroque) reports that Leibniz ''took up in detail'' Cusa's idea of ''the most simple'' number: ''The question of harmonic unity becomes that of the 'most simple' number, as Nicolas of Cusa states, for whom the number is irrational. But, although Leibniz also happens to relate the irrational to the existent, or to consider the irrational as a number of the existent, he feels he can discover an infinite series of rationals enveloped or hidden in the incommensurable.'' Leibniz thus stands between Cusa in the fifteenth century and the flowering of the mathematics of infinite series in the nineteenth century. That is a triumph of the biblical viewpoint in modern science.

We can thus draw a red line from the Hebrew Bible (most clearly from Ecclesiastes) to Augustine, and through Nicholas of Cusa to G W Leibniz and the higher mathematics and physics of the modern world. The Hebrew Bible remains a force in modern science, despite the best efforts of rationalists and materialists to send it into exile.

Kurt Goedel, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, approached all his work with the conviction that no adequate account of nature was possible without the presence of God. Inspired by Leibniz, Goedel destroyed all hope of a mechanistic ontology through his two Incompleteness Theorems as well as his work (with Paul Cohen) on the undecidability of the Continuum Hypothesis, as I reported in a recent First Things essay. [7]

There is always a temptation to offer simple homilies in honor of the Bible, for example, "intelligent design" theory, which in my view tells us nothing of real importance. An atheist like Spinoza also would contend that God designed the world, because in his philosophy God is the same thing as nature. Design contains no information about the unique and personal God of the Bible.

Curzon's discussion of the laws of nature is by no means wrong, but it would be wrong to leave the matter there. "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." As Ecclesiastes (3:11) said, "I have observed the task which God has given the sons of man to be concerned with: He made everything beautiful in its time; He also put an enigma [sometimes "eternity"] into their minds so that man cannot comprehend what God has done from beginning to end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11, Artscroll translation). Eternity is in our minds but the whole of creation is hidden from us. Steven Hawking has gone so far as to conjecture that something like Goedel's Incompleteness Principle might apply to physics as well as mathematics.

What divides Hebrews from Greeks, above all, is a sense of wonder at the infinitude of creation and human limitation. The Odyssey is intended to be heard and enjoyed; Genesis 22 is to be searched and searched again for layers of meaning that are withheld from the surface. The Greek gods were like men, only stronger, better-looking and longer lived, immortal but not eternal, and the Greeks emulated them by seeking become masters of a nature infested by gods. The Hebrews sought to be a junior partner in the unending work of creation. With due honor to the great achievements of the Greeks, modernity began at Mount Sinai.

You are a Brand

Are you a Coke or a Pepsi?
Presenting yourself as a 'brand' may help you secure a job interview.

Remember the Pepsi Challenge? Take a group of punters, two cans of cola, cover up the labels, and get them to taste. Pepsi always wins; more people like the taste of Pepsi than Coke.

But walk into a supermarket and something weird happens. Coke outsells Pepsi. For quite a lot of us, the rational bit of our brain, which tells us Pepsi is nicer, gets overridden. An irrational, emotional bit, the bit that likes the sexy shape of the old Coke bottle, or that would like to teach the world to sing, takes control, and we buy Coke.

That’s the power of a brand, and people have them just like companies. And recruiting someone is like walking down that supermarket aisle. Loads of people apply, with roughly the same experience, skills and qualifications. Rationally, there’s not much to choose between them – candidates are a hundred cans of cola on a shelf. So how do employers pick who to interview?

They pick irrationally. Emotionally. On the basis of what they pick up about your personal brand. And most of that will come from the way you write your CV and cover letter. Not just getting your apostrophes in the right place (though that’s a good start), but your 'tone of voice’.

So for any decent job, an identikit CV means death. Start with 'I am a hard-working team player ...’ and, even if it’s true, you’ll sink back into the vat of candidate cola that’s slopping around. And avoid buzzwords. If you trained a load of people, say that; don’t say you 'upskilled a functional unit of direct reports’.

If I’m the employer, wading through them, I want someone who makes me take notice. Who sounds funny. Or brave. Or good company. Or caring. Someone who takes the risk of standing out from the crowd. If your hobby is the conservation of rare toads, drop that in. If you think the way your industry works is completely unsustainable, say so. Anything that will intrigue your reader into conversation will pay dividends. Because the aim of most job applications isn’t to get you a job, it’s to get an interview. Once you’re in the room you can show what a hard-working team player you are. By then you’ve got me hooked.

That’s why, for many big brands and smaller companies, how you reply to a job advert is the first filter.

They might have spent thousands on a recruitment campaign.

So if you don’t pick up on the tone of that ad, and send a generic CV, like most people do, it says you probably won’t pick up on the culture if you end up working there. It says you’re the wrong person.

You must put a bit more of yourself into your writing. Decide if you want to sound like a Coke, or a supermarket’s own brand.

If it’s the right place, and the right job for you, it will work.

And then you won’t kick yourself for being like Pepsi – competent, but unloved.

Neil Taylor is creative director of brand language consultancy The Writer (thewriter.com) and author of Brilliant Business Writing.

Irrational Optimism

A state-hating free marketeer ignores his own failed experiment to offer discredited theories riddled with blame-shifting and excruciating errors

George Monbiot

Brass neck doesn't begin to describe it. Matt Ridley used to make his living partly by writing state-bashing columns in the Daily Telegraph. The government, he complained, is "a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world … governments do not run countries, they parasitise them."(1) Taxes, bail-outs, regulations, subsidies, intervention of any kind, he argued, are an unwarranted restraint on market freedom.

Then he became chairman of Northern Rock, where he was able to put his free market principles into practice. Under his chairmanship, the bank pursued what the Treasury select committee later described as a "high-risk, reckless business strategy"(2). It was able to do so because the government agency which oversees the banks "systematically failed in its regulatory duty"(3).

On 16th August 2007, Dr Ridley rang an agent of the detested state to explore the possibility of a bail-out. The self-seeking fleas agreed to his request, and in September the government opened a support facility for the floundering bank. The taxpayer eventually bailed out Northern Rock to the tune of £27bn.

When news of the crisis leaked, it caused the first run on a bank in this country since 1878. The parasitic state had to intervene a second time: the run was halted only when the government guaranteed the depositors' money. Eventually the government was obliged to nationalise the bank. Investors, knowing that their money would now be safe as it was protected by the state, began to return.

While the crisis was made possible by a "substantial failure of regulation", MPs identified the directors of Northern Rock as "the principal authors of the difficulties that the company has faced". They singled Ridley out for having failed "to provide against the risks that [Northern Rock] was taking and to act as an effective restraining force on the strategy of the executive members."(4)

This, you might think, must have been a salutary experience. You would be wrong. Last week Dr Ridley published a new book called The Rational Optimist (5). He uses it as a platform to attack governments which, among other crimes, "bail out big corporations"(6). He lambasts intervention and state regulation, insisting that markets deliver the greatest possible benefits to society when left to their own devices. Has there ever been a clearer case of the triumph of faith over experience?

Free market fundamentalists, apparently unaware of Ridley's own experiment in market liberation, are currently filling cyberspace and the mainstream media with gasps of enthusiasm about his thesis. Ridley provides what he claims is a scientific justification for unregulated business. He maintains that rising consumption will keep enriching us for "centuries and millennia" to come(7), but only if governments don't impede innovation. He dismisses or denies the environmental consequences, laments our risk-aversion, and claims that the market system makes self-interest "thoroughly virtuous"(8). All will be well in the best of all possible worlds, as long as the "parasitic bureaucracy" keeps its nose out of our lives(9).

His book is elegantly written and cast in the language of evolution, but it's the same old cornutopian nonsense we've heard one hundred times before (cornutopians are people who envisage a utopia of limitless abundance(10)). In this case, however, it has already been spectacularly disproved by the author's experience.

The Rational Optimist is riddled with excruciating errors and distortions. Ridley claims, for example, that "every country that tried protectionism" after the Second World War suffered as a result. He cites South Korea and Taiwan as "countries that went the other way", and experienced miraculous growth(11). In reality, the governments of both nations subsidised key industries, actively promoted exports and used tariffs and laws to shut out competing imports. In both countries the state owned all the major commercial banks, allowing it to make decisions about investment(12,13,14).

He maintains that "Enron funded climate alarmism"(15). The reference he gives demonstrates nothing of the sort, nor can I find evidence for this claim elsewhere(16). He says that "no significant error has come to light" in Bjorn Lomborg's book The Sceptical Environmentalist (17). In fact it contains so many significant errors that an entire book - The Lomborg Deception by Howard Friel - was required to document them(18).

Ridley asserts that average temperature changes over "the last three decades" have been "relatively slow"(19). In reality the rise over this period has been the most rapid since instrumental records began(20). He maintains that "eleven of thirteen populations" of polar bears are "growing or steady"(21). There are in fact 19 populations of polar bears. Of those whose fluctuations have been measured, one is increasing, three are stable and eight are declining(22).

He uses blatant cherry-picking to create the impression that ecosystems are recovering: water snake numbers in Lake Erie, fish populations in the Thames, bird's eggs in Sweden(23). But as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment shows, of 65 global indicators of human impacts on biodiversity, only one – the extent of temperate forests – is improving. Eighteen are stable, in all the other cases the impacts are increasing(24).

Northern Rock grew rapidly by externalising its costs, pursuing money-making schemes that would eventually be paid for by other people. Ridley encourages us to treat the planet the same way. He either ignores or glosses over the costs of ever-expanding trade and perpetual growth. His timing, as BP fails to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is unfortunate. Like the collapse of Northern Rock, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was made possible by weak regulation. Ridley would weaken it even further, leaving public protection to the invisible hand of the market.

He might not have been chastened by experience, but it would be wrong to claim that he has learnt nothing. On the contrary, he has developed a fine line in blame-shifting and post-rational justification. He mentions Northern Rock only once in his book, where he blames the crisis on "government housing and monetary policy."(25) It was the state wot made him do it. He asserts that while he wants to reduce the regulation of markets in goods and services, he has "always supported" the careful regulation of financial markets(26). He provides no evidence for this and I cannot find it in anything he wrote before the crisis.

Other than that, he claims, he can say nothing, due to the terms of his former employment at the bank. I suspect this constraint is overstated: it's unlikely that it forbids him from accepting his share of the blame.

It is only from the safety of the regulated economy, in which governments pick up the pieces when business screws up, that people like Dr Ridley can pursue their magical thinking. Had the state he despises not bailed out his bank and rescued its depositors' money, his head would probably be on a pike by now. Instead we see it on our television screens, instructing us to apply his irrational optimism more widely. And no one has yet been rude enough to use the word discredited.

If you're looking for class war, just read Cameron's policies

 

Johann Hari: 

It is very hard for the British people to make a serious choice in this election without talking about one factor above all others - class. This isn't about David Cameron's background; it's about his policies. It is a provable fact that he will redistribute wealth - substantially - but in a strange direction: from everyone in the big wide middle and bottom of British society, to the very top.
Here are the facts. He will give a £1.2bn inheritance tax cut to the richest 2 per cent in Britain - with most going to the 3,000 wealthiest estates (including his wife's). Then he promises to end the 50p top rate of tax, giving another £2.4bn to the richest 1 per cent. Then he has pledged to cut taxes on the pensions of the richest, handing another £3.2bn to the same 1 per cent. Then his marriage tax relief policies will give 13 times more to the rich than the poor. To pay for this, he will slash programmes for the middle and the skint, like the Child Trust Fund, SureStart and state schools.
 
But this is not called "class war". No. The nasty "class warriors" are the people who try - with hard statistical facts - to point out this rip-off by the rich. This exposes the assumptions that underpin our politico-media debate. Money being endlessly shovelled up to the top by the state is considered the natural state of affairs; anybody trying to speak for the interests of the majority is considered a rude and irrational "warrior." These premises were best rebuffed by the billionaire Warren Buffett, who quipped: "Let's face it - if there's a class war, my side's winning."
 
Yet the media is trying to render all of this taboo, by claiming that any discussion of class is an attack on Cameron's childhood at Eton. One front page screamed: "Now The Class War Begins!" - referring not to Cameron's policies, but Gordon Brown's mild reference to himself as "middle class." But how can the British people know what they are choosing, if we can't discuss which class will benefit from Cameron - and which classes will lose?
 
Yes, the differences between New Labour and the Conservatives are far too small, on this as on all issues. There are myriad ways in which the current Government has also spoon-fed the super-rich. They cheer-led the economy-crashing deregulation of the banks; they turned Britain into a de facto tax haven for non-doms; when you add it all up, a tycoon still scandalously pays a lower proportion of his income in tax than his secretary.
 
But it is wrong to say, on this issue, there is no difference at all. The gap is real, and millions of people live in that gap. The Institute of Fiscal Studies just published a long-term study of how Labour's tax changes have affected different classes, compared to the last Tory government. It found that the richest 10 per cent have seen their incomes cut by 9 per cent, to pay for an increase in the incomes of the poorest 10 per cent. A rich man has lost on average £25,000 a year; a poor woman has gained on average £1,700 a year. I have seen these changes among my own family and friends: gaining £1,700 is the difference between struggling to pay the bills, or being able to give your kids a summer holiday. Yes, there should have been much more - but the cigarette paper between the parties is big enough to make a pretty fat roll-up.
 
Cameron's policies make it pretty plain: this redistribution will be slammed into reverse by him, with state cash flowing in the opposite direction. Is this due to the fact that Cameron has lived his life in a bubble of extreme privilege, and thinks it is natural that People Like Us should be the primary beneficiaries of government action? This is a question that matters - but it needs to be answered carefully. It is idiotic to attack somebody for a decision their parents made when they were a child, or money they earned before he was conceived. There's nothing wrong with being an Etonian: George Orwell went to Eton, and went on to become the greatest left-winger this country has ever produced.
 
The problem isn't Cameron's extreme privilege - it is that he has never tried to see beyond it. He keeps accidentally revealing how warped his view of Britain is, and how little of it he understands. For example, Cameron said in an interview: "The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background", but "she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school."
 
Read that sentence again. Now imagine how Britain looks from inside David Cameron's head, where the 97 per cent of us who went to day schools are "very unconventional". (In the Bullingdon Club, he called George Osborne "oik", because he had gone to the £20,000-a-year St Pauls, not the £30,000-a-year Eton.) This points to a wider mindset. The group he considers "conventional" and "normal" are the only people he has ever really mixed with, and they are the people he chooses to staff his office with today - very rich people. Is it any surprise he makes policies that serve them, not us?
 
But this attempt to stop the British people understanding the class differences underpinning the election campaign is part of a wider effort to stop us understanding how our society still works. Cameron keeps saying class doesn't matter any more, and "it's not where you're from that matters, it's where you're going." But today, a child born into a poor family has to be 20 IQ points smarter than a child born into a rich family to have the same income when he is an adult. To a kid born in east London, the glistening towers of the City - just a 10-minute walk away - may as well be on a different planet.
 
But any discussion of this is stigmatised as old fashioned, gauche, or even "spiteful." Look at how the term "middle class" is used in our political discussion. The median income in Britain - where half earn more, and half earn less - is £23,000 a year. That's the middle class. Yet routinely the media will refer to taxes on people earning more than £100,000 - the richest six per cent - as "attacks on the middle class." Even the BBC has been referring to Cameron as "upper middle class", when he is related to the Queen and, with his wife, is estimated to be worth £30m - more than 1,000 times the middle-class wage. How is that the middle? The middle of what - White's gentlemen's club? By creating a false middle in this way, they obscure how much Cameron's policies serve a tiny clique at the very top.
 
Labour must not be intimidated into silence on this issue. On this, it is closer to public opinion than Cameron or his media cheerleaders. Poll after poll finds 75 per cent believe Britain is too unequal, and virtually nobody believes tax cuts should not be targeted at the rich. Indeed, public opinion is substantially to the left of Labour, choosing more progressive policies almost across the board - revealing yet again that New Labour's tragedy has been its conservatism and capitulation to the right. Despite all the disinformation, the British people are whiffing the truth: a Populous poll found that 50 per cent think Cameron is on the side of the rich, compared to only 42 per cent who thought he was on the side of ordinary people.
 
Yet Brown keeps lapsing into a feeble technocratic line of attack instead, complaining "the Tories' sums don't add up". This will fail and fail badly. People are so disgusted by politicians they assume all their plans are lies anyway - so finding a supposed "£6bn black hole" leaves everybody cold. He needs to appeal to people's visceral instincts instead.
 
The truth is plain, and it is provable. David Cameron's policies will take money from the hard-working majority of Brits, and hand it to his friends and relatives on landed estates and in tax havens. He is not on your side; he is on the side of a tiny clique who have every luxury in life and now bray for even more. Cameron bragged to his supporters last month: "Nothing and no one can stop us." It's up to the majority who will lose out if he become PM to say - oh yeah?

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Reform Or Revolution - the UK political system

 

By William Bowles

20 October, 2009
Countercurrents.org

 

It's really time I started writing more about the country I live in, the country of my birth, the UK, a country that has the oldest, the most cunning, the most duplicitous (not to mention the most mendacious) of all ruling classes. After all, they've been at it for five hundred years, finally being forced to come up with what they like to call parliamentary democracy over a century ago, but just how democratic is it? And can we really expect real change to come about through a system as corrupt and sclerotic as 'parliamentary democracy'?

 

Parliamentary democracy is a closed system, literally owned by the two main political parties who work in intimate cooperation with the state bureaucracy to maintain the status quo. For proof of this we need only look at the panic caused by the 'expenses' scandal and how the political class, fearful of any challenge to its hegemony has fought tool and nail, left and right to defend their privilege to spend our money as they please.

 

How they have managed to do this should be important to us and especially the confidence trick called Parliament. It is a system that has, for around a century, played the central role in the preservation of capitalism, in reality a private game with the political class being the players, the judges and the rule makers. In other words, a fix and a fix carried out, no less, with the complicity of organized labour.

 

We, the public, play our part by voting (or not) to maintain the 'game', getting bounced back and forth between two sides of same coin. But clearly the 'game' would seem to have run its course which, with all the talk of the state's 'lack of legitimacy', is reflected in the falling number of those who bother to vote or take part in any kind of political activity. Even the Labour Party's own membership has dwindled to a fraction of its size since 'New' Labour came to power (before coming to power in 1997 the Labour Party had over half a million members).

 

The worst thing about this scenario is that, aside from the Anarchists, the left has attempted to join in the 'game' for the past century and more, with predictable results. We only need to look at the 'left' in Parliament to see the truth, for no matter how left they are outside of Parliament, inside, they too have to play the 'game', effectively emasculating themselves in the process. If they don't, the results are predictable, for example, when George Galloway spoke out about the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, he was very quickly ejected from the 'game'. Just how seductive the 'game' is can be illustrated by Galloway's claim, via the Respect Party, that part of Respect's objective was to restore the Labour Party to its former, pre-Blairite reformist glory.

 

The exclusion of the real left from the political process by the Labour Party and its complicit trade unions goes back decades, illustrated by the endless disbanding and reforming of the Labour Party Young Socialists every time it moved to the real left. Also, the fact that under the Labour Party's 'bans and proscriptions', all attempts by the left within the Labour Party to seek common cause (and vice versa) with real progressives meant certain expulsion from the Party. True to its Cold War legacy Red-baiting was and remains Labour's methodology.

 

The trade unions are in the same fix, having handed over their power to the 'party of labour' long ago. Interestingly, William Morris's 'News From Nowhere' predicted this outcome in 1895 after the path of attempting to 'reform' capitalism won the day.

The end result is plain to see: a disenfranchised and alienated population, and with only a fraction of the workforce in trade unions (in the 1950s around 50% were unionized), most don't even get a look-see into the 'game' unless some scandal is exposed. Add to this a corrupt, incompetent and murderous political class, revealed in all its sordid details over the twelve years of Labour rule. Is it any wonder that the state 'lacks legitimacy'?

 

So what's the reason for this pathetic state of affairs? In a word: reformism, the idea that capitalism can be 'reformed' to more resemble socialism (capitalism with a human face?), a process that reached its zenith with the post-war Labour government and even then the nationalization of key sectors of the economy came about firstly because British capitalism was bankrupt. Secondly, it was under pressure from a working class who did not want to see a return to a reactionary and backward pre-war Britain. Things had to change but, how much? And, what kind of change?

 

The post-war Labour government was elected on a wave of progressive ideas following the defeat of Fascism: the National Health Service (the Tories realizing that a complicit population was essential to the survival of capitalism, had already created a new standardized national 'education' system), transport and energy were nationalized, a massive house building programme was initiated, Keynesian capitalism was born (even in the early 1960s many British homes had neither an indoor toilet or even a proper bathroom, let alone adequate heating).

 

So all the while the Labour Party (and successive Labour governments) were proclaiming socialism, in reality they were, not only, propping up domestic capitalism, worse still, their foreign policy was avowedly anti-communist and imperialist/colonialist! So those on the left who claim that 'New' Labour has somehow strayed from the path of righteousness need to brush up on their history. Britain's African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean colonies got the same treatment from Labour as they did from the Tories; the same, racist and imperialist policies were enacted (if ever there was proof of just how the ideology of racism works when utilized by the state this is it) and nothing has changed eg, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, China, Russia, in fact any country that doesn't buy into Western 'democracy' gets the 'treatment'.

 

This is the terrible trajectory of reformism. It explains in part at least, why the left is so marginalized in British political life by what is, in effect, an unholy alliance between organized labour and its alleged voice, the Labour Party and their master, Capital.

But how to break this impasse? Over the past one hundred-plus years the British left has 'evolved' as an integral (if ineffectual) component of the reformist model with organized labour, led by a revolutionary party, viewed as the main vehicle for bringing about an end to capitalism through the ballot, a policy that obviously has not worked. Instead, the trade unions became an elitist battleground between left and right with corrupt practices on both sides. The 'rank and file' membership were relegated to mere onlookers whilst the labour elite slugged it out, with the left inevitably losing.

 

The end of the industrial working class

 

The end of the Keynesian model of capitalism in the 1970s with the birth of so-called neo-liberalism should surely have been a wake-up call for the left. Instead, it retreated in disarray, eventually fragmenting into small pieces, especially after the destruction of the largest and most powerful of unions, the miners by the Thatcher government (the opening shot in the deindustrialization of the UK). Instead we have witnessed the same entrenched left 'leadership' pushing the same failed reformist policies, the 'parliamentary road to socialism' as the British Communist Party called it.

 

The central question for the left is: what is to replace organized industrial labour, after all wasn't it organized labour that was to lead the revolution? In order to try and answer this question, we need to recognize that, whilst capitalism has transformed itself, largely by exporting manufacturing to our former colonies and, in the process, destroying the organized industrial working class, the left simply hasn't got it. Instead, it insists on fighting a battle long lost and with 'tools' that no longer exist.

What used to be the organized industrial working class is now a shadow of its former self, worse still the creation of a so-called service-based economy, composed largely of non-union labour, much of it part-time. It is fragmented and lacks voice. It's here that the trade union movement reveals its real nature: where are the campaigns to unionize the unorganized if only to strengthen the power of the central union bureaucracy, the TUC?.

 

The only potential rising force in society, the so-called middle class, is barely even recognized as being a part of the working class by the left (we really need to question the use of the term middle class). Yet the economy is now managed by the 'middle class', a situation the ruling elite are only too aware of. The state is the single biggest employer and not coincidentally. The biggest unions are all mostly public employee unions, but these unions are split along 'middle'- working class lines.

 

In the private sector, with ascendancy of the financial services sector, marketing and distribution, especially of 'virtual' products, the capitalist economy is now in the hands of the managers and technicians, the so-called middle class. Just look at the chaos unleashed by paying young university whizz kids to play with the numbers in the futures markets, it's all a big game to them.

Britain is once more a Merchant's economy with 'wealth' being generated, not by the production of real and useful products and services, but by manipulating numbers on a gigantic, global scale and doing all of it in real time. The amount of money in private hands dwarfs the amount that the state messes about with as the UK's £20 billion public debt. The US's now (officially) $1.3 trillion debt demonstrates, after all, the state borrows it from the private sector (after the banks et al have ripped off their profits they get by charging interest on the money printed by the state that they then lend out to customers). It's a marvellous system, ingenious even, but utterly irrational, designed to do only one thing, produce a profit for the shareholders in the shortest possible time.

 

This is the setting, so for example, truly revolutionary trade unions would be demanding that running financial services like this is irrational, immoral, unstable and destructive, in other words, against the public's interest. So here's an alternative way of managing the economy, if for no other reason than to protect the interests of its members. But, for as long as the trade unions are in bed with the political class, such outcomes are just fantasies.

 

Instead, we get the following collaboration between the union hierarchy and the government!

 

"BBC Newsnight on Thursday revealed a leaked confidential document spilling the beans on a Royal Mail plan to impose cuts, provoke a strike and smash the union. This blows a hole in their spin over the past couple of weeks about an uncooperative union!

 

"The embarrassing bit was when the Newsnight presenter repeatedly asked Billy [Hayes, postal workers' union] how he felt about the CWU giving £7 million since 2001 to Labour to have it plotting against it, and did he support the 98% of London postal workers who had voted to break from Labour? Labour-lovin' Billy ducked it several times before lamely saying the party wasn't the same as the government." — "Royal Mail secret plot with 'the Shareholder'"

 

How can a trade union represent the interests of its members when its leadership are funding the very government that's trying to destroy it? This is the insane end-product of reformism, where workers fund a government via their trade unions that is a wholly owned subsidiary of capital.

 

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Stop blaming the poor

 Population growth is not a problem. - it's among those who consume the least. So why isn't anyone targeting the very rich

 

• George Monbiot
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 September 2009 21.00 BST

 

It's no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it's about the only environmental issue for which they can't be blamed. The brilliant Earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for instance, claimed last month that "those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational." But it's Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

 

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for instance, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world's population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO₂. North America turned out only 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three percent of the world's population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

 
Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that about one sixth of the world's population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees (£40) a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning 30,000 rupees or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

 

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to the developed nations. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for instance, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together. Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm.

 
The paper's author, David Satterthwaite, points out that the old formula taught to students of development – that total impact equals population times affluence times technology (I = PAT) – is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I = CAT: consumers times affluence times technology. Many of the world's people use so little that they wouldn't figure in this equation. They are the ones who have most children.

 

While there's a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there's a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I've been taking a look at a few super-yachts, as I'll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the style to which they are accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet's RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour I realised that it wasn't going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 litres per hour. But the raft that's really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3,400 litres per hour when travelling at 60 knots. That's nearly a litre per second. Another way of putting it is 31 litres per kilometre.

Of course, to make a real splash I'll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jetskis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar, and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I'll do more damage to the biosphere in 10 minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we're burning, baby.
 
Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3,000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

 

In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined "Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation". It revealed that "some of America's leading billionaires have met secretly" to decide which good cause they should support. "A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat." The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it's the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it's impossible to satirise.

 

James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust. It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven't been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

 
The obsessives could argue that the people breeding rapidly today might one day become richer. But as the super wealthy grab an ever greater share and resources begin to run dry, this, for most of the very poor, is a diminishing prospect. There are strong social reasons for helping people to manage their reproduction, but weak environmental reasons – except among wealthier populations.

 
The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century, probably at about 10 billion. Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing.
 
But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become richer, but they don't consume less – they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock's words, "hiding from the truth". It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich.
 
So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against super-yachts and private jets? Where's Class War when you need it?
 
It's time we had the guts to name the problem. It's not sex; it's money. It's not the poor; it's the rich.

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The hidden truth behind drug company profits

 

Johann Hari:

 

Ring-fencing medical knowledge is one of the great grotesqueries of our age.

 

Wednesday, 5 August 2009

 

This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.

To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.

 

In the answer to this whodunnit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.

 

Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

 

Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.

 

This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.

So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche – the drug company that owns the patent – doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment – but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.

 

And the WHO seems to be backing Roche – against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.

Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."

 

What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."

 

The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.

But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

 

As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.

 

We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.

 

Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."

 

There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."

 

Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody, anywhere in the world, could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.

 

The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same – but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system – spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them – would end.

It isn't cheap – it would cost 0.6 per cent of GDP – but in the medium-term it would save us all a fortune because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor – and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.

 

Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.

 

The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."

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