Tuesday 30 August 2011
Why you won't find the meaning of life
By Spengler
Much as I admire the late Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who turned his horrific experience at Auschwitz into clinical insights, the notion of "man's search for meaning" seems inadequate. Just what about man qualifies him to search for meaning, whatever that might be?
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht warned us against the practice in The Threepenny Opera:
Ja, renne nach dem Gluck
Doch renne nicht zu sehr
Denn alle rennen nach dem Gluck
Das Gluck lauft hinterher.
(Sure, run after happiness, but don't run too hard, because while everybody's running after happiness, it moseys along somewhere behind them).
Brecht (1898-1956) was the kind of character who gave Nihilism a bad name, to be sure, but he had a point. There is something perverse in searching for the meaning of life. It implies that we don't like our lives and want to discover something different. If we don't like living to begin with, we are in deep trouble.
Danish philosopher, theologian and religious author Soren Kierkegaard portrayed his Knight of Faith as the sort of fellow who enjoyed a pot roast on Sunday afternoon. If that sort of thing doesn't satisfy us (feel free to substitute something else than eating), just what is it that we had in mind?
People have a good reason to look at life cross-eyed, because it contains a glaring flaw - that we are going to die, and we probably will become old and sick and frail before we do so. All the bric-a-brac we accumulate during our lifetimes will accrue to other people, if it doesn't go right into the trash, and all the little touches of self-improvement we added to our personality will disappear - the golf stance, the macrame skills, the ability to play the ukulele and the familiarity with the filmography of Sam Pekinpah.
These examples trivialize the problem, of course. If we search in earnest for the meaning of life, then we might make heroic efforts to invent our own identity. That is the great pastime of the past century's intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, the sage and eventual self-caricature of Existentialism, instructed us that man's existence precedes his essence, and therefore can invent his own essence more or less as he pleases. That was a silly argument, but enormously influential.
Sartre reacted to the advice of Martin Heidegger (the German existentialist from whom Jean-Paul Sartre cribbed most of his metaphysics). Heidegger told us that our "being" really was being-unto-death, for our life would end, and therefore is shaped by how we deal with the certainty of death. (Franz Kafka put the same thing better: "The meaning of life is that it ends.") Heidegger (1889-1976) thought that to be "authentic" mean to submerge ourselves into the specific conditions of our time, which for him meant joining the Nazi party. That didn't work out too well, and after the war it became every existentialist for himself. Everyone had the chance to invent his own identity according to taste.
Few of us actually read Sartre (and most of us who do regret it), and even fewer read the impenetrable Heidegger, whom I have tried to make more accessible by glossing his thought in Ebonics (The secret that Leo Strauss never revealed, Asia Times Online, May 13, 2003.) But most of us remain the intellectual slaves of 20th century existentialism notwithstanding. We want to invent our own identities, which implies doing something unique.
This has had cataclysmic consequences in the arts. To be special, an artist must create a unique style, which means that there will be as many styles as artists. It used to be that artists were trained within a culture, so that thousands of artists and musicians painted church altar pieces and composed music for Sunday services for the edification of ordinary church-goers.
Out of such cultures came one or two artists like Raphael or Bach. Today's serious artists write for a miniscule coterie of aficionados in order to validate their own self-invention, and get university jobs if they are lucky, inflicting the same sort of misery on their students. By the time they reach middle age, most artists of this ilk come to understand that they have not found the meaning of life. In fact, they don't even like what they are doing, but as they lack professional credentials to do anything else, they keep doing it.
The high art of the Renaissance or Baroque, centered in the churches or the serious theater, has disappeared. Ordinary people can't be expected to learn a new style every time they encounter the work of a new artist (neither can critics, but they pretend to). The sort of art that appeals to a general audience has retreated into popular culture. That is not the worst sort of outcome. One of my teachers observes that the classical style of composition never will disappear, because the movies need it; it is the only sort of music that can tell a story.
Most people who make heroic efforts at originality learn eventually that they are destined for no such thing. If they are lucky, they content themselves with Kierkegaard's pot roast on Sunday afternoon and other small joys, for example tenure at a university. But no destiny is more depressing than that of the artist who truly manages to invent a new style and achieve recognition for it.
He recalls the rex Nemorensis, the priest of Diana at Nemi who according to Ovid won his office by murdering his predecessor, and will in turn be murdered by his eventual successor. The inventor of a truly new style has cut himself off from the past, and will in turn be cut off from the future by the next entrant who invents a unique and individual style.
The only thing worse than searching in vain for the meaning of life within the terms of the 20th century is to find it, for it can only be a meaning understood by the searcher alone, who by virtue of the discovery is cut off from future as well as past. That is why our image of the artist is a young rebel rather than an elderly sage. If our rebel artists cannot manage to die young, they do the next best thing, namely disappear from public view, like J D Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. The aging rebel is in the position of Diana's priest who sleeps with sword in hand and one eye open, awaiting the challenger who will do to him what he did to the last fellow to hold the job.
Most of us have no ambitions to become the next Jackson Pollack or Damien Hirst. Instead of Heidegger's being-unto-death, we acknowledge being-unto-cosmetic surgery, along with exercise, Botox and anti-oxidants. We attempt to stay young indefinitely. Michael Jackson, I argued in a July 2009 obituary, became a national hero because more than any other American he devoted his life to the goal of remaining an adolescent. His body lies moldering in the grave (in fact, it was moldering long before it reached the grave) but his spirit soars above an America that proposes to deal with the problem of mortality by fleeing from it. (See Blame Michael Jackson Asia Times Online, July 14, 2009.)
A recent book by the sociologist Eric Kaufmann (Will the Religious Inherit the Earth?) makes the now-common observation that secular people have stopped having children. As a secular writer, he bewails this turn of events, but concedes that it has occurred for a reason: "The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for people's powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones."
Traditional society had to confront infant mortality as well as death by hunger, disease and war. That shouldn't be too troubling, however: "We may not be able to duck death completely, but it becomes so infrequent that we can easily forget about it."
That is a Freudian slip for the record books. Contrary to what Professor Kaufmann seems to be saying, the mortality rate for human beings remains at 100%, where it always was. But that is not how we think about it. We understand the concept of death, just not as it might apply to us.
If we set out to invent our own identities, then by definition we must abominate the identities of our parents and our teachers. Our children, should we trouble to bring any into the world, also will abominate ours. If self-invention is the path to the meaning of life, it makes the messy job of bearing and raising children a superfluous burden, for we can raise our children by no other means than to teach them contempt for us, both by instruction, and by the example of set in showing contempt to our own parents.
That is why humanity has found no other way to perpetuate itself than by the continuity of tradition. A life that is worthwhile is one that is worthwhile in all its phases, from youth to old age. Of what use are the elderly? In a viable culture they are the transmitters of the accumulated wisdom of the generations. We will take the trouble to have children of our own only when we anticipate that they will respect us in our declining years, not merely because they tolerate us, but because we will have something yet to offer to the young.
In that case, we do not discover the meaning of life. We accept it, rather, as it is handed down to us. Tradition by itself is no guarantee of cultural viability. Half of the world's 6,700 languages today are spoken by small tribes in New Guinea, whose rate of extinction is frightful. Traditions perfected over centuries of isolated existence in Neolithic society can disappear in a few years in the clash with modernity. But there are some traditions in the West that have survived for millennia and have every hope of enduring for millennia still.
For those of you who still are searching for the meaning of life, the sooner you figure out that the search itself is the problem, the better off you will be. Since the Epic of Gilgamesh in the third millennium BC, our search has not been for meaning, but for immortality. And as the gods told Gilgamesh, you can't find immortality by looking for it. Better to find a recipe for pot roast.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. View comments on this article in Spengler's Expat Bar forum.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist
Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers
'Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets.' Photograph: Peter M Fisher/Corbis
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.
Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a "keep out" sign on the gates.
You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I've seen, Elsevier's Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities' costs, which are being passed to their students.
Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.
The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.
More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it's not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.
The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer's words) because they "develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication in the past 15 years". But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more.
What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.
It's bad enough for academics, it's worse for the laity. I refer readers to peer-reviewed papers, on the principle that claims should be followed to their sources. The readers tell me that they can't afford to judge for themselves whether or not I have represented the research fairly. Independent researchers who try to inform themselves about important scientific issues have to fork out thousands. This is a tax on education, a stifling of the public mind. It appears to contravene the universal declaration of human rights, which says that "everyone has the right freely to … share in scientific advancement and its benefits".
Open-access publishing, despite its promise, and some excellent resources such as the Public Library of Science and the physics database arxiv.org, has failed to displace the monopolists. In 1998 the Economist, surveying the opportunities offered by electronic publishing, predicted that "the days of 40% profit margins may soon be as dead as Robert Maxwell". But in 2010 Elsevier's operating profit margins were the same (36%) as they were in 1998.
The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers. You can start reading open-access journals, but you can't stop reading the closed ones.
Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will.
In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating – along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität – a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.
The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us.
• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot's website. On Twitter, @georgemonbiot
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I've seen, Elsevier's Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities' costs, which are being passed to their students.
Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.
The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.
More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it's not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.
The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer's words) because they "develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication in the past 15 years". But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more.
What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.
It's bad enough for academics, it's worse for the laity. I refer readers to peer-reviewed papers, on the principle that claims should be followed to their sources. The readers tell me that they can't afford to judge for themselves whether or not I have represented the research fairly. Independent researchers who try to inform themselves about important scientific issues have to fork out thousands. This is a tax on education, a stifling of the public mind. It appears to contravene the universal declaration of human rights, which says that "everyone has the right freely to … share in scientific advancement and its benefits".
Open-access publishing, despite its promise, and some excellent resources such as the Public Library of Science and the physics database arxiv.org, has failed to displace the monopolists. In 1998 the Economist, surveying the opportunities offered by electronic publishing, predicted that "the days of 40% profit margins may soon be as dead as Robert Maxwell". But in 2010 Elsevier's operating profit margins were the same (36%) as they were in 1998.
The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers. You can start reading open-access journals, but you can't stop reading the closed ones.
Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive. But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on "the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies". You bet they will.
In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database. In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating – along the lines proposed by Björn Brembs of Berlin's Freie Universität – a single global archive of academic literature and data. Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.
The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us.
• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot's website. On Twitter, @georgemonbiot
Sunday 28 August 2011
August 27: The saddest day for Parliament
CP Surendran
Today is probably the saddest day for Indian Parliament.
The Lokpal bill approved by Parliament now accommodates Anna Hazare’s main demands with a little tailoring. Interestingly, the House thumped its assent. Its vocal chords seemed to have been silenced at the most decisive moment. They had taken to fists. In retrospect that makes sense; Parliament had been silenced by People.
For 12 days the Anna’s fasting frame had hung over Parliament like Damocles’ sword. It is ironic that in a largely foodless country, what power a man who can forgo it wield. Perhaps such self-inflicted gastronomic torture raises the atavistic fears of the Famine, a national archetype that is never too far from our subconscious.
Close to 790 members in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha represent the billion odd population of India. They are there because we believe in exercising our franchise every five years, or whenever we are asked to. Unlike in the West, where institutions of democracy are in place, we put everything into our election, which is why Parliament here should be totally true to its people.
According to the speeches made in the House today, this is not the first time a Lokpal bill was sought to be introduced in Parliament. Apparently, we have done it some eight times before. For over 40 years then the bill had been doing the rounds. The question is why?
Because, Indian Parliament is a failure. One of the more eloquent tributes to its emasculated status came from Lalu Prasad Yadav in the second half of the day’s speeches. Perhaps he has himself to blame for the state of affairs he was lamenting?
Or may be not. Corruption is at the heart of Indian ethos. We bribe Gods, sanitation workers, peons and loan officers. We bribe RTO officials, passport officers and traffic constables. We believe if we don’t bribe, the job will not be attended to as a “special case.” And if it’s not a special case, it will never get done anyway. We can’t be blamed either. The system runs on our willingness to bribe. And the officialdom’s eagerness to take. Perhaps this is the legacy of a starvation economy, where for all supplementary income is the main thing.
Certainly, it is not as if corruption is part of the system; it is that the system is a part of the corruption. You take corruption out of it, and the whole establishments will just crash. If the cash for votes scam is any indication, Parliament is very much a part of it.
Which is why Parliament has been so dilatory with the Lokpal bill. It resorted to procrastination to protect itself. If Anna Hazare had not starved himself on a high stage in the Ramleela grounds, so TV cameras can watch him waste away to Bollywood music, the Lokpal bill--for what it is worth, and it is not much, because you can’t bring a law to make your genetic pool more ethical-- would still be a piece of paper to soak the tea spilled on a table in the Central Hall.
At the end of it all, the bill still might serve as a mop.
Philosophically the bill believes corruption as an unethical practice involving public money. It says nothing of corporate corruption, which is a horror story all by itself. The grand narrative of India’s overnight corporate miracles owes a great deal to efficacies of graft. Corporates directly, or indirectly through their lobbies, buy and sell favours that range from land to licences to whole portions of rivers and forests. The new development model that India swears by, the one of Public Private Participation (PPP) where the line between Corporate profits and government responsibility is fluid at best and nonexistent at worst is in fact tailor made for export-quality corruption.
It is difficult to believe that a simple legislation even if is improvised to accommodate corporate corruption will change all that. No law can change our genetic disposition. To be ethical is an existential choice. I am personally skeptical of Anna and his movement because the fashionable families from Defence Colonies and Greater Kailashes who frequent the Ramleela grounds between parties and PVRs are a suspect lot: how many of them for example treat their maids well? How many beat up their wives and wouldn’t mind a rape now and then just to add a little excitement to their scented lives? How many will resist a dowry deal for their sons?
That an unelected body of people-- inchoate in their articulation, self delusional in their idealism—has risen to act as a kind of corrective to the highest law making body in this country is tragic news. The people have lost faith in their Parliament. Clearly, parties across the ideological spectrum have forfeited their right to call themselves representatives of the people. Left, Right or Centre, their function has been whittled down to reluctant approvers of what an amorphous mass aspires for: respect. And it has come at the expense of a Parliament that is blind to the reason why it came into being.
Today is probably the saddest day for Indian Parliament.
The Lokpal bill approved by Parliament now accommodates Anna Hazare’s main demands with a little tailoring. Interestingly, the House thumped its assent. Its vocal chords seemed to have been silenced at the most decisive moment. They had taken to fists. In retrospect that makes sense; Parliament had been silenced by People.
For 12 days the Anna’s fasting frame had hung over Parliament like Damocles’ sword. It is ironic that in a largely foodless country, what power a man who can forgo it wield. Perhaps such self-inflicted gastronomic torture raises the atavistic fears of the Famine, a national archetype that is never too far from our subconscious.
Close to 790 members in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha represent the billion odd population of India. They are there because we believe in exercising our franchise every five years, or whenever we are asked to. Unlike in the West, where institutions of democracy are in place, we put everything into our election, which is why Parliament here should be totally true to its people.
According to the speeches made in the House today, this is not the first time a Lokpal bill was sought to be introduced in Parliament. Apparently, we have done it some eight times before. For over 40 years then the bill had been doing the rounds. The question is why?
Because, Indian Parliament is a failure. One of the more eloquent tributes to its emasculated status came from Lalu Prasad Yadav in the second half of the day’s speeches. Perhaps he has himself to blame for the state of affairs he was lamenting?
Or may be not. Corruption is at the heart of Indian ethos. We bribe Gods, sanitation workers, peons and loan officers. We bribe RTO officials, passport officers and traffic constables. We believe if we don’t bribe, the job will not be attended to as a “special case.” And if it’s not a special case, it will never get done anyway. We can’t be blamed either. The system runs on our willingness to bribe. And the officialdom’s eagerness to take. Perhaps this is the legacy of a starvation economy, where for all supplementary income is the main thing.
Certainly, it is not as if corruption is part of the system; it is that the system is a part of the corruption. You take corruption out of it, and the whole establishments will just crash. If the cash for votes scam is any indication, Parliament is very much a part of it.
Which is why Parliament has been so dilatory with the Lokpal bill. It resorted to procrastination to protect itself. If Anna Hazare had not starved himself on a high stage in the Ramleela grounds, so TV cameras can watch him waste away to Bollywood music, the Lokpal bill--for what it is worth, and it is not much, because you can’t bring a law to make your genetic pool more ethical-- would still be a piece of paper to soak the tea spilled on a table in the Central Hall.
At the end of it all, the bill still might serve as a mop.
Philosophically the bill believes corruption as an unethical practice involving public money. It says nothing of corporate corruption, which is a horror story all by itself. The grand narrative of India’s overnight corporate miracles owes a great deal to efficacies of graft. Corporates directly, or indirectly through their lobbies, buy and sell favours that range from land to licences to whole portions of rivers and forests. The new development model that India swears by, the one of Public Private Participation (PPP) where the line between Corporate profits and government responsibility is fluid at best and nonexistent at worst is in fact tailor made for export-quality corruption.
It is difficult to believe that a simple legislation even if is improvised to accommodate corporate corruption will change all that. No law can change our genetic disposition. To be ethical is an existential choice. I am personally skeptical of Anna and his movement because the fashionable families from Defence Colonies and Greater Kailashes who frequent the Ramleela grounds between parties and PVRs are a suspect lot: how many of them for example treat their maids well? How many beat up their wives and wouldn’t mind a rape now and then just to add a little excitement to their scented lives? How many will resist a dowry deal for their sons?
That an unelected body of people-- inchoate in their articulation, self delusional in their idealism—has risen to act as a kind of corrective to the highest law making body in this country is tragic news. The people have lost faith in their Parliament. Clearly, parties across the ideological spectrum have forfeited their right to call themselves representatives of the people. Left, Right or Centre, their function has been whittled down to reluctant approvers of what an amorphous mass aspires for: respect. And it has come at the expense of a Parliament that is blind to the reason why it came into being.
Hazare ke Khwaishen aisi ki har Khwaish ho-hum nikale// Bahut nikale unke demands phir bhi kam nikale
Corruption And Its Discontents
By Niranjan Ramakrishnan
26 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Countercurrents.org
Hazare ke Khwaishen aisi ki har Khwaish ho-hum nikale
Bahut nikale unke demands phir bhi kam nikale
Bahut nikale unke demands phir bhi kam nikale
(with apologies to Mirza Ghalib)
Judging from the New York Times and the Washington Post, urban India is abuzz with the idea of banishing corruption. Photographs of peaceful marchers filling a giant overpass have made front-page news. Anna Hazare, whose arrest and fast have ignited the stir in cities all across India and amongst Indian groups abroad, is now a well-known figure. The fast, meetings, and protests are being billed as nothing less than a second Freedom Movement.
That last accreditation is in perfect pitch with an intelligentsia cut adrift from any sense of proportion, as befitting one that till only the other day was capable of considering Manmohan Singh a more significant reformer than Mahatma Gandhi.
Amid all the din it is easy to forget the lofty purpose of the Second Freedom Movement. It is for the appointment of an ombudsman and a subsidiary bureaucracy to oversee allegations of corruption amongst government officials. One may just as soon label a demand for Web access to one's income tax records as the second Declaration of Independence.
Owing perhaps to his experiences as a lawyer, Gandhi did not view some new law as the panacea to every social, economic or political problem. He pinned a lot more importance on the renewal of the human being. Gandhi believed that the quality of any country ultimately depends on the quality of its people. His abhorrence of legal cleverness as a means to fixing human problems is best illustrated by EF Schumacher in his classic, Small Is Beautiful,
" Gandhi used to talk disparagingly of 'dreaming of systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good'. "
That corruption is the scourge of daily existence in India as in few other countries may be entirely true. Ordinary people in everyday life have to pay bribes all the way from getting a driver's license to obtaining a housing permit. Certainly many of these are paid to government officials, big and small. The same government officials have to bribe others in their capacity as applicants. Corruption is many things to many people.
What Anna Hazare and his acolytes seem to forget is that corruption is not limited to the government. They also appear to believe that the appointment of eminent Indians to some overseeing council would somehow ensure moral chastity. If credentials alone, or even a personal reputation for incorruptibility, were such strong safeguards, the administration of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should be a showcase for civics textbooks on model governance. Instead, it is considered the fount of malpractice and graft on a gargantuan scale, with many reckoning it presides over the most corrupt dispensation in independent India's history.
Neither the protesters nor the government want to address the issue of corruption in India in its deeper essence. Is it an obscenity only when a government official receives a bribe? What about corruption of the conscience? For instance, is it corruption when someone can build a 60 story skyscraper for a personal residence in a country where millions of children go to bed malnourished? Gandhi again,
"Every palace that one sees in India is a demonstration, not of her riches, but of the insolence of power that riches give to the few, who owe them to the miserably requited labours of the millions of the paupers of India."
Even though there seems to be a palpable correlation between the size and scope of scams in India and Manmohan Singh's neoliberal initiatives starting in the early 90s, Anna Hazare and his wise counselors don’t seem to want to see it. And amidst all his ineptitude in dealing with this latest crisis, practically the first words out of the Prime Minister’s mouth were to caution that it would be wrong to connect corruption with economic liberalization.
As veteran journalist Alexander Cockburn is fond of saying, "never believe anything until it is officially denied".
In 1991, Manmohan Singh, finance Minister in a minority government, kicked off a 'liberalization' program laying the foundation for a two decade neoliberal spree. It has turned some 250 million Indian citizens into celebrated ‘consumers’, but distorted any measure of what Professor Amartya Sen would call ‘social choice'. In this new order, what is good for consumerism and high living is alone good for India, whatever its cost by way of farmer suicides, uprooting of entire villages, pollution of the water table, or handing over of India's agricultural future to the GMO boys at Monsanto and elsewhere. The lone measure of success in this Eastern Wild-West is something called growth rate; the ethos it has spawned would both amaze and gratify Gordon "Greed Is Good" Gecko.
Gandhi's diagnosis and cure for India's corruption epidemic would probably involve a lot more pain and sacrifice than a few marches. He might point out that in a milieu where leaders openly promote moneymaking as the most important virtue, and an elite esteems itself by the extent of its ostentation, corruption would only find a conducive habitat. He would reject recourse to some bill, not for some technical shortcomings, but perhaps saying that reliance on such measures would "diminish the moral height" of Indians, just as his khadi movement urged Indians to boycott foreign cloth and adopt the rougher and costlier homespun, instead of a fast outside the Viceroy’s palace pleading for a ban on English mill imports.
The fervid and often uncivil jousting between "civil society" on the one side and the gentleman Prime Minister’s cabinet on the other, poring over fine points of an anticorruption bill while taking care never to mention the 800 pound gorilla parked in the middle of the room, reminded me of something I had read long ago.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living in the United States. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com“One of the greatest of the Bengali novelists of the 20th century, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, has summed up the underlying principle of Hindu behavior in a neat, if cynical, epigram. He makes a woman who had a low-caste paramour boast that although she lived 20 years with him she had not for a single day allowed him to enter her kitchen.”-- Nirad Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
British Tourism
http://giffenman-miscellania.blogspot.com/2011/08/uk-tourists-beware-cambridge-hospital.html
Friday 26 August 2011
Top Ten Jokes at Edinburgh Fringe This Year
The top 10 festival funnies were judged to be:
1) Nick Helm: "I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves."
2) Tim Vine: "Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels."
3) Hannibal Buress: "People say 'I'm taking it one day at a time'. You know what? So is everybody. That's how time works."
4) Tim Key: "Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought... once you've hired the car..."
5) Matt Kirshen: "I was playing chess with my friend and he said, 'Let's make this interesting'. So we stopped playing chess."
6) Sarah Millican: "My mother told me, you don't have to put anything in your mouth you don't want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards."
7) Alan Sharp: "I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure."
8) Mark Watson: "Someone asked me recently - what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I'm not falling for that one again, wife."
9) Andrew Lawrence: "I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can't even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails."
10) DeAnne Smith: "My friend died doing what he loved ... Heroin."
1) Nick Helm: "I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves."
2) Tim Vine: "Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels."
3) Hannibal Buress: "People say 'I'm taking it one day at a time'. You know what? So is everybody. That's how time works."
4) Tim Key: "Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought... once you've hired the car..."
5) Matt Kirshen: "I was playing chess with my friend and he said, 'Let's make this interesting'. So we stopped playing chess."
6) Sarah Millican: "My mother told me, you don't have to put anything in your mouth you don't want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards."
7) Alan Sharp: "I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure."
8) Mark Watson: "Someone asked me recently - what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I'm not falling for that one again, wife."
9) Andrew Lawrence: "I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can't even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails."
10) DeAnne Smith: "My friend died doing what he loved ... Heroin."
Thursday 25 August 2011
UK TOURISTS BEWARE – Cambridge Hospital Staff Demand Instant Money from Sick and Ailing Indian Tourist
Cambridge Hospital Staff Demand Instant Money from Sick and Ailing Indian Tourist
The UK likes to portray itself as a friendly and inviting place for tourists. Its visa regime informs tourists who possess medical insurance that in case of an emergency they will receive adequate medical treatment without any need to pay the money upfront. But this is not true in reality as the following story illustrates.
VM, aged 73, is an Indian tourist visiting her family in Cambridge UK since June 2011. On Thursday 18 Aug she was admitted to Cambridge's famous Addenbrooke's hospital for an emergency illness and she received good medical care. Her medical insurers contacted the hospital on Friday 19 August in order to confirm her medical insurance cover and to guarantee payment. Yet on Tuesday 23 August and Wednesday 24 August VM received a rude shock in her hospital bed. Staff from the finance department beseiged her sick bed and demanded that she sign a carte blanche document agreeing to pay any/all charges the NHS may levy for her treatment. When it was pointed out that her insurance company was willing to offer a payment guarantee for her treatment they refused to listen and threatened to deport the tourist.
This issue becomes even more important as London prepares to invite tourists for the 2012 Olympic games. As the following article shows, NHS hospitals have made it a policy to use such high handed behaviour to extort cash from patients in their ailing beds.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-562980/Foreigners-asked-produce-cash-hospital-beds-crackdown-health-tourists.html
In short if this behaviour is allowed to continue, if a luckless tourist finds himself in an NHS hospital s/he will not only have to hope to get better soon in a foreign land, but also try to figure out how to arrange large amounts of cash to fob of the finance staff of these hospitals.
You have been warned, visit the UK only if you or your relatives have large amounts of instant cash. Else you and your relatives will be in peril should you have a medical emergency as NHS hospitals fail to honour the legal commitment made when you obtained your visa.
THE DAILY MAIL ARTICLE
Foreigners asked to produce cash in their hospital beds in crackdown on 'health tourists'
By OLINKA KOSTERLast updated at 17:54 30 April 2008
A hospital is pioneering a "get tough" attitude on health tourists - by throwing them out of hospital before their treatment is complete unless they pay up.
It means that foreigners who travel to Britain to get free care on the NHS will now be asked to produce cash or a credit card at their hospital bed.
The new approach has already saved the West Middlesex University Hospital in Isleworth up to £700,000 a year. Its proximity to Heathrow Airport makes it a particular target for immigrants.
If all hospitals did the same, the NHS could recoup tens of millions of pounds a year from health tourists.
Scroll down for more...
Crackdown: West Middlessex University Hospital is getting tough on illegal 'health tourists'"We will discharge a patient before they are well," he insisted.
"We will discharge a patient when they are stable, when we have provided what we have to provide - the minimum benchmark.
"Generally, within the first 48 hours after admission they will be given a price on how much, roughly, their treatment is going to cost.
"If I'm interviewing an inpatient I will be at that patient's bedside and I will ask them there and then for a visa, MasterCard, debit card, or cash. We don't take cheques."
Under the current system, anyone who needs emergency care, such as for a heart attack or accident and emergency treatment after an accident, does not have to pay.
But patients not eligible for free care who attempt to use the NHS for ongoing care or treatment that is not immediately necessary have to pay.
These so-called health tourists normally receive a bill on departure from hospital - but only an estimated 30 per cent of the money is recovered.
Under the pilot scheme, they will be asked to pay at their hospital bed for non-emergency care, or told to leave.
However, they would only be discharged after three consultants have agreed their condition is stable.
In the case of a heart attack victim, NHS patients would normally stay in hospital for 10 days. But anyone not eligible for free care could be asked to leave after 48 hours if they are judged stable.
Most patients told to leave did so willingly, Mr Finlay added - but not all of them.
"I've had two death threats, I've been held up against a wall, I've been grabbed round the throat, I've been manhandled by relatives - verbal abuse is almost day-to-day," he said.
"You have to have a very thick skin."
Last year, a secret Government report based on figures from 12 NHS trusts suggested that the bill for treating health tourists was at least £62million a year.
This did not include the cost of treating foreigners entitled to free healthcare, such as asylum seekers and students.
Health tourists not entitled to free treatment include pregnant women who arrive on holiday visas and give birth here.
Many foreign HIV sufferers also target UK hospitals for treatment, the study from 2005 revealed.
In the case of an HIV patient, a clinical decision would be made as to whether emergency care was needed.
At the time the figures were revealed, Conservative MP Ben Wallace said hospitals appeared to be pursuing a "don't ask, don't charge and don't chase policy".
Cash-strapped hospitals are being pushed further into debt because they are failing to claim the millions owed to them by those abusing the system.
As well as the West Middlesex University Hospital, the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the Luton and Dunstable NHS Foundation Trust have been chosen to take part in the pilot scheme because their catchment areas contain both a "major point of entry to the UK" and a large proportion of asylum seekers.
Mr Finlay said his methods had received an enthusiastic response from across Whitehall - and saved the trust between £600,000 and £700,000-a-year.
"They think it is a fantastic idea, a solution to a relatively new problem," he said.
"It is up to the Department of Health to see how brave they will be to use innovative ways to tackle health tourism."
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: "It is important that those who are not entitled to NHS services pay for any they receive.
"The Government is currently reviewing access to primary and secondary care for all foreign nationals.
"In doing this we must take into account the implications of any such decisions on the key preventative and public health responsibilities of the NHS.
"We always treat people and do not charge them for emergency treatment, but the thinking behind the pilot schemes is that the NHS is there first and foremost for people who live here."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)