Pheel Phree

Battersea Bardot

2010-12-21T21:03:00.000-08:00

In a bit of a change of pace, I’m going to write about music rather than politics/economics this time, so you all can get a bit of a sense of what I think about when I am riding my bike and listening to music. I think that most music blogs are based around the writer’s ratings: in other words, telling the reader why she likes XYZ band/album. I’m not going to do that, because: (1) nobody likes the same kind of music that I do, so there’s no reason to recommend anything (2) I will just look stupid because I don’t know anything about music. What I am going to do is talk about some songs whose messages I appreciate and which resonate with me. I’ve always been a message>music kind of guy, although I guess any song needs to have both for me to really appreciate it.
That being said, the song I’m going to talk about today is “Battersea Bardot,” by Cock Sparrer. If you know me, you know that Cock Sparrer is probably my favourite ever band. However, you might also know that I think “Two Monkeys,” their 1997 album, is pretty terrible. I decided to listen to it a few weeks ago, though, and give it a serious chance. Some of the songs are alright, some are not great, but the one that really stuck out to me was the aforementioned Battersea Bardot (I’m going to lose the quotes from now on, because it’s a pain to type them every time). Basically, it’s a slowish ballad about a girl from London. I later did a little research and found that the Carol White described in the song was a real lady, a British actress who was mostly active in the 1960s. Her nickname was the Battersea Bardot, because obviously she looked like Brigitte Bardot, and was from working-class London. She was famous for basically playing downtrodden women from British slums, and had a pretty tragic life in the end, but that’s not really what this is about.
Nor is it an exegesis of the song. However, one of the lines really got to me: “From the stage to the Squeeze, from T.V. to striptease/I loved you in the back of my car.” On first thought, it doesn’t really make sense – how could the guy from Cock Sparrer have known (much less known carnally) a woman who by then would have been a major movie star? The answer may be obvious to you, but it took me a little while to figure out. Basically, these lines are a synecdoche (right?) – Carol White is a stand in for all the girls that the song writer knew from his neighbourhood. Although the actress became a star (sort of) and moved to the US, her characters captured that trope perfectly. This is why the lyrics refer multiple times to one of her roles (“Cathy Come Home”). The two lines quoted above then, are parallel juxtapositions of The Battersea Bardot (uppercase) and the Battersea Bardot (lowercase, which is to say indeterminate). I love the way that this line conveys a deep love and respect, even if it is in some ways objectifying. It reminds me of the line from “Hersham Boys,” by Sham 69: “It’s down to the pub for the local girls/They’re not beauty queens, but they’re our pearls.” Cock Sparrer seems to be saying the opposite here, but I think that, in the strict juxtaposition of the celebrity and nameless people, they are in fact making clear the difference between these two classes of people, despite their underlying figurative similarities.
There’s more to this song that I like, but I’m not sure I want to, or am able to, go into any worthwhile depth about it here – it has to do with music and a general feeling, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Keep an eye out for more of these (at least one or two) coming in a minute.

The video:

And the lyrics.

p.s. Coincidence that Sham 69 also has a song called “Poor Cow,” named after a Carol White movie?

Situational Morality

2010-10-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

The post-modernist movement had several prominent intellectual effects, but the one which I think is the most significant is the fore-fronting of relativism. Post-modernism valorised relativism and subjectivism across disciplines; for example, in the field of literary studies, with an increased focus on subjective context rather than objective text. Aside from (perhaps) that field, the most important impact of relativism has been in the area of morals and ethics. Briefly, moral relativism is the assertion that moral codes are variable transculturally, and, to a certain extent, on other levels. Most people today, I believe, understand that at least some degree of relativism must be incorporated in large-scale theories of morality. There is some degree of debate on the subject, of course, with people who would probably describe themselves as leftist/liberal/progressive in general favouring a higher degree of relativism than those who describe themselves as rightist/conservative. The latter are more likely to believe that “our” values are superior and should be imposed on others, while the former probably favour a certain degree of co-existence between competing moral theories. Perhaps the thorniest prescriptive question in all of the social sciences is to what degree ethical paradigms that are in conflict with our own should be accepted, or, to put it another way, to what degree one should be “tolerant of intolerance.”
I am not, however, attempting to tackle that question here, but rather to add another wrinkle to the ongoing complication of metamorality indicated by the existence of moral relativism. Allow me to explain. A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a friend who had been working in a (very poor region of a) developing country. If I recall correctly, she was upset that a local UN office wouldn’t contribute money to the project she was working on, which was both positive and underfunded. It seems the UN office had to spend money to build a private gym in its compound, despite the existence of a quite tolerable gym in a country club in the near vicinity, and the obvious non-danger to UN personnel in the area. To the extent that it matters, I’m inclined to agree with her. However, I believe that this issue is more complicated than it seems. If you’ll allow me to recap and gather my thoughts, the situation as I’m trying to present it is as such: rich-ish interlopers refuse to spend a (comparatively) small sum of money to make (comparatively) vast improvements in the quality of life of vulnerable people, while spending money on what is essentially a luxury for themselves.
Doesn’t sound good, does it? One could rightfully decry their behaviour as self-serving and heartless. Think about an essentially similar example in another context, though: a company that owns an office building in Toronto decides to build a workout facility for its employees in the building, despite the availability of local gyms, and the overall affluence of its employees. Not such a bad thing, maybe; in fact, the company may fairly be lauded for considering the quality of life of its employees. However, shouldn’t the Canadian company send its money to development projects instead? In a utilitarian framework, the answer is yes, of course. This action would indisputably create a greater improvement in human happiness. It could be argued that the duty of for-profit companies is not to add to the greater good, but to make money. However, setting aside possible gains from something like increased employee satisfaction, providing extra employee benefits is more or less an altruistic action, in other words, not one governed by a strict profit motive.
So what’s the difference? In my opinion, simple context. The moral framework that the organisations are operating in is the same, but their circumstances are different. Certain activities that may be perfectly permissible in one context are morally objectionable in others. The context of an action can provide an important moral consideration. For example, the type of lifestyle that many of you probably enjoy – spending a certain portion of your income on car payments, or alcohol, or new clothes, or enjoyable food, or whatever – is more or less commensurate with your position in society. We can perhaps castigate people for buying luxury cars or private jets or exorbitantly priced bottles of wine, but hardly for buying milk or taking the subway for non-essential functions. However, the aforementioned lifestyle would probably seem gratuitous and vulgar in another context. If you were living in a remote village in a desperately poor area, spending money on a new record or a bottle of beer or even fresh produce might seem deplorable. So, there is more to morality than simply applying a given rule to evaluate a possible action. In some situations, this is obvious – what would be murder in a civilian context could easily be heroism in a military one – but I am making a point that is (I hope) a little bit more subtle and novel.
War is, at least in theory, an undesirable and transitory state, a pathology on the body politic. Poverty, on the other hand, is as old as the world, and glaring inequality nearly so. Keep in mind that, removing a few outliers, the spread between the average individual incomes of richest and poorest countries in the world is two full orders of magnitude (and that’s adjusted for purchasing power parity – the incomes of poorer countries are 1.5-2 times lower in nominal terms). What I’m trying to say is that this dichotomy (multichotomy would probably be more accurate, but certainly too complex) is pervasive and almost certainly ineradicable in the short term. In other words, it is a normal state of affairs, one that must be taken into consideration rather than simply dismissed as an outlier. It’s probably true that most people are able to judge what’s right or wrong subconsciously, for example not waving money around in the face of a desperately poor person just to show off, but I think it’s important to also understand this phenomenon on a intellectual or theoretical, rather than simply visceral level.

Metrics

2010-10-14T18:13:00.001-07:00

A serious, if under-noted, problem with empiricism is the difficulty in deciding just what you want to measure. Of course, this doesn’t come up too often in the hard sciences, where experiments are designed with specific goals in mind, but it is an issue in the social sciences. For example, even if strict utilitarianism was a good moral theory (which it’s not, obviously: should we kill someone with no pangs of conscience if we think it will make the world a better place in some sense?), it would be useless, because there’s no real way to calculate all of the utilitarian ramifications of any particular action, at least the complicated ones. Similar issues pertain in related situations. The full class is too long to enumerate, but one that I hope is exemplary is the use of GDP as a measure of development, and more generally social health.
I’m not going to bother telling you what GDP (& by extension, GDP per capita and some corollary concepts) are, because, quite frankly, you should know, and if you don’t you can always look it up. You probably also know that par capita GDP is seen by many, if not practically all, mainstream development economists and other specialists as the key metric for development, both economic and social. This point of view certainly has some problems, and one shouldn’t think that all development thinkers are uniformly and wholeheartedly in favour of it. It does also have its advantages, though.
1)It is pretty strongly correlated to a Potter Stewart (i.e. know it when you see it) definition of development. In other words, it’s not surprising that countries you would probably want to live in, like the United States and Belgium, have a fairly high GDP/capita, while less desirable ones, like Mali and Uzbekistan, don’t. This has some exceptions, most notably in terms of sparsely populated oil states.
2)Conceptually, it makes sense. There is a plausible mechanism through which increased wealth could make people happier. I’ve read studies that claim this effect peaks at a certain income level, but all of these are far higher than the average personal income of practically any country in the world, most notably developing countries.
3)It’s pretty easy to measure, or at least estimate. Can you imagine the nightmare in trying to measure the average happiness of citizens in a poor country, and then to compare that to other countries. I mean, purchasing power parity is sort of complicated, but nothing compared to that.
Of course, wealth is not the only, or most important, concept in development. Amartya Sen’s theories have garnered a lot of respect, and there’s a reason why the UN puts time and effort into calculating the HDI. However, the ubiquity of the metric poses its own problems. Most notably, the issue of what we could call “teaching to the test,” which is to say, focusing on improving the metric at the expense of making substantial progress.
As this phrase indicates, this problem is also prominent in the education sector. This is another field in which it is desirable to measure and compare progress, but in which there is no obvious internal means of doing so. Businesses all have the goal of making money, and schools have the goal of educating kids. So far, so good; but how do you go about measuring a concept as nebulous as “education”? The obvious way is to develop a test. Setting aside the fact that standardised tests are inherently unfair to those who test poorly (I have a few friends who are smart but can’t take exams for the life of them) or come from different cultural backgrounds, the problem remains that education, like development, is hard to boil down into something easily measurable and discussable. We can safely say that someone who gets a 1550 on their SATs (I don’t know how the new scale works, so forgive me – it was out of 1600) is better educated than someone who scores 1100. In the same way, it’s easy to grasp and easy (ish) to measure. These three form a large part of the reason that standardised testing is so en vogue in the United States today, especially since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001.
The problem, though, is that the very act of testing (or rather, the importance placed on the tests) has detrimental side-effects. Just as development orthodoxy can promote certain reforms that harm the interests of developing-country citizens (cuts to education budgets, for example), too much focus on narrow tests of math and English can narrow and stunt the progress of intellectual development in students. It does not stop with students Dubner and Levitt (Freakonomics, 2005) even show that teachers are given an incentive to cheat for their students in order to avoid penalties for a lack of progress. I don’t think this happens too much for development economists (in fact, I’m inclined to think that the problem may go the other way – if aid is dependent on poverty, it certainly seems that it might provide a disincentive for creating sustainable economic growth), but the point stands. Absent the test, there would be no motivation to cheat.
Do I think that this type of metric should be scrapped? No, particularly since these areas are very important, and there is no other obvious way to measure progress in them. Without the ability to measure progress, however imperfectly, it is impossible direct our efforts in any manner better than educated guesswork. At the same time, it is important to be aware of their limitations. In the same way that one cannot make empirical statements of any stripe without a tiny mental asterisk after reading Hume, one should not read think that all is well in the DRC simply because they posted a /capita GDP growth of 7.6% last year. For a less cherry-picked example, India still faces serious problems, despite a sustained growth rate of 7-10% over the last decade or so. In the end, we just have to admit that this particular metric is used faute de mieux. People involved in this field must be exceedingly careful not to forget which facet is the means and which the end.

p.s.: I just read an interesting book on standardised testing in the US (Maryland, to be specific). If you’re interested, it’s called Tested, by Linda Perlstein (2008, Henry Holt & Co.). I think that it does a good job of pointing out flaws in the system – of which there are many – without sinking to the level of polemic or screed.

Part 2

2010-09-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

Upon further reflection, I don’t think I got my point across properly in my last post. Instead of just editing this in, I’m going to leave it how it was, so as to avoid any “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” types of issues. What I failed to get across was the essential connection that I saw between radical change and money, and more specifically the commodification of sex and love. Simple promiscuity is neither new nor threatening (at least not on a social level, I can think of some people who might not agree with that in their own lives). For that matter, I suppose, neither is sex work – I’m sure everyone’s heard the saw about the “world’s oldest profession.” However, I do think that this nexus has the capacity to be deeply destabilizing, and I think that it’s becoming more prevalent. Maybe not in the last, say, six months, but in the last few decades, for a variety of reasons that, even if I understood and could articulate them, I’m not going to get into here. In the end, the problem is that commodity exchange is pretty much the polar opposite of love. Love should be...well you all know that, from innumerable sitcoms &c., if not from first-hand experience. In any event, this will be one of the (I hope) few times that I make an obvious leap in logic and/or beg the question, so enjoy it. I don’t think anyone would deny that love, of which the sex-based/romantic (not 100% sure that these are the same thing, but you can see where I’m going) variety is an integral part, is a positive, important, essentially human (constitutive, as well as demonstrative, if that’s the word I’m looking for) quality. Therefore, as a corollary (again, may not be strictly accurate; I feel like a 17th century philosopher here, making unwarrantedly bold claims), anything that tends to diminish the quality of love, or threaten its existence, is bad. So the impacts of this process are malgressive (coined word here – think progressive but with a negative connotation). To the extent that these are real changes, they’re hurting our society, and ourselves. I think I may have failed to make a convincing case that these changes are real, but a certain amount of evidence for them can be seen quite easily in the world, and these are enough to make me feel nervous, to some extent.
In some ways, I may have been too harsh on Ms. Banks: I think that we have the same basic idea and maybe fear, although I would like to hope that I expressed myself in a little bit less of a scolding way. Socially-generated gender dimorphisms, both of expectations or roles and (particularly) of economics, are extremely complex, not to mention foundational factors in our society. I think what I meant to say was that the idea of an existence where sex is based completely on economic (which is to say monetary) considerations is a frightening one. It is not, however, inconceivable. Indeed, by some standards (a certain kind of strict liberal economics, for example), it seems to be a dominant solution. In many ways, this represents the modal situation in the pre-modern era: you’ve heard, I’m sure, about the weddings made to cement political alliances and so on. I guess this was the equivalent of marrying for money in a world before freely convertible, easily transportable, and widely accepted currency. I guess in the end I’m just that we are in a position where some things are not determined by financial calculus alone. It feels like a lot of things are.

Love in the Time of Money

2010-08-22T21:47:00.000-07:00

I should preface this with a disclaimer. As always, I’m trying to be posi, but without any kind of AOP experience, it’s not always easy for me to know what’s kosher and what’s not. I realise that this is a contentious subject, because of questions of gender, class and race, as well as ones of law and morals. Also, keep in mind that while I will mostly be talking about women, and using the feminine pronoun, there are lots of men and transpeople involved in this industry as well. Despite not being personally acquainted (AFAIK) with any sex workers, and enjoying white male (&c., &c.) privilege, I will try not to step on anyone’s toes or make any unwarranted assertions, and I hope that readers will assume good faith.
Today I saw a YouTube video of Sasha Grey appearing as a guest on the Tyra Banks show (note: it was four years ago). The theme of the episode was a vaguely moral panic-y focus on “Teenage Porn Stars and Prostitutes.” I was struck by Tyra’s ill-disguised shock and disapproval at Grey’s career, especially in contrast with the latter’s blasé attitude. Of particular interest was Grey’s assertion (trying not to be pejorative here; “claim” would be begging the question) that she enjoyed working in the porn industry. Granted, I’m generalising on a pretty small sample size (n=1 is never a wise choice), but the disapproval that she faced is, in my mind, endemic in our society. Sex work (including pornography) is marginalised and ignored by polite society when possible, and, when not, is strictly disapproved of. I’m not talking simply about moral prudery, although there is a lot of that, in many different guises. On some level, most people are probably opposed to it. Even progressive/positive/feminist people have a specific type of antagonism towards sex work. This is primarily focused around the perception that this type of work is inherently degrading and misogynistic, as opposed to merely dangerous and discriminatory in effect. For the record, I agree, for reasons too numerous and probably uninteresting to get involved in here.
This argument runs into something of a problem, though, when it meets someone like Sasha Grey, or the pseudonymous writer of the “Diary of a Call Girl,” or the recently-outed phone sex worker from Vancouver whose nickname slips my mind at the moment. I’m not trying to argue, as some (stupid) men do, that the fact that some women like or choose to do something makes it inherently non-sexist. However, it is an interesting quandary. No one denies that the majority (perhaps the vast majority, certainly in some sectors) of sex work is degrading and deeply horrible to be a part of. This may be less of an issue in porn than say, in a certain type of prostitution, but not necessarily. One of the problems posed by people who have clearly chosen and continue to enjoy this line of work is that it challenges the issue of degradation: can one be degraded without knowing it, or without feeling degraded? The obvious answer would be “no.” I don’t think this is any kind of argument-ender – this situation is much more complex and deeper-rooted than that – but it does raise some questions. Why did Tyra Banks invite someone onto her show who not only worked in a legal industry, but was making a good deal of money and enjoying herself, only to criticise and attempt to shame her?
I don’t think that Tyra is an aberrantly bad or reactionary person, but the avatar of a powerful ideological trend in our society. This ideology is deeply historically rooted, and permeates many, if not most, societies around the world. “Slut shaming” and differential punishments for female compared to male sexual improprieties in many parts of the world are symptoms of it. This type of institution is based on a perceived behavioural dimorphism. It has always, as far as I know, been taken for granted that women are more selective in choosing sexual partners than men. To put it another way, it is taken for granted that men are more promiscuous. I think there’s at least some truth to this point, anecdotally/based on my own experience. There are also evolutionary arguments for it, which hold some water, although they risk crossing into reductionism territory. Regardless of any kind of empirical difference, this meme is pretty common: think of all the TV shows in which the husband is portrayed as being sex-starved, while the wife just barely tolerates his advances. The stereotypes and perceptions that I described above tend to reinforce this perception, making it a more powerful force in contemporary society. Its persistence – purpose, from the functionalist standpoint – serves/is to protect an integral ideological foundation of our society.
Think of it this way: a situation in which women are as promiscuous as men, and particularly one in which they consistently engaged in sex work for its own sake, rather than for financial reward or out of some sort of coercion, would be a serious challenge to the structure of our society. This may not be entirely clear, and I’m having a bit of a hard time putting my finger on how as well, but maybe you should take a second to imagine it before reading on. In large (although decreasing) part, our society is based around a conception of women as prizes to be “won” by men, through displays of fitness of various types. To the extent that our society is still based on patriarchal institutions, much of their power is derived from a focus on the control of female sexuality by men. I’m trying to hedge a little bit here – this issue is certainly not as constitutive in early 21st century Canada as it has been in many other societies (and remains in, say, Saudi Arabia), and we are moving away from it to some extent. A transformation of sexuality from something constrained by tradition and based (theoretically) on emotion – a constraint, I should add, which is applied much more often and strongly to female than male sexuality – would serve to undermine fundamental existing institutions, most notably marriage, and memes like chastity or unconditional love. I’m not sure this would be an altogether bad thing, but increasing the reach of commodification in an area that has traditionally been seen as beyond its ambit makes me uneasy, even if I was fine with all the rest of it.
In the end, polite society (viz., Tyra) must still be shocked by deviant behaviour because it is in some ways revolutionary. Not in the sense of Julia throwing off her Junior Anti-Sex League Sash in 1984 – a more accurate word may be “destabilising.” People feel, on some level, that what Ms. Grey does must be wrong, even, as I have noted above, if it cannot be categorised as illegal, immoral, or even psychologically harmful to the participant (on thinner ice here, but bear with me in terms of principle). This inchoate worry is not so much about the danger to the people themselves involved in the industry (although this is a serious worry, and should not be ignored), but the threat that they are capable of posing to the status quo. I should end on a qualified note: none of what I’m saying here is a goal of mine – description, not prescription – and I’m trying not to judge anything in particular. Nor am I making predictions, just pointing out something that I think is important.

Social-Institutional Darwinism

2010-08-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

Social Darwinism, a theory pioneered by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer in the second half of the nineteenth century, has an exceedingly poor reputation. It is entirely deserved. Social Darwinism argues that the Darwinian concept of “survival of the fittest” (interestingly, a phrase coined by Spencer himself) should be applied to human beings in the context of society. This implies that unsuccessful people are such as a result of genetics, and that helping them would not only be useless, but positively harmful, insofar as it would tend to encourage the propagation of undesirable traits, and weaken the “stock” of a society. Not only was this theory flat-out incorrect (Spencer’s arguments relied on a Lamarckian model of heredity, which has since been completely debunked), but it provided a philosophical basis for one of the most heinous schools of thought of the twentieth century, eugenics. Fortunately, eugenics, as well as its more benign cousins, have been consigned to the dust heap of outdated philosophies.
The problem with Social Darwinism was not its mechanism – the “Darwinism,” as it were – but its field of application. We now know that the genetic differences between groups of people, however they are demarcated, are vanishing, and that there’s no way for the differences that he posited to either have accrued or to continue to aggregate on timescales approaching those of societies. In geological time, human evolution is an instant, but on social time, it is a relative eternity. The problem, then, must be the “Social” – evolutionary theory should be restricted to biology, and should not come into play at all when describing societies. Or, it should come into play merely on a descriptive level (as in the academic discipline of sociobiology), and not a prescriptive one. This isn’t exactly right either, though; as I will endeavour to show below, the theory of natural selection plays an important, even fundamental, role in our society. Spencer’s intellectual mistake was Lamarckism, plain and simple: no educated person (and Spencer was certainly well-educated, in addition to being a brilliant thinker) could now believe the points that he and similar theorists made. Moral aspects aside, they simply are not supported by science. However, the mechanism of natural selection, broadly defined, is a constitutive part of many of the most important institutions in modern, western society. The simplest, if not the most important, is the legal system. Although our system is in theory designed to discover “the truth” (being a bit post-modernist here in my use of scare-quotes), its most practical aim is to set two (in general, excepting esoteric situations like amicus briefs) conflicting opinions up against each other, and then to judge which one is the best/most accurate in the occasion. The theory is that forcing each advocate to compete on the merits of their case, then selecting between them, encourages the formation of the strongest (i.e. most accurate) decision.
A more familiar example might be the capitalist system. In a free-market economy, firms compete, and customers select the products (and hence firms) that they prefer. Price and quality of goods or services are the two most obvious grounds for competition, but, in principle, a differentiation can be made on any grounds. The firms that survive will tend to be “better” in some way – note that this is not as simple as the case of the legal system, which can be seen as a simple marketplace in which two suppliers compete on very narrow grounds. They will in turn tend to pass on some of their trends to other firms, as these other firms seek to learn from history. The same process is at work in a multi-party democratic political system. In essence, the strength of democratic-capitalist systems is the ability to derive better (in the sense of more representative, effective, etc.) institutions based on selective pressure created by the citizenry, in their role as voters or consumers. In this way, the two major underlying institutions of our society are internally consistent. It is clear, from these examples as well as numerous others, that competition, and in particular its “Darwinian” form – evolution by (popular) selection – is an essential part of western, liberal society.
A clear contrast to this (more or less) harmonious and efficient system can be seen in societies that do not have pluralism either in the public (government) or private (market/civil) sphere. I don’t have to go into great depth about how a lack of choice and selective pressure proved to be a negative for, say, the Soviet Union. There are other examples, though, which are somewhat less clear-cut, but nevertheless show the deleterious effects of a non-competitive society. Import substitution industrialisation (ISI) was a somewhat popular development programme in the third world during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. In brief, its proponents proposed to spur development in their countries by creating captive markets through the use of trade barriers (tariffs, quotas and the like). On the face of it, this policy is more or less sound. In fact, it is in many ways quite similar to the policies adopted by many currently industrialised countries as a means of creating development. These policies ended up not working for a variety of reasons. The most fundamental of these was the problem of stagnation brought about by a lack of competition. As anyone who has studied neo-liberal economic theory, or read the WTO’s website, will know, allowing only domestic businesses access to a market will discourage innovation and investment, causing stagnation and a lack of progress. In effect, the favoured firms have nothing to fear from foreign competitors, and since they face no selection pressure, they do not bother to evolve in positive ways. Of course, the Scylla of uncompetitiveness stands across a narrow channel from the Charybdis of product dumping and persistent underdevelopment, so it is not easy to blame these governments. However, it is clear, in retrospect, that a lack of competition has had deleterious effects in these situations.
For a more recent example, we can turn to a legal and political philosophy currently in vogue in large parts of continental Europe. This set of policies has found its most famous iteration in the French “burqa ban,” which I’m sure you either know about or can look up on the internet. In my view, European politicians are now attempting to implement what is effectively a form of “cultural protectionism,” attempting to close off their societies from the influence of Islam and Islamic culture. Not being a follower of European domestic politics, I can’t say how much of this is just pandering, but I get the feeling that Sarkozy, at least, is truly committed to this goal. Drawing on the points made above, I think that this is a dangerous game for Europe. Not only does it show a lack of faith in their culture, but it sets it up for stagnation and decline. I’m personally of the opinion that the independent “cultures” of the various European states are already on a path of inexorable decline, but that is a controversial topic not suited for discussion here. In any event, the strength of the western liberal cultural tradition is its ability to include and absorb the best features of other systems, while maintaining its core traditions, rationalism and egalitarianism. In the western world, and increasingly in other regions, it is accepted freely by citizens, who feel that it is the best system for them (of course a much more complicated situation in real life, but give me a little license). Attempting to isolate it by fiat will be no more successful than the decision of politicians in the 1970s to close their countries to foreign manufactured goods. The ascendancy of western culture is based, in large part, on the foundation of evolution by competitive selection; any meddling with this situation will cause nothing but problems, if you ask my opinion.
In sum, “Social Darwinism,” if we’re going on the literal meaning of the term, is a mixed bag. When applied to individuals, it’s both heinous and scientifically wrong. When applied to institutions in society, it is fundamental, at least in liberal, open societies. Any leader who forgets the importance of this type of competition and improvement by selection is making a serious mistake.

Land Reform

2010-08-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

The hallmark of Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe – the policy that has elevated him (so to speak) from the level of a Castro, repressive but fundamentally not dangerous, to that of a Mao or Kim – is his policy of “land reform.” This programme, which has been in place since the late 1990s, has precipitated not only widespread violence against white commercial farmers and black political opponents (primarily directed against the main opposition party, the MDC), but complete economic collapse, to the degree that Zimbabwe is now the poorest country in the world, as measured by per capita GDP. The primary cause of this collapse was severe hyperinflation brought about by reckless monetary policy, but the evisceration of commercial farming, the largest sector of the Zimbabwean economy, has also played an integral role. The way in which it has been carried out has conclusively demonstrated the simultaneous blind brutality and impotence of the regime, and won it a great deal of enmity from the international community. I doubt that it would be possible to find anyone, perhaps barring an inner circle of Zimbabwean apparatchiks, who would agree that the program of land reform (also known as the “Third Chimurenga”) has been carried out efficiently or fairly. It should also be noted at this point that a good deal of the confiscated land has been redistributed not to landless peasants or indigent slum-dwellers but as patronage to Mugabe’s associates or members of the increasingly powerful “war veterans’” movement. What I am more interested in is the underlying principle of land reform through redistribution, rather than the nature of its implementation in Zimbabwe, which has been inarguably poor. These failures, while grievous, do not automatically imply that the idea of land redistribution, even forced redistribution, as a means of righting historical wrongs should be automatically dismissed.
A little history is in order here. Towards the end of the 19th century, a primarily British expeditionary force, under the ultimate command of businessman and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, invaded an area north of South Africa. This was an attempt to stake claims to land thought to be rich in diamonds and other minerals, following the massive diamond find at Kimberley, South Africa, in the mid-19th century. After a series of small but vicious conflicts, which were mostly decisive victories for the colonists and their Maxim guns, the Europeans gained effective control over much of what is now Zimbabwe. They later consolidated this control, primarily by violence and shady dealings, coming to control a large majority of the best agricultural land in the country, despite their small numbers. This situation essentially carried through the first half of the 20th century, past the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 and the subsequent war of independence, and into the era of independent Zimbabwe. Mugabe, despite some fearsome rhetoric during the war, proved to be content to work with white farmers, refusing to expropriate their land. Thus, while a large number of white Rhodesians fled the country during, and immediately after, the war of independence, the European population remained a significant minority even after black majority rule was achieved. They continued to own a disproportionate amount of land, and to enjoy living standards on average significantly higher than those of their black compatriots. This situation remained more or less the same until the mid-1990s. After the reforms noted above were put into place, large numbers of white people fled the country, and a great deal of land was repossessed, although not all of it has been redistributed.
Initially, the British government was an active backer of this project, providing money to purchase land from large holders on the basis of the “willing-buyer willing-seller” principle. This principle was not strictly followed by the Zimbabwean government, and the UK soon withdrew its commitments. This, to me, implies that the British government disagreed with expropriation and was seeking to eliminate it. This is somewhat hypocritical, because there are forms of forced expropriation that are tolerated in western liberal democracies (most notably what is called eminent domain in the United States). These do involve compensation, but are still clearly contrary to the strict principle of the inviolability of private property. In any event, the goal here is not to put western governments on trial, but to investigate the fundamental bases for support of or opposition to this type of redistribution. First of all, I would like to say that I am in favour of private property, as a general thing. This does not go without saying, because some people aren’t, and there are valid enough arguments to be made against it. In Zimbabwe, it turned out to be the case that farmers had their land expropriated even when they had actually bought that land after independence and had certificates from the central government to that effect (if you can’t see why that’s important, you will soon). So, as a fan of private property rights in general, I’m against that. My point here is that private property rights should not only not be inviolable, but should be considered to be in tension with another fundamental goal of society: redistribution and the creation of inequality. This imperative is especially important in the case of systemic, class-based (“class” in the sense of an identifiable group of people, as in class action) inequalities that result from specific historical circumstances.
The central question, then, is this: to what extent should private property be privileged over redistribution? On a small scale, it is answered implicitly in the west by the use of progressive systems of taxation. Compulsory taxation of the rich to provide for the poor is a form of redistribution that violates strict interpretations of the sanctity of private property rights, as the people from the the Club For Growth would be happy to tell you. However, this approach is clearly limited. For example, we don’t see large-scale “reparations” paid by the American government to victims of slavery. First of all, doing so would be prohibitively expensive, as well as a logistical nightmare. In addition, there are strong philosophical arguments to be made against such a programme. The most important of these, in my opinion, is that it is by no means clear that people living today should be liable for the crimes of their ancestors. There should certainly be a duty to help the less fortunate, particularly if their misfortune has the same cause as your good fortune. However, this obligation is (relatively speaking) based primarily on a generalised duty towards people, rather than a specific restitution. It should be marginal, which is to say, not something that should endanger the livelihood of the person who is forced to pay. It is, in effect, a “constrained” Pareto Efficiency, in which “worse off” is a defined, relative, term, rather than a logical, absolute one. The land invasions/repossessions (depending on your perspective, I guess) in Zimbabwe clearly fail this test, as they almost always cost white farmers their entire livelihood, and sometimes even their lives.
I think that this is a different situation, though. An analogy is in order here: if one country invades and annexes the territory of another, the invaded country has a clear right to regain that territory, even (in theory) should a long period of time have elapsed. On a more relevant level, colonies and other non-self-governing territories have some sort of presumed right to independence. This right seems to pertain even in the case of settler colonies, as in Algeria, Angola, and Mozambique, which had substantial white populations. Except when it doesn’t. The most obvious examples of this are Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, British settler colonies in which the indigenous inhabitants were almost entirely wiped out. However, it was also the case in apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. The white governments of these countries believed that they would be ruled by small (if powerful) minorities indefinitely. Of course, this didn’t happen, but it was not prima facie. In Rhodesia, this was, in fairly large part, a result of the British policy of NIBMAR (No Independence Before Majority Rule). As I noted above, the British, while committed to rewriting the political landscape of Rhodesia to bring about majority rule, were not willing to endorse a similar change in the economic sphere.
During the colonial period, though, the land (which is the primary economic resource of the country, even setting aside its historical/cultural aspects) had been stolen from its previous owners, just as surely as political power was usurped. And how is it fair to give political power to the majority, as a means of creating equality, if one particular class of injustices is immune to alteration? Is there some sort of statute of limitations on land theft? If it was taken 85 years earlier, then it cannot be taken back? Or does one “legal” transfer break the chain of obligation? There’s some evidence against the latter, in the case of the purchase of stolen goods – the return of works art stolen by the Nazis to the descendants of their former owners, even decades later, is a good example. It seems to me that, in principle, there is no reason why the Zimbabwean government should not now reclaim land held by white farmers, at least if that land has been passed down directly from its first usurpation by the early European settlers. It is difficult to imagine how exactly that land should be distributed, but that is not a central concern on the philosophical level. Democratic practice should not simply be a formal requirement, a set of institutions that does not actually allow for fundamental social restructuring, if that is necessary. In short, I don’t see why custom and passage of time should eliminate the initial fact of misappropriation. I can’t see why white people who – say – received grants of land from the Rhodesian government after the Second World War should have any more right to it than a black Zimbabwean person from whose ancestors it was taken, despite the fact that they never broke any laws. There seems to be a fairly strong consensus around the fact that large-scale expropriation without compensation is illegal (note that this is a relative concept, but to the extent that there was an independent judiciary in Zimbabwe, it opposed Mugabe’s plans) and ethically wrong, but I’m not sure that I agree. From the examples I have noted above, it is clear that there is at least a prima facie argument to be made in favour of it, and I would be surprised if this line of reasoning wasn’t stronger than that. It does undermine the supremacy of private property rights, undoubtedly one of the foundations of our society, but these rights are not inviolable, and were not intended to be, in the first place. I think that the weakest part of the argument may be the fact that current landholders, who merely inherited land from their parents, should not have their entire livelihood repossessed to make up for the sins of their ancestors. It certainly doesn’t seem fair to them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong, as a matter of principle.
This result tends to raise some interesting, and complicated philosophical questions. First of all, that of the settler colonies noted above. Do living Native (I’m not 100% sure of the correct term/capitalisation here, by the way) Americans “own” large portions of Canada and the United States (note that I am not talking about situations in which various landholders traded their land to interlopers – that is a different issue altogether, involving questions of informed consent and the validity of traditional western notions of ownership and land tenure in cross-cultural situations)? If so, should they all be returned? By the same token, do hereditary aristocrats in the UK (not that there are maybe many of those any more) have a legal duty to distribute their land to others or have it repossessed by the government? Also, how far does this stretch? Some anarchists like to argue that “all property is theft” – does this argument support that conclusion, on some level? These are difficult questions, clouded by centuries of practice and overwhelming demographic realities. I believe that the situation in Zimbabwe is much more clear-cut, falling into the return-of-stolen-property category. As usual, I wouldn’t be willing to stake my life on this conclusion, and this was more of an exploration than an argument, but this is something that’s been bothering me for a little while.

1984: Magic Realism

2010-08-08T20:10:00.000-07:00

[A/N: I realise it's been approximately 18 months since the last thing I put up here. I sort of hit a dry patch and got involved in other things. Doubt anyone was too stressed out anyways. I'm going to put a few more of these up in the next few days/weeks, and then it may become a regular thing, or not.]

1984 is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and influential political novels of the post-war era, if not all time. This perspective is so widely held that it’s almost a cliché. Orwell’s position as principled critic of all types of totalitarianism has been so cemented by the brilliance of this book that his (pseudonymous) last name has passed into general parlance as an adjective describing a surveillance-based totalitarian state. As you can probably tell, I have a pretty favourable impression of it. My point here though is to add another wrinkle to what most of you probably figured out for yourselves or learned in grade 10. I’m not an English major, though, or any kind of expert in literature studies, so this may not be of a very high standard. In fact, it may not even be original, although the subject about which I’m going to talk today is limited enough that I’m fairly confident that no one has talked about it in exactly this way before.

The passage I will base my analysis on occurs directly at the end of the second chapter, in Part I (page numbers will vary by edition, I assume).

“He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken off if the book was moved.”

The diary, of course, is an important object and image – it allows Winston, whose job it is to destroy physical (written) evidence, and thus memory, to create his own documentary evidence of the past. I’m talking about something more minor here, though: the “grain of whitish dust” that Winston uses as a means of determining whether or not the diary had been inspected. In fact, this is actually a sort of protection. One of the most oppressive features of life in 1984 is the ubiquity of the monitoring telescreens, and, more broadly, the constant knowledge that one is being watched (or at least the impossibility of knowing that one is not being watched). Recall that one of the luxuries of being a member of the inner party is the ability to turn off the telescreen. So, Winston makes use of this protection, and the reader can only assume that he’s assiduous in both applying it and noting its presence when he returns, judging by the danger that is clearly inherent in writing down the heresies that he does.

In the end, though, this doesn’t seem to have worked: O’Brien later produces and reads from his diary. This is, in my mind, an extremely important fact. Orwell also gives the impression that the party has known about the diary the whole time. The Party, and its avatar, O’Brien, are thus not only ubiquitous (i.e. omnipresent) but also literally omniscient. This is a fact that Orwell conveys in other ways – the ability to deny strict (formal) logic is an example of a kind of omnipotence. On a more relevant level, the fact that the torturers of Room 101 always know a person’s deepest fear – to be completely honest, I don’t think that I could think of my own – is also an example of omniscience that borders on the unbelievable, if not crossing directly. It is this aspect of the novel, exemplified by the speck of dust, that drags it from a strictly realistic, if speculative, novel into the realm of magic realism. A similar example, from later on in the book, is that of the picture of Aaronson, Rutherford and Jones.

“‘Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three onetime Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford – men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession – were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.’”

The photograph that O’Brien produces is the same one that Winston had destroyed by dropping into a furnace years earlier. There’s no way of explaining its recovery without postulating supernatural powers to the Party. These powers change, in some ways, the interpretation of this novel. I’d never really thought of 1984 as a work of magic realism, until a couple of days ago, when I decided to write this. I don’t mean to suggest that this is its defining feature, but I’m sure there have been huge amount of exegesis on its more important and/or obvious features.

Its implication is that the Party, and by implication the general ruling machinery of IngSoc in Airstrip One, is literally unassailable. Doing so is not merely extremely difficult, but theoretically impossible. The party is as much a magical as a temporal, concrete entity. It has certain non-corporeal qualities that allow it to be everywhere, all-knowing, and invincible. The strategies of the Party seem especially pernicious to us because they operate on such a heavily psychological level, one that is far beyond the capacity of even the most sophisticated totalitarian regime of our day to implement. I don’t think that this is a difference of technique, or technology, but one of metaphysical kind. Its compulsive need to eliminate any possible mental opposition (i.e. heretical thoughts, rather than simply deeds) is a manifestation of this difference. The true strength of the Party lies not in its physical machinery, but its memetic (in the sense of memes) aspect, which is to say its ability to reshape the minds of the citizens of Oceania. If the informational structure of the Party is inherent in the minds of all people, it is infinitely reproducible, and (thus?) ineradicable. The fact that the brains of the citizens are made up of the information of the Party allows them to carry out the seemingly impossible mental gymnastics described in the book: most notably doublespeak, but also the ability to disbelieve simple logic on command.

In a sense, the Party is trying to supplant all existent, and therefore competing, memes with its own. The first step in this process is the invention of Newspeak, which severely limits the most powerful meme-diffusing device in existence, language. Once its task is completed, there will be only one meme, and thus one idea, in existence. The idea of rebellion would be, quite simply, non-existent. In fact, the only remaining concept would the Party (IngSoc), plain and simple.

Conscientious Consumption

2009-02-27T09:00:00.000-08:00

There have been gallons of ink spilled (well, maybe coulombs of electrons reorganised, because I think this is a debate that’s taken place mostly online, with the New York Times occasionally trying to keep up – which it shouldn’t stoop to anyways because it makes it seem out of touch) on this subject, most of it totally worthless, but, hey I guess I might as well add my two cents. The subject is this new subculture that we have, which I will call hipsterdom. One thing that’s really interesting about this debate, if you can call it that, is that it seems to be going all one way. No one ever seems to stand up and say: “Wait a minute! Hipsters are rad! Lay off, Adbusters/random blogs/whoever!” It seems weird, especially because of all people, it’s hipsters who are the most involved with random blogs, and just on cool internet sites in general. Well, there’s a simple reason for it, one that you probably already knew – practically no one who’s a hipster will admit it. It’s a weird catch-22 of a problem: if you call yourself a hipster, you care, and are probably dangerously uncool. If you don’t, and especially if you deny it, maybe you are one. In any event, it’s not really important to define who is or who isn’t what. In fact it’s a stupid thing to spend your time doing. However, the fact of the denial itself is interesting. I can’t really think of any other sub-culture (and correct me if I’m wrong on this) – aside for ones, like nerds, that are really just mean nicknames – whose members so virulently deny their membership. I mean, all the ones that I’ve been involved in have basically been defined by their community – the big problem, for punk kids, with the explosion of blink-182 and that about six or seven years ago was that their community was being opened up to people they didn’t care for. Hence the proliferation of internet flame wars over who was or wasn’t punk. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve heard some variation on that argument.
So, I guess one of the hallmarks of this sub-culture is individuality, to such a great degree that overt membership of any sub-culture is shunned. This individuality is achieved, primarily, through conscientious consumption. There’re no carbon-copy Abercrombie shirts for these guys, no way. American Apparel is popular, but with its lack of logos, it could be anything, and its “made in the USA” image allows it to be seen, I guess, as a somewhat anti-capitalist decision. You see it with bikes too, and here’s where I’m reaching my point. If you don’t care about bikes, or my feelings about them, you should probably be advised to stop reading right now. The hipster standard is clean, logo-free fixed gear. This fits – as opposed to the athletic racing/mountain bike culture, which focuses on expensive, high-tech parts, brand names, and looking rough, the typical hipster fixed gear is about being cheap, simple, and decidedly low-tech. It’s even better if it can come from a small manufacturer somewhere in the US (yeah, I know, I’ve lived there for too long). So far, so good. I mean, it makes sense to me. There’s something about riding a fixed-gear that is a bit hard to explain, but much better, in a way, than riding a regular bike. For me at least. But part of the culture, at least now, is the ideology of it. I described it a little bit above, and that part made sense to me as well. It didn’t hurt that a tricked out fixie is awfully pretty either. However as I’ve thought about this more – and it’s not really as a result of getting into the community, because I haven’t, except just being on the fringes, but just by observing and thinking – the whole idea of it just seems sort of messed up. I mean, I can understand that you want your bike to look pretty, and that’s way cheaper than a car anyways so you might as well splurge, but what’s the deal with all of the brand name, fancy parts. I mean, does the average cyclist really need $250 wheels, when you can get a pretty good complete bike for that price? How much of it is about just the look, or the cred? Same thing with Brooks saddles, or Nitto bars or Sugino cranks, or what have you. I mean, I know they are better parts, but how much of is like buying the fanciest flat-screen TV? More and more, people who are into bike culture seem to me like car kids. I mean, granted, bikes are way cooler than cars, but why should it matter what colour everything is, and what brand name all of the parts are?
I’m not trying to tell anyone how to spend their money or anything, but to me this whole “alternative consumption” thing, or whatever it’s called (maybe nothing, yet) is a bit weird. And I'm not completely immune to it, I mean, I've had my eye on a set of track drops for Rocky for a long time, but I can't handle all this brand-name purchasing passed off as counter-culture. Great, you’re buying used, or sustainable or whatever, but the problem is the buying. I mean, it should only be done because you have to, not because there are some cute crafts or sweet parts around.

Oi! and Gangsta Rap

2009-02-26T03:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve already made this argument in a different forum (MySpace blogs – I don’t even remember how long ago; at least three or four years, I would guess – does anyone still use MySpace anymore?), and nothing much has changed about it, so sorry if you read that version. Actually, maybe it would be really interesting to see what I wrote then, and how my thoughts or writing style have changed, if at all. It’s like how I was randomly reading over year-old emails a couple of days ago, and it was a strange feeling to be reminded of how I felt about things then, in my own words.
In any event, this one is a bit of a departure from my usual fare, but at least it’s raising and not really answering a question, which should be familiar. Right now I’m listening to Gang Starr, who, if you didn’t already know, were a prolific gangsta rap duo in the late ‘80s and ‘90s. Just before that, I was listening to a band called The Business, one of the seminal early ‘80s British Oi! bands. If you don’t know what either of those genres are, you can look it up, because I’m sure there are other people who could explain it much better than I could.
On the surface, these two bands couldn’t be more different – one thrives on jazzy samples and tight, smart rapping, the other is basically a straight-up rock band, which makes extensive use of anthemic sing-alongs. In terms of content, too, these bands, and the genres that I’m rather heavy-handedly using them to stand in for, seem pretty different. One sings about pubs, soccer, and being working class in industrial England; the other, about gang culture and the experience of being African-American in American inner cities. Of course, there is a great deal of intra-genre diversity, and I’m simplifying, but that’s the beginnings of a sketch of these two genres. I also may have picked bands that are not completely representative of the genres, as I tend to listen to music that is somewhat more political, and much more positive, than the average, I think. The point of this blog entry is to argue that these genres are really more similar than one might think. First of all, both are fundamentally about being oppressed, but there’s more to it than that. The commonality between these two forms is really a combination of their good and bad tendencies, and the way in which these reflect the lived experiences of the people writing the music.
I guess I’ll start with the bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to lionize either of these genres. There’s no doubt that both embody some really deplorable tendencies. The obvious one for Oi! is the problem of racism. Although racism in Oi! music/skinhead culture is much less prevalent than the average person thinks, it’s still an issue. The number of actually racist bands, like, say, Skrewdriver or Landser, is pretty small, and there are a large number of actively anti-racist/fascist bands (The Oppressed being the most obvious example). However, there are also a lot of bands that don’t really take a side either way, and some of these – Condemned 84, for instance – drift uncomfortably close to racism. A lot of this, I think, is just a reflection of the culture that these bands come out of – full-on Nazism is beyond the pale, but fence-sitting and even some degree of prejudice is comparatively common. For instance, when Combat 84 sings “Won’t send money to a foreign place/Watch their governments stuff their face/Tell them beggars to get off their ass/I’m working not fucking middle class,” it simultaneously includes an arguable point of view about government priorities – the stupidity of supporting of corrupt regimes overseas rather than focusing on needy home-country citizens, an epithet that verges on racism, and a class-based justification for both of the above. This appeal to class is important, because it provides a reason for the existence of the other arguments made just before it, and the solidarity that it creates is really the bedrock of the entire sub-culture.
In the same way, a lot of rap music is not only violent but misogynistic and homophobic. Immortal Technique, for instance, despite being a “conscious” rapper, is blatantly, and often, frighteningly, misogynistic and homophobic. He acknowledges this, saying that “I never make songs to disrespect women/Or to judge people about the way that they’re living/But the way I am is based on the life I was given.” Other than the above, I’m not sure I can think of an example, off the top of my head, where misogyny is directly linked to the experience of being an African-American man, but I think that probably has something to do with the fact that I don’t have nearly as good a grounding in rap as I do in Oi!. I think that both tendencies probably come from the same place, partly based on an intentional desire to seem controversial and tough, and partly based on what W. E. B. DuBois called the “wages of whiteness.” Maybe I’m stretching it here, and some African-American Studies majors can correct me, but I think that what he’s arguing is that it’s a fairly common occurrence/problem that oppressed groups are themselves oppressive towards even more marginalised groups. This oppression is used as a means of legitimating the dominant group’s social position, sort of an “at least I’m not X” position.
One of the main ideological aspects that these two genres have in common is a fetishisation of violence, and the culture of the “hard man.” Whether this is the drunken bootboy or the drug-dealing “gangsta,” both cultures celebrate low-level crime and violence. However, this violence is not simply about beating people up, though it is, but about taking care of oneself. Whether making money through hustling or glory-less hard work, both cultures are based on getting by in a hostile world. Violence is conceptualised as a way to stand up for oneself, with the rival gang or crew filling in for the system. As I said above, I’m not trying to glorify this attitude, which is deeply backwards-looking, and really misses the issue. I mean, there are flashes of self-awareness, like “Real Enemy,” by The Business. Even The Business, though, who are among the most positive/liberal of the mainstream Oi! bands (I mean, they covered a CRASS song, for crying out loud), still have an album about being a soccer hooligan (the aptly named “Hardcore Hooligan”), which includes songs glorifying straight-up fighting on the terraces (“Saturday’s Heroes”), rubbing in a victory against the German soccer team (“England 5, Germany 1”) and making fun of Argentina for having lost the Falklands War (“Handball”). I mean, anyone would think that they were listening to The Last Resort or something. There’s real pride taken in violence, and in anti-intellectualism, as education is seen as a hallmark of upper-class society (“They Schools” by Dead Prez, “School’s Out” by Infa-Riot).
All that being said, there are definitely a lot of non-violent/progressive/socially conscious Oi! bands and woman-positive/well-thought-out gangsta rap acts. I’m not sure I want to say “most,” and it does depend on definitions, but certainly a large number of groups in both of these genres are totally positive. No difference there, again. Basically, we’re coming to the hard segue of this blog entry, and rather than trying to think of a clever way to do it, I’m just going to break the fourth wall and use that as a way to make a cute transition. I’m like a modern day Pirandello, right? The big difference, and I think that anyone who thinks about this will be inclined to agree, between these two genres of music is that rap has become immensely popular, while Oi! has been left on the margins of popular history. I mean, everyone knows what rap is, whether or not they’ve heard of it. Jay-Z and Puff Daddy are practically royalty, and an adulatory movie about Notorious B.I.G. just came out (here, two weeks ago – in America maybe earlier). It’s hard to even imagine that, as a musical genre, hip-hop has only been around for about 25 years, gangsta rap even less. On the other hand, mention Oi! to people – or at least this is what happens when I try it – and they first of all don’t know what it is, and second, when you explain (I call it “punk rock for skinheads,” which I know is not at all accurate, but sort of gets the gist of it) what it is, they crinkle up their noses, assuming either that it’s racist or that it’s stupid. Of course, sometimes it is (well occasionally it’s racist, often it’s stupid), but no one could deny that DMX, for example, is stupid, or that Dr. Dre puts out misogynistic music. African-American people, however, in large part, have identified with hip-hop. I don’t want to make any statements about something that I manifestly know nothing about, but I think it’s safe to say that it is very popular among black youth in America, and is likely the most popular musical genre. At the same time, this popularity has caused hip-hop to expand its scope – the widely remarked-upon “white kids in the suburbs” phenomenon.
On the other hand, Oi! never really caught on, even amongst its supposed core constituency. I mean, the whole point of Oi! was supposed to be that it used music to tell stories from the working-class perspective, talking about common themes, using easily understood and emotionally affective musical styles. However, working-class British people in the 1980s overwhelmingly stayed away from it. Sure, some people liked it – I think the British Labour party may even have used “If the Kids are United” as a campaign song a few years ago, and Splodge didn’t do too badly – but it never caught on. People listened to – what, disco? Wings? Springsteen? – I couldn’t tell you, but not Oi!, anyway. What’s the difference?
I’m not sure it’s controversy or perceived threat to society that has held Oi! back. Granted, a lot of people associate Oi! with racism, but I think hip-hop has historically been seen as more of a threat. I mean, the vice president’s wife developed a whole system of labelling to deal with hip-hop lyrics, and cops refused to do security for NWA's shows – you can’t get much rougher than that. There’s something else to it. Part of it might be a gender thing – and props to Moira for pointing this out, because I wouldn’t have ever though about it: Oi!, like gangsta rap, is man-centric, but the music is way less conducive to women dancing. I mean, what would club music be without hip-hop? Oi! couldn’t be more different. The music, based on soccer chants and slam dancing, privileges violence over melody. Despite the fact that gangsta rap is full of lyrics that are super-demeaning to women, women can still participate in musical performances without (too much) fear of getting hurt. This still doesn’t feel like enough, though.
The main difference between Oi! and gangsta rap, when it comes down to it, is that they have diverging political goals. One of the constituent parts of the Oi! music/skinhead identity is being poor – “working class.” The idea of a rich or commercially successful Oi! band is laughable. On the other hand, gangsta rap is all about making it big – using music as a way to succeed in a hostile world. For every KRS-ONE or Chuck D, there are five Cassidys, who want nothing more than to make money and accumulate possessions. It’s sort of interesting – Oi! still has this attitude of consumption and brand names: Dr. Martens and Levi’s are all over the place, from The Last Resort (“Skinheads in Sta-Press”) to The Oppressed (“Joe Hawkins”) to Cock Sparrer (“Tough Guys”) and that’s just the beginning. And where would skinheads be without Ben Sherman, Fred Perry and Alpha Flight? It’s different, though, I think. I mean, there’s a taste for these clothes, but the clothes aren’t too flashy, and there’s no real desire to really make it big (“Flash limousines and mortgages ain’t no big deal,” to quote Cock Sparrer). I don’t know how much of the lack of popularity experienced by Oi! music has been self-imposed, brought about by a refusal to succeed, and how much is discrimination, intentional or subconscious. I think, though, that this is really the root of the problem. I said before that rap represents more of a threat to the system than Oi! does – well, maybe that’s not entirely true. One thing that rap doesn’t challenge is the idea that making money is the most (or at least one of the most) important things in life. Punk rock was supposed to be defined by its radical opposition to this idea, but with the rise of pop-punk and the depoliticisation of the genre, this message has been lost. Oi! doesn’t need pink hair and chaos to be anti-consumerist, it just has to be. I think that really has a lot to do with why it never took off, but, hey, maybe people just didn’t like the music. I really don’t know. Just something I’ve always wondered.

Market failure & ARVs

2009-01-31T09:46:00.000-08:00

I don’t think that anyone would deny that the lack of life-saving drugs in the third world is a serious world problem. The most obvious example of this deficiency is in the case of anti-retroviral (ARV) drug cocktails used to treat HIV. Not only are these drugs expensive, but they are incapable of completely eliminating the disease in an infected individual, so they must be taken for life, with regular modification necessary to deal with resistance. Everyone knows that widespread access to these drugs would significantly improve quality of life for HIV positive people, as well as extending their lives, and cutting down on transmission of the virus, by decreasing viral load in affected people. Unfortunately, there is no consensus of how to provide these drugs. There are certainly technical barriers to the wide dissemination of ARVs, such as ensuring that the right drug cocktails are being used, distributing the medicine, and making sure that patients are taking the drugs properly.
However, the primary problem in this situation is really the availability of the drugs (and forgive me if this seems basic to everyone, but it helps me to start from the beginning in order to get my thoughts in order). ARV cocktails are extremely expensive – off the top of my head, I can’t say exactly, but I think that $10 000 (US) in the developed world per year should be right, give or take a few thousand dollars, for any double- or triple-combination therapy. The costs, of course, are variable across national borders, especially in developing nations, where ARV therapy may cost as little as 1%-10% of what it does in the first-world. I’ve attached a link to a decent World Bank study of the issue, but keep in mind that it’s more than ten years old, and a lot of the prices are therefore out of date.
This cost basically ensures that many in the developing world, who may be living on less than $1/day – perhaps much less, especially if they are already ill – will be unable to afford treatment. I personally think that if all these people had access to effective medical treatment, the HIV/AIDS epidemic would look very different on the macro-level, although I acknowledge that this is an open question. It is undeniable, however, that these drugs could have a strong positive effect on the lives of many people.
That being said, the issue that I have described above is one of the most contentious in world development. Unfortunately, the debate is sort of an “immovable-object-meets-irresistible-force” kind of thing. The demand for affordable/generic medicines for everyone in the third world at the expense of the drug companies would bankrupt the people who (like it or not) develop basically all the world’s new drugs. On the other hand, the status quo will surely bring about an amount of suffering that is literally incomprehensible to healthy people living in the north. So...what?
Well, this may not be a solution, but at least I think it’s a new way of thinking about the problem. This is another one of those situations where I’m not sure if this point has been made before, or maybe it’s even considered to be trivial at this point. I know I’ve never heard it, and I’ve done a little work on development/AIDS/market studies, so maybe it will be new for some of you, too. The thing that sort of struck me like a bolt out of the blue a couple of days ago is that the situation with this kind of drugs, which have an extremely wide possible market, but low ability to pay, thus driving up prices and limiting effective demand, is essentially market failure. Briefly, the social benefits of providing these drugs are much higher than the private (i.e. drug company) benefits accrued by covering research and development costs associated with inventing them. If it is fairly easy to develop low-cost generic versions (which it is) of these drugs, which do not have to reflect the high sunk cost of R&D, there will be no/very little incentive to develop them, and they won’t get invented. The way of dealing with this, of course, is to provide patents, which, as you all know, essentially grant a limited monopoly on the use of this information, allowing the investor to gain a return on their money. This idea, along with other forms of intellectual property, is by no means perfect, but it seems to have worked for a long time. The problem is that, obviously, the patent-holder will act in a monopolistic factor, refusing to supply past the point of diminishing marginal returns, despite possibly high levels of demand.
The other piece of this puzzle is that this kind of medicine is – or should be – a public good. The hallmarks of a public good are that it is nonrival (i.e. its use by one individual does not prevent its use by any other) and non-excludable (almost self-defining, technically meaning that it is possible to prevent people who haven’t paid for the service from using it). Trivially, the actual physical stuff of medicine – you know, pills or inoculations or oral rehydration solution or whatever – is rival; the more important issue here, though, is the (very expensive) research that goes into making drugs. Information, of course, is the textbook nonrival good. Patents, however, prevent innovation from becoming non-excludable. Although it does not work perfectly, the current international intellectual property regime more or less ensures that most patent-holders gain a monopoly over their products. Usually, that’s at least efficient, if not always 100% good for humanity. I mean, usually, it’s not a big deal, right? When else, other than medicine, do we really hear anyone complaining about (or, for that matter, even mentioning) TRIPS? With medicine though, or more specifically for drugs that are life-saving, needed in great quantities in the developing world, and rather smaller ones in richer countries, this problem – that these drugs are a public good – becomes extremely important. There is enough of an incentive for companies to innovate, as, protected by patents, they can sell their drugs for huge mark-ups in developed countries. Demand has very low elasticity up to the upper limit of ability to pay, because the alternative to buying ARVs is usually drastically lowered quality of life and much earlier death. At the same time, the incentives for cross-regional price discrimination are lowered because of the fear of reselling.
Essentially, it is very difficult for people with low incomes to get the drugs they need through market mechanisms. Governments, or NGOs, or whoever can give away or subsidise these drugs, but this is simply not financially possible on a wide scale. The solution isn’t simply to soak the drug companies, either. As silly as it might sound to complain about injustices done to Pfizer, or GlaxoSmithKline or Novartis, billion dollar companies all, taking the information that they have paid to develop is essentially theft, at least under the current system. These companies are not charities, and that’s the problem. I’m not saying that they should be nationalised (internationalised?) or anything like that, but we need some realisation that the market is simply incapable of dealing with this problem. That’s the easy part, I guess. Figuring out how to deal with it is harder, but can never be done until there is at least a proper diagnosis.

Finally!/Les Damnés de la Terre

2009-01-28T14:39:00.000-08:00

So, sorry, I realise that it’s been about 9 months since my last blog update, which, I think, took place when I was still living in Ho Chi Minh City, while Allison, Amalia and Ariya were watching “Into the Wild,” and before we re-arranged our living room. Man, I hate that movie. There’s no really good reason for not writing anything for months on end – I just kept putting it off – but I apologize to anyone who’s still reading this; probably no one. Oh well. I think I’m going to try and make future posts a bit shorter, but also try and make them somewhat more regular. I assume everyone’s waiting with bated breath for that to happen.
In any event, since Joel’s finally updated his blog (although after a lacuna significantly shorter than mine), and I’m travelling, which always makes me feel, if not act, more productive, I figured I might as well do it tonight.
End of mea culpa, beginning of blog entry.
I’ve been reading The Wretched of The Earth (which, if you don’t know, and are at all interested in decolonisation, black power, or the psychology of oppression, you should read), which is, let me say right now, really a great book. I’ve never read it cover-to-cover before; it was one of my first-year SOSC books (UChicago jargon, to those of you who don’t get it), and I really enjoyed it then, but, like a couple of other rad books that we read that year, I never actually read it in full until I picked it up here. Maybe that means I care more about Algerians than women or holocaust victims.
Anyways, I really like it, and I like the prologue by old J-P, which could really stand alone. Despite its sometimes far-fetched predictions – decolonisation in Algeria did not cause the European system to collapse, although it did have more serious political effects in metropolitan France than most Americans realise today – Sartre’s prologue is one of the most passionate pieces of writing that I have ever read. The way that both authors use extended metaphors allows this book to transcend typical categories of political writing – it’s a serious, sometimes even technical (especially the chapters dealing with clinical psychology) analysis, but without the pedantry of the technocratic analyses that are now in vogue in international studies. I mean, it makes “Workers of the world, unite!” seem like a cheap afterthought. At the same time, it’s not flighty, like a lot of the leftist/radical stuff I read these days. In fact (this sounds sort of weird – the French say en fait, which means pretty much the same thing, but makes more more sense in conversation, somehow), the form of the writing is a really good reflection of the subject matter, which, if you haven’t read it, is about nationalist anti-colonial revolution, based on violence, and working in opposition to the emerging intellectual-bourgeois “native” élites in colonialised countries. There is a certain tension here, especially in the chapter where Fanon deploys what are essentially western, intellectual, psychological analyses to criticise the practice of colonialism. I find his arguments to be convincing, but they seem somewhat strange in the context of the rest of the book. Even more incongruous is Sartre’s prologue, which is essentially concerned with telling Europeans that their days are numbered, and that they mean nothing to the new men described by Fanon. The disdain for intellectualism is palpable, but it rings a bit hollow, like white kids rapping about how hard it is to grow up in the ghetto.
The point of this commentary, though, isn’t to call The Wretched of the Earth fake, which it’s definitely not, although it could maybe use a little more introspection. Rather, reading it reminded me of something that I’ve been troubled by for a while. In theory, a lot of The Wretched of the Earth makes sense – I’m willing to believe his arguments about violence being central to the formation of a nation, even the argument that town-dwelling proletarians are somehow bourgeois. However, the big problem with this book, like The Communist Manifesto, is that all of the focus is on the revolution, and none on the actual state of the post-revolutionary society that is supposedly the goal of the entire process. I guess the idea is that the post-colonial state will just be a communist state, and Fanon seems to have respect for the Soviet Bloc, but it is a bit hard to believe that, at this point, anyone still thought that the USSR (post-Stalin) was a model worthy of emulation. Fanon criticises urban-dwellers and intellectuals, but it is not clear who he expects will run the country – one of the biggest problems in many newly independent African states was the lack of human capital and technical expertise, and the system of patronage, ethnocentrism and kleptocracy that arose in many post-colonial countries was in large part a result of the fact that much of the new governing class had access to few resources other than those that they could appropriate from the state. This problem was, if anything, worse in the nations that espoused socialism as their governing ideology (however, it is often hard to say which countries were socialist, which were capitalist, and which were merely dictatorships in 1960s-1980s Africa).
It seems like a lot of utopian political theories – both on the left and the right (think Ayn Rand) – rely on assumptions that human behaviour will fundamentally change in their perfect society. This theory, called social constructivism, is something that really gives me pause. On the one hand, you don’t want to discount anything out of hand. I mean, maybe it is the case that, absent the profit motive, people will behave communally, and it won’t require a heavy-handed, intrusive bureaucracy (or, a “dictatorship of the people”) to ensure the continuing legitimacy of the state, and its idea of equality, or freedom, or whatever. On the other, I don’t find it too plausible, and I certainly think that it would be pretty foolhardy to base an entire ideology on what seems, to me at least, like a guess.
Fanon would probably argue, as a lot of Marxists have about the USSR, that these countries don’t represent true examples of his theory. This is probably true, and it maybe is a bit unfair to judge Fanon based on what transpired in Ghana or Kenya, or, for that matter, Algeria. That line of argument sort of gets on my nerves, though. Essentially, these kinds of arguments do away with the idea of falsifiability; I know that, at least in Popper’s original formulation, this is primarily a “hard science” kind of concept, but I think it’s still an important thing to keep in mind here. If no one is ever “real” enough to fulfill Fanon’s standards, it’s a bit hard to prove his theories wrong. This makes it a bit hard, for me at least, to take this book seriously as a plan of action, rather than a piece of philosophy that has had important effects on subsequent thought but was never put into action. Certainly, his theories were an enormous influence on American black power thinkers, but the situation that he described never really came about. Like Marx, the revolution happened – think Angola, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and of course Algeria – but the perfect state never did. Instead of Lenin and Stalin, we see the violence of Savimbi, Algeria’s civil war and religious fanaticism, and of course everyone knows about Robert Mugabe.
In the end, of course, Fanon’s predictions didn’t really come true. There were examples of mass peasant uprisings, but none of them succeeded in creating a functional, egalitarian state, and Africa remains, in many ways, in a position as bad as or worse than it was in 1961. Similarly, decolonisation didn’t cause the end of European hegemony, or even a true realisation of the horrors of colonialism. Fanon was ahead of his time in predicting neo-colonialism, but unfortunately his remedies for it have gone unrealised in practice.

The Annex(ation)

2008-04-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

During the immediate post-war period, practically no European colonial nations suspected that they would soon lose their African colonies. Despite the shock to the British of losing India, the jewel of the Empire, in 1947, and Egypt five years later, they didn't expect that sub-Saharan African colonies would become independent for another two generations, at least. Belgium thought that the Congo and Rwanda-Urundi would stay under their control for another century, while the French, displaying a remarkable degree of imperial arrogance, assumed that their African colonies would become départements d'outre-mer, joining their nation as "equal partners." It seems obvious, in hindsight, that this decision wouldn't work, but at the time, in France, it was considered to be completely rational. Of course, the French were disabused of this idea by the bloody independence struggle in Algeria and Sékou Touré's rhetoric in Guinea.
But is this idea really so unusual? Maybe no one thinks it is, and I'm crazy, but it seems to me like most people who hear about this think that something was seriously wrong with it. One strikingly similar situation, though, appears in the history of the United States - namely, Hawai'i. While the acquisition of Alaska can be chalked up to a disjointed continuation of Manifest Destiny, the dissolution of the Hawai'ian monarchy in 1893 signalled a US policy towards Hawai'i that culminated with its admission to the Union in 1959.
Of course, there are some obvious differences between Hawai'i and France's African colonies. First of all, France, while avowedly protecting the rights of all people, and attempting to make colonised peoples "into Frenchmen," still enforced a clearly racist legal system in its colonies, the indigénat , which made it a crime, for instance, to not salute (European) French people. At the same time, however, the rights of native Hawai'ians were severely limited under US rule, until its annexation. Also, Hawai'ians supported annexation by a wide margin in a plebiscite in the 1950s, although this result is tainted by the fact that the choices included were statehood or continuation of territory status, and, in my opinion more importantly, the fact that by this point the native Hawai'ian population had drastically declined by the time of the referendum. Nevertheless, it seems clear that most of the population, for better or for worse, supported annexation, and the state seems to be pretty happy with it at the moment.
In my opinion, the main reason why this process "worked" in Hawai'i, and not in, say, Guinea, is that the native Hawai'ian population was so small in proportion to the European population of Hawai'i from the late 19th century onwards. Nowhere in the French Empire, including the settler colony of Algeria, were white colonists in the majority. In some ways, then, it's similar to the situation I mentioned below, where Native Americans could be successfully excluded from North American society in a way that Black South Africans could not, because of their demographic weakness.

Israel and Apartheid

2008-04-09T22:05:00.000-07:00

First off, I know that I have been remiss in not posting on here in a while. I went back to Toronto, then have just been finding my feet at the beginning of the spring in Chi-town. I'll try and put a new post up on here every week or two from now on.
To the point:
This is a subject about which a lot has been written, obviously, and which is, to say the least, acrimonious. Claims that the Israeli government carries out a policy essentially similar to South African Apartheid under the National Party government from about 1950 to 1994. This has become fairly common among leftist groups in North America and Europe - including among at least one former US President. For example, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Canada's largest labour union, voted in 2006 to boycott Israel, using the word "apartheid" several times in statements. This is an especially tense subject because Israel exists, explicitly, as a homeland for Jewish (there is confusion over how exactly to use this adjective, but there is pretty clear consensus about its reference to a specific ethnoreligious group, and I think that you will all understand me if I use it here) people. Jewish people, of course, have been oppressed throughout history, especially in "liberal" western Europe, culminating with the horror of the Nazi Holocaust. At the same time, this cannot make the state of Israel immune to criticism, and it is fallacious to conflate criticism of Israeli political policy with anti-Semitism, as some pro-Israel groups attempt to do (and, kind of, the US State Department - check out its equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism on page 27 of this report). Anyways, I'm not trying to stir anything up, but I think that there are clear parallels to be drawn between South African Apartheid and the practices of the Israeli state. This is not based on invective, or even moral grounds, but rather a simple comparison of political realities. In fact, Apartheid bears similarities to practices of other governments - I'm thinking here of Canada, the United States and Australia, primarily - especially with regards to their treatment of indigenous populations.
One thing that has to be noted, first of all, is that Apartheid ("separateness" in Afrikaans - the Wikipedia article about it is a pretty good introduction) was made up of two separate strains. One was so-called Petty Apartheid, which segregated public places, forced Blacks to observe all sorts of humiliating and arbitrary laws, as well as disfranchising minorities. This system is remarkably similar to the Jim Crow regime in the United States. Its second component was Grand Apartheid, fundamentally an attempt to remove the citizenship of Black South Africans. It was the final goal of the white masterminds of Apartheid to eventually have a nation of South Africa populated entirely by white (and perhaps "coloured" - mostly Indian and mixed-race people) exist side-by-side with subservient "Bantustans," or homelands, based on ethnicity and restricted to marginal land. This would provide retroactive justification for their founding myth that South Africa was mostly empty space when "discovered" by Europeans in the 17th century, and that Blacks belonged in rural "kraals." Of course, this was actually a way for whites to maintain a cheap stock of labour without having to grant political concessions and rights to the majority population. The same tactics were used in North America and Australia, although there their success was ensured by the earlier extermination of native populations through new diseases and mass murder. The whole idea of native reserves in Canada as "separate nations" is similar to Grand Apartheid, and, while it may not be as clearly evil, has certain social-control functions.
Israel, I would argue, is doing the same thing, more successfully, in its "Occupied Territories." I don't have space to go into great detail here, but basically the Palestinian territories are semi-self-ruled, under the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. They have responsibility for most peacekeeping and civilian control, but Palestine does not have a sovereign government. Israel controls border crossings and access to water and, and reserves the right to intervene militarily whenever it feels the need to. Thus, Palestinians are neither citizens of Israel, nor citizens of their own state. The Israeli government has thus successfully consigned Palestinians, the former residents of this area, to underdeveloped, overcrowded regions, limiting their scope for action in Israel to violence. Chomsky once said that this situation was akin to governments in the United States turning over policing in its inner cities to their residents, and he makes a good point.
Even the often-suggested idea of a two-state solution would do little to help the situation. Israel would still be the dominant force in the area, and the chances of a Palestinian government being able to exert an independent of effective foreign or domestic policy would be negligible. It should not be forgotten that the only nation to recognise the independence of the "Bantustans" was South Africa, which nevertheless reserved the right to freely intervene in their affairs. Sound familiar? The only solution, as I see it, is full integration of Palestinians into the Israeli nation. Like it or not, both groups have a claim to the territory. Israel must become a multiethnic, open society. Although it is currently a parliamentary democracy, there is little chance for Arab Israelis to exert political power, and civil society is dominated by Judaism. This process is sure to be difficult - extremely difficult. I really don't have much of an idea of how to do it at this point - I'll write more later - but I'm convinced that a pluralistic state in this territory, representing all of its inhabitants, is the only way to ensure equal rights and end this conflict.

Human lives aren't equal, I guess

2008-03-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

Today, President Bush gave a speech claiming victory in Iraq (really? again?) five years after its invasion by a US-led "Coalition of the Willing." What struck me, though, even more than his ridiculous arguments about the nature and effects of the Iraqi insurgency ("an Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden"?) was his argument that "The terrorists who murder the innocent in the streets of Baghdad want to murder the innocent in the streets of America," and that "Defeating this enemy in Iraq will make it less likely that we'll face the enemy here at home." If you think about it, what he's really saying is that it's better that Iraqis die in the American "War on Terror" than Americans. As a result of terrorist attacks in the United States, which killed maybe 5000 people, about 85 000 Iraqi civilians have died. Bush, presented the rationale that US troops liberated Iraqis from the Ba'ath regime, but his main point seems to have been that the "Surge," by eradicating the Iraqi insurgency, will show America's enemies (Iraq? al-Qaeda?) that the United States is the "stronger horse." Nevermind that his arguments about the Surge are based on a very narrow definition of success - today, the New York Times argued that, by diverting both US and Iraqi troops to Baghdad, US military leadership had given the insurgency in Mosul a chance to expand in scope and scale. What's really frightening is that President Bush seems to think that treating Iraqi civilians like cannon fodder is not only acceptable but good practice.
The issue is a simple one, if well-hidden - foreign lives are not considered to be as important as those of Americans. I'm not just trying to make a political point here - this way of thinking is certainly not restricted to one party, although the policies of the current American administration do show a stunningly callous disregard for the lives of the people that they're supposed to be protecting.
The Clinton administration is equally complicit: Romeo Dallaire reports that a staffer told him it would take 85 000 (number seem familiar?) Rwandan deaths to justify risking the life of one American soldier. The same logic underlay the Cold War-era proxy wars - Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, any number of countries in Latin America. Ever wonder why Kosovo warranted a NATO military intervention, while Indonesia was allowed to have its way with East Timor for 25 years? The hypocrisy is unavoidable, and the dichotomy between important and unimportant people obvious even between citizens of the same country. On this level, the citizens of New Orleans abandoned after Hurricane Katrina aren't so different from Africans left to the depredations of poverty, civil war and AIDS.
If we ever reached a stage of consciousness that privileged all human beings equally, the world's gross inequalities would be, I think, impossible. This sounds utopian, I know, but I feel like it must be true. The problem is how to reach this level. I'm sure that this inequality of consideration has some sort of biological basis, arising out of kin-selection theory or some such, but this doesn't mean that it can't be overcome. It's not just a political problem, though - it's easy to blame politicians for problems, but the system is, in some ways, just a reflection of the interests and attitudes of its constituent parts. Imagine feeling each needless death of everyone in the world, the million that Stalin said make up a statistic, as if it were the singular, tragic death of a friend or acquaintance. I guess human beings are probably incapable of dealing with this kind of suffering without going insane, but there has to be some sort of change, to an understanding that all people are inherently equal, and that all lives must be protected, as a moral imperative. It is easy to say this, but less so to realise the feeling that would precede its implementation.