Turner and Boris

To my surprise Lord Turner and Boris the Blond have succeeded in interesting me. The former has floated the possibility of a transaction - 'Tobin' - tax to control the excesses of the City and the latter has said this is crazy because it will damage our competitiveness and, anyway, even the bonus buggers pay taxes. Turner said some City activities were 'socially useless'. This, at least, is true. I often tried to get City types to explain the point of their menagerie of derivatives and they always failed, primarily because, as we now know, the point of them was to be ever more elaborate versions of Find the Lady that would enrich the card sharps on the other side of their easy-pack trestle tables and leave us impoverished when they suddenly vanished with their carpet bags full of used tenners.

But lots of things are socially useless and we can't legislate against people solely because they make money. We can however legislate - in this case, tax - things that are socially damaging. We do it all the time. It should now be clear to everybody that whatever the bonus buggers were up to that wiped out trillions of pounds of our wealth was socially damaging. This should not be forgotten even though Barclays and Goldman Sachs are now floating happily on a government-rigged market saying it was all a storm in a tea cup. The question then becomes: how much of our present prosperity, as defined by Boris, are we/should we be prepared to forego in order to eradicate activities that are bound to be socially damaging in the medium or long term?

Turner went a long way in using the phrase 'socially useless' but not quite far enough properly to sharpen the issue. The enormity of the City's long con is in danger of being forgotten as stock markets and house prices begin to rise. They ripped us off, they drained the blood out of our economy. Think on, Boris.

The American Way of Death

Understanding the American health care debate from abroad has been rendered difficult, if not impossible, by the cretinous, Palinesque rhetoric which now seems to be the preferred discourse of the Republican Party. There will be, according to these knuckle-draggers, government death panels and the whole Obama scheme is either Nazist or socialist or both. In fact, what the current health insurers get up to seems to be far worse than anything imaginable in any state scheme and, besides, America's position as the only wealthy country not to look after the health of all its citizens does look increasingly weird as the years go by.

This is not to defend the NHS, which needs very radical reform indeed, but it is to say that American suspicion of any government involvement in health insurance and the resulting denial of medical care to millions of its citizens needs more explaining than I have yet seen.

Part of the answer, I think, is the deep American conviction that failure should be punished so that success can be rewarded. This is seen both as a moral and an economic imperative. In this context, failure involves the loss of health insurance. If this penalty is removed then there will be less incentive to be successful. The three big flaws in this are: a)rampant and demonstrable private sector abuse of the system b) the fact that very little failure is actually deserved and, even if it were, death or serious illness must be an excessive punishment and, therefore, the moral aspect of the imperative drops out of the equation and the only justification becomes economic. But this too is weakened by the fact that c) the current US system is not very effective in that life expectancy is not that high, it encourage massive over-medication to the point where iatrogenesis is the third biggest killer and it is fantastically inefficient and expensive.

Health would seem to be a perfectly legitimate extension of the state to correct market failures. Nevertheless, I understand the need to reward success and punish failure in the context of the American imagination. The potency of the idea is what makes the US so different from Europe. Unfortunately, to stir up the knuckle-draggers and damage Obama, the Republicans have decided to exploit and debauch this idea. American individualism thus becomes American savagery and true conservatism withers.

On Class

I dimly remember Roger Scruton writing somewhere that snobbery was a form of sanctity. This made certain meritocratic types of my acquaintance madder than wet hens, which, I assume, was Roger's intention. He's like that. But I know what he meant - snobbery sustains class divisions and aspirations which were the foundations of eighteenth century England, a kind of paradise. Unlike Roger, I can't go along with this. Not only am I an angry agnostic, I am also chippy middle class. This means I regard the working class with intense paranoia because I know they are out to rip me off and the upper class with burning resentment because all this bird-slaughter and condescension is plainly designed to conceal the fact that they aren't as clever and well-read as me.

But, to be honest, I think the worst aspects of the British class system are expressed in the idiotic strivings of the middle class. One becomes aware of these things if one spends too much of the summer in the country. There is, for example, the desperately fraught phenomenon of the house guest. Middle class house guests instinctively strip their beds before they leave and neatly fold the sheets, perhaps even putting them in the washing machine. Upper class guests leave their beds unmade and a tip for the cleaning lady. These are both perfectly respectable responses. What is not respectable is middle class types making a big show of leaving a cleaning lady pourboire just to demonstrate they know about upper class manners. Once you notice this, you see it everywhere. I was scanning a wedding magazine in a hairdresser's and I became oppressively aware that weddings have become an entire industry designed to extract money from the middle classes by telling them they must have flouncy marquees, poncey catering and daft clothes because that's what the upper classes do. And what did the middle class jerks in the City who made money out of dud mortgages and the misery of the poor spend their bonuses on? Purdey shot guns and the like.

I have come to the view that we should proudly be what we are. This means we should politely say to the uppers 'We don't do that, we read Marilynne Robinson' when they offer to take us bird murdering and to the lowers, 'Don't come the cheeky chappy with me, sunshine, I'm in trade myself' when they tell us fixing the toilet will cost exactly £999.99. Being non-striving middle class is, I have concluded, the most fun.

Back to the Past

I shall be on the Today programme at 8.40, I think, discussing the return of the seventies. Brilliantly, the producers have organised an overnight demonstration of this phenomenon.

Ben Hur

Mysteriously my article on Ben Hur in The Sunday Times did not appear online until now. Here it is.

Kliban and the Ontological Proof

There's a cartoon by, I think, the sublime B. Kliban which shows an anguished man crouched in a cave. On the wall behind him is a sign which reads, 'Do not read this sign'. Of course, the fact that he's crouched and anguished means that he has read the sign and is awaiting the consequences and/or he is trying desperately not to read it again.

Now say, bear with me, the sign is God and the man is an atheist. Now his predicament is that he doesn't want to have anything to do with the sign, but, having read it, the contents are, so to speak, inside him. In his head he is constantly reading the sign or, in my version, thinking about God, which, for an atheist, must be damned irritating. But, of course, that's what atheists must do if they are to continue to be atheists - if they stop thinking about God, they stop being atheists.

I think there are elements of Anselm's Ontological Proof in this. Or, at least, there was something about this proof - discussed here by Nathan Schneider - that evoked the cartoon. What is most interesting about the Schneider piece (aside from the glorious fact that it is on a newspaper web site, long live the NYT) are some of the comments. I think that it is these that evoked Kliban's man in a cave. Typical is the one from Jack Walsh - 'Eeek. Will you all just stop it?? This is all just crazy talk about nothing. Nothing. Read your Wittgenstein!!! Aaaaaarrrrrgh. Otherwise sensible bright people wading through cant. Just stop it.'

I think Jack should reread Wittgenstein. But, anyway, these are clearly the howls of a man who has read the sign or possibly one with his fingers in his ears yelling, 'La-la-la, Can't hear you.' Schneider's piece is tinged with sentimentality, but it does make the point that, whatever you think of Anselm's proof (in fact, it wasn't just Anselm's), it is clear that it says a great deal about the way language and the human mind work. God as the greatest possible concept is a perfectly reasonable way of assessing our thoughts, intuitions and, most importantly, our art. Consider it as the square root of -1 in mathematics. You can stop thinking about it if you like, but then you won't understand maths or, in the case of God, people who, you see, have all read the sign.

Elberry the Unkillable

So I get this email from the prodigious Elberry telling me he's burnt his blog and will not blog again. I reply sympathetically only to be told he is, in fact, blogging again - here. I sometimes wonder whether I have imagined Elberry. Like the incomparable Dave Lull he may be the first sign of the acquisition of self-consciousness by the internet. It is winning us over by adopting seductive and alarming personae. Perhaps I should alert The Guardian.

Science and the Guardian

Today's Guardian leader on the Large Hadron Collider - 'But the greatest benefit of the LHC may simply be that it exists.' This provokes in me two associations. The first is those follies that rich men built to keep the poor employed during hard times. The LHC, having been the great key that would unlock the mystery of matter, has become a job creation scheme. The second is what might be termed the Scargill defence. Arthur Scargill, having taken on Margaret Thatcher and lost and having destroyed the power and credibility of the Trade Unions for the next two decades, said the miners' strike had been a triumph simply because it had happened. I quite like the follies and even Scargill's hilarious combover has taken on a pleasing sepia tinge with the passing of the years, but I do think it's a bit early to start so radically lowering the bar on our expectations of the LHC. Admittedly I've always thought of it as a contemporary cathedral, but I try to remember that the medieval cathedrals had a real function for at least a few centuries. The full argument of the Guardian leader is that the mere fact of international co-operation on such an apparently useless project is to be applauded. Again I feel a sepia tinge coming on - this time it involves a kind of Fabian hard-work ethic. But, behind this, lurks the way in which 'pure' science is being used as a quasi-religious abstraction, a transcendent force that guides and justifies our striving. The leader steers away from this at the end by bringing in climate change as a practical project, but, so far as I am aware, the discovery of the Higgs Boson will have little impact on global warming.

Which brings me to another article in The Guardian. This ties together a number of developments in neuroscience and psychology. Madeleine Bunting says these point to a new view of human nature as humans now no longer seem to possess reason, autonomy or freedom. This is a tricky argument as, once you have said it in its strong form, you can't say anything else because you are human and, therefore, anything else you might say is compromised by your lack of reason, autonomy etc.. See Vladimir Tasic for the full version of this. But, since the point has been made, it's worth saying that it has been made many times before, most famously by Michel Foucault's announcement of the death of the human. In fact, the idea is much older than that because it has been implicit in the causal assumptions of science since Galileo. These new versions of the idea are interesting but tentative. Speak to any decent neuroscientist - and I have - and he'll tell you that, in spite of our big white scanners, we know next to nothing about how the brain actually works. As ever with science, this makes it dangerous to draw any conclusions for the real human world. Bunting does this, suggesting there is some link between free market conservatism and the 'old' view of the autonomous human self and that, therefore, the left should take on board this new science as a countervailing ideology. This offers the pleasing prospect of a kind of Dadaist Labour party, declining all suggestion of rationality and autonomy. Don't go there, boys. Science as tentative as this is likely to change in an instant and you'll be left with a political programme with all the authority of a pack of Tarot cards.

Anyway, in all seriousness, this is why I like the Guardian, it's full of ideas. They may be wrong, they may be bonkers - a perfectly respectable technical term, I was told by a distinguished psychologist yesterday - but at least they are ideas.

All We Have Is Cricket

Sun and deep thought have stalled the old blog drive. There are, however, some things too wonderful to evade remark. Come on now, really, is there any game that can compare with a five-day test match? 'At least we still have this,' was the gist of most remarks I heard yesterday, the clear conviction being that in every other respect our nation is pretty much screwed.

Factasms

Read this. Mary Midgley is a good thing, a great, persistent and wise critic of scientistic pretension.

'The mythology of how markets work, of how money can do things on its own, is as remote from solid physical reality as these other things. And of course whatever the mythology of the time is, those inside it don't recognise it as such; they think they're just noticing facts.'

This mythology to facts manouevre became the excuse for the absurd 'strong programme' in sociology, an attempt to turn science into just another social discourse. Midgley is not going that far, indeed she is not saying anything about science qua science. She is simply saying that prevailing mythologies can produce phantasms that are taken for facts - factasms? - by believers. The mythology thus takes on the authority of science, often, as Midgley well knows, with the collusion of scientists.