Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Category: Outlook (Page 6 of 6)

…and the winner is:

27.06.2016 /

Speaking ill of the dead is in bad taste. I suspect that speaking ill of the winner of a competition is no better.

So I have a problem. I may not speak ill of the winners of the US presidential primaries, may not speak ill of the Brexicists and may not even speak ill of a man I viscerally abhor, Spain’s President Rajoy.

Of worse taste, even, is the speaking ill of voters of the winners.
What can I do?

Today was a truly sad day for me. I had hoped that Spain would finally turn its back on its shameful past: the very recent corruption, the not so recent dictatorships with “disappearances” of people my age – neither accounted for nor investigated – the extremist catholic stance on a number of issues, the pathetic nationalism, the recent sacking of a prominent judge for political reasons, the abuse of the Constitutional Tribunal, etc., etc.

But no, the voters voted for the party that represents all that, the party whose top brass regularly appears in court, accused of every kind of corruption. I nearly wept!

I will not, repeat not, speak ill of Spanish voters. Here and now I intend to make peace with them, at the risk of making a fool of myself. In a couple of days, analysts will have broken down the figures, examined turnout, age groups, social backgrounds, etc. Just as they defined the average Trump voter, just as they have already (!) defined the average Brexit voter, they will define the Rajoy voter. I am going to put my neck out and define the Rajoy voter myself.

Before I do that, I must explain why I am doing it: Having read who the average Trump voter is, I feel shame on behalf of my Trump-voting friends, if I have any. Having read that the average Brexit voter is an ageing, if not senile, racist loser, I truly feel pained on behalf of my Brexit-voting friends, and I do have them: They are neither losers, nor ignorant. As for my numerous Spanish friends, conspicuously many of them take pains not to reveal their political preferences. I suppose that meanst they are not leftist, because leftists tend to vociferate a lot.

So, to Spain: I suspect that the turnout of people younger than 50 was relatively poor. Why? Because the factions that could have attracted the young were the ones that lost most seats compared to what they won the last time.  This applies to both Ciudadanos, on the right, and Podemos Unido on the left.

Podemos Unidos has a very daring, left-wing programme and a leader who plays high stakes and is considered arrogant. After the first burst of enthusiasm that met Podemos, voters are wary. Can the party be trusted? Look at the plight of Greece, for instance. Moreover, Spain definitely does not want to leave the EU, and after the Brexit debacle, voters are afraid of anything that might rock the boat. Podemos makes a habit of rocking boats.

Ciudadanos is a modern party that tries to appeal to the up and coming. It wants progress, not so much social progress, perhaps, as modernity, efficiency, transparency.

The result of the vote is already seen as a triumph of the traditional bi-partite system. I think not. I think it is an expression of the new parties’ failing to convince a “fragmented electorate that oscillates between apathy and indignation” (I have stolen this line from the BBC). I think the oscillation is very much a reality that will haunt Spanish politics for some time. Indeed this new election is again considered a “deadlock”, though there is no doubt that the old-fashioned authoritarian president’s hand has been strengthened.

I suspect voter loyalty came from the people who vote ritually for the values they have held all their lives. PP has always flagged Spain’s glory, the importance of traditional family values and the church, the importance of giving alms to the poor… etc. Many PP voters are bigots, to be sure, but the ones I think I know are good, kind people who are afraid of modernity because they see ominous signs around them, signs the rest of us have grown so used to that we ignore them: drugs, organised crime, violence. They believe that Mr Rajoy will be less permissive than his PSOE counterpart.

Most of all, they want to be told that everything will be all right. Mr Rajoy is good at that. In his stern, patronising way, he chastises critics, and makes us all feel like little boys and girls again. (And you should hear how he talks to Catalunya! No wonder they want out!) No need to make decisions. No need to think. “Mr Rajoy has brought Spain to its knees, but he is taking care of us,” Spanish voters seem to be saying. Indeed they need taking care of. In Andalucia, registered unemployment is somewhere around 35 percent, over 60 per cent among the young.

Why didn’t the ritual voters of the other traditional party, PSOE, turn out? They have lost faith, that’s why. Podemos has undermined voter faith in PSOE. And with good reason.

If, in the UK, Labour is divided, in Spain it has split.

In all of Europe, I suspect, the left is either divided or split. Why? Well, that is the big question, isn’t it? There will be no Pax Romana until a few cardinal issues are resolved.

Speaking of which: How about leaving NATO to Mr Trump and establishing, instead, a European Military Defence Alliance (EMDA)?  The UK, I suppose, will prefer to go it on their own again, or stay by the side of their dearest ally, but the rest of us might make a nice go of it? After all, Iceland’s football victory over UK has proved that nothing is impossible.

Word of warning

21.04.2016 /

I put to you – though of course you are entitled to disagree with me – that a successful democracy is contingent on an informed and responsible electorate. Mind you, democracies being what they are, the electorate rules (though parenthetically, of course, the market also has a slight say in the matter; in most matters, actually).

An uninformed or ignorant electorate will too easily be tempted to seek drastic solutions of one kind or another. An irresponsible electorate will mainly consider what might thrill or benefit each voter here and now, regardless of the costs to future generations or even to each voter’s own future.

Ignorance is statistically closely associated with involuntary socio-economic deprivation. I repeat: involuntary. Few people are happy about deprivation, which is usually imposed on them.

Irresponsibility is a word I cannot recall having heard in vote result analyses. Irresponsibility strikes me as being the something that is not mentioned, not referred to, not measured (since, in democracies, we have the right to vote as we please without questions being raised about our moral fibre).

So that brings me back to ignorance. The ignorance of a population is often assessed on the basis of the number of inhabitants who are more or less illiterate, and thus unable to find the information they need to make informed decisisons about matters that concern them.

Now the matter of the identity of the next US president evidently concerns Mr Trump’s voter very much, and the numbers of Mr Trump’s voters are daunting, indeed. So if Mr Trump’s voters are not statistically illiterate (and we are not allowed to refer to them as irresponsible), we have no other alternative than to conclude that US education is seriously deficient.

My question then is: Is the USA a successful democracy?

The Mujica effect

19.02.2016 /

The former Uruguayan President Mujica has long since left office, but his legacy will live forever, I hope.

In Tanzania a new president has gained so much popularity after his first 100 days in office, that he now enjoys more than 90% support.

What do the two have in common? They slash expenses on pomp and ostentation. For all I know, President Magufuli may never even have heard of Pepe Mujica. Maybe we are approaching a watershed. Maybe the world has grown tired of junk food and tinsel.

Alas, I doubt it. I fear only the Tanzanians have understood, for some inexplicable reason, that national resources are better spent on health and education than on public or private exorbitance.

Among President Magufuli’s first decisions after taking office was to ban the purchase of first and business class tickets for foreign travel by ministers and officials… he slashed the budget allocated for an inauguration dinner by 90 per cent, diverting the money thus saved to healthcare… banned holding official meetings and workshops in hotels (they must now be held in government buildings) …. ordered a review of all privatisation contracts … starting by repossessing five estates… increased the number of businesses that pay taxes …

If things get much worse here in Europe, I might consider applying for Tanzanian citizenship.

Mind you, I would love to own a chateau on the Loire, a trim Colin Archer boat and a private beach cum comfortable cottage in Sardinia. If I had them, I would live simply and modestly, sorting recyclable rubbish according to source material, bicycling to town rather than driving, etc. I would travel by train, if at all possible, rather than by plane. I might even forego having a car.

But I belong to the long-suffering middle class. No chateau, no Colin Archer, no private beach. I, we, have every reason to compensate as best we can, poor things.

Rule of Law

29.11.2015 /

The other day a colleague who is familiar with my slightly subversive views maliciously presented me with a philosophical challenge:

– How come you who so fervently believe in the rule of law defend people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange?
It is true that I passionately believe in the rule of law, defined by the UN as follows:

“… a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards.”

(You will find other definitions of the “rule of law”, definitions from which the last clause – “and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards” is absent.)

Back to my malicious colleague: I took the moral highground: Edward Snowden and Julian Assange did not have the right to violate certain legal provisions; they had a duty to do so.

– Ah, said my colleague with a sly smile, so when you face the enemy, the rule of law no longer applies?

I must admit that my mumbled reply was not very impressive. I saw where he was going, and I am a terrible chess player. He would make sure I’d soon be writhing in a corner (figuratively that is) admitting that to defend my values, we must do whatever it takes, whereas to defend your values – if they differ from mine – we must play by the rules.

Now I am an extremely law-abiding citizen. I don’t even cheat on my taxes, and wouldn’t do so even if I had the chance, for the simple reason that I’m proud of paying my share of the upkeep of this country. Nevertheless, my sympathy for rule breakers does not stop at Snowden and Assange. I also have full sympathy with hackers “Anonymous” when they claim to be taking down the “enemy’s” Twitter accounts (again, on the assumption that their enemy is my enemy, and ISIS certainly is a shared enemy.) Taking down a Twitter account is, however, a far, far cry from “Guantanamo Bay” and universal telecom surveillance.

The self-styled “Islamic State” and Boko Haram are not the only monsters lurking in the shadows. There are other agents of rape and mutilation out there. And some of them are friends of our friends. Take the Uzbek government, for instance – just about as bad as they come, yet several European governments including my own, have invested heavily in Uzbekistan. A recent scandal rocked the press in my country for a couple of days, but all is surprisingly silent now. Was it too close to home for the powers that be?

I quote the Norwegian Helsinki Committee:

It is widely known that authoritarian regimes put as a condition for providing licenses to mobile telephone and internet providers that they get full access to content and meta ‐ data of communications on the systems. The Norwegian Helsinki Committee has inter alia criticized the Swedish company Telia Sonera and the Russian company Vimpelcom (partly owned by the Norwegian company Telenor) for providing authorities in Uzbekistan and Belarus full access to their systems.

Meanwhile, in Sweden (source: the Guardian), the prosecuting authority is taking an Uzbek hit-man to court. He is suspected of having been acting at the orders of the Uzbek government when he shot an Uzbek opposition politician in the head. He did it in Malmö. That’s in Sweden. The impudence!! Yet, Sweden has also been investing heavily in Uzbekistan.

If our own governments don’t play by the rules, how can they expect us, to whom they are accountable, to do so? If our governments practise realpolitik  why should not we also do so, at least in self-defence. The question is: Should hackers in one country, mine for instance, defend violently suppressed people in another, eg, the “ganster state” Uzbekistan?

That, I think, is the real philosophical challenge. Would the consequences be all-bad, as have those of the military intervientions in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya?

Finally, should it occur to you to you to ask me, let me be clear: Any hacker who, for personal gain, abuses his/her skills (e.g. online bank fraud, industrial espionage, etc.) will find no more sympathy at my door than a medical doctor who kills his/her patients. There are certain things one just doesn’t do!

Point of view

25.02.2015 /

In my town, people don’t like Mr Putin. Come to think of it, I don’t like him much myself. In my town people look down their noses at Rambos, and Mr Putin, it would seem, is a Rambo. Around here, they prefer the spindly type, the Spidermans, agile and supple. And they don’t condone belligerence either. Behave, civilly, they say, and you will be treated civilly.

As a matter of fact, there are lots of things people in my town don’t prescribe to; religion, for instance, unless it’s decorous and discreet, like make-up – the less the better – and mainly only for soirées or carnivals. Nor do they prescribe to opera, in spite of our having recently built a gloriously expensive and glamorous opera house – too much drama, life just isn’t like that. And as for ballet: forget it!

Around here, real men (as opposed to “you-know-whos”) don’t sing. Never. Not even when they are drunk. Not even the “you-know-whos”. Except at football games. So if I tell you that they don’t even condone belligerence at football games, that’s saying quite a lot, wouldn’t you say? And what they say is true: most of them have never been treated uncivilly, nor have their relatives.

On the other side of the river, people are somewhat different. They say: treat us civilly and we will be civil to you. For all I know, men might even sing on the other side of the river, and they certainly are religious, very religious. That’s a bit scary; after all, godliness is a kind of madness isn’t it, a reality distortion. They are, moreover, often polite and downright considerate towards elderly people. Some, very few of them – misfits of course – will even kill to defend a mother’s honour.

Like us, most of them censure violence. But they will frown – more than that, will knit their brows in anger – if you drag their dignity through the mud. They may even congregate, who knows, and – eh – “discuss” the situation. There will be voices calling for a calming of the spirits, and there will be other voices clamouring for action.

Oh, and I forgot to add that many of the people in the town on the other side of the river have relatives who are being treated far from civilly in far-away places. I have no relatives, no loved ones, no childhood friends festering in any dungeon. Nobody I know has ever been reduced to a shadow of himself from ill-treatment. Ever! I wonder, I really wonder, what sort of a person I would be if that were not the case.

What I do know from other people’s experiences of dictatorship is that if you have been painfully trained to distrust the police, you will never completely trust the police again, even after the introduction of democracy.

This business of outlook is really quite striking, don’t you think. In my town, if you ask people to define the term dignity, they would have to think very hard, and I am pretty sure that afterwards they would never forget the mental exercise, because the very concept is in the process of slipping away from us here.

If you ask anybody on the other side of the river, I suspect they won’t even have to think. They will know at once what to reply.

So, back to Mr Putin, I had this very odd experience the other day: I saw him for a moment on a Russian television channel addressing people in an auditorium, the Duma perhaps – I have no idea. Now my Russian is very rusty, to say the least, but he was trying to explain some policy that was not faultless and that had been criticised. I listened to him for five minutes and thought: My word, what a nice man! He was not haranguing them, not berating them and not even being defensive. He was not oratorial, as US presidents are without exception – yes, even Mr Obama – not assuming the role of God’s representative on earth, unlike US presidents. He was just talking easily and pleasantly to his audience. He admitted without the slightest hesitation that the chosen course had disadvantages, but he humorously suggested that the same would apply to any other course. He spoke, not like a teacher, more like a colleague about the need to weigh the disadvantages of any course against those of other courses.

Maybe Mr Putin is a Spiderman, after all. Maybe he is subtle. Do we like subtlety better than Rambo? Do we like “satire” (i.e “satirical” drawings) better than a punch in the jaw?

Two sides of Mercy

14.02.2015 /

Christianity claims to be merciful. And indeed, for believers who have no problem with the awkward concepts “original sin”, “immaculate conception”, “resurrection”, etc., who are happily married, give birth to healthy children, and who don’t have to steal to feed their young, the mercy of Christianity may well be a blessing. Caring for their loved ones, generating waves of well-being around them, being loved and cared for in return, some of them may well be happier than most.

But for those believers who have AIDS or bear more children than they can feed (due to the ban on  contraception) or who are homosexual, or who take abortion or, for that matter, don’t take abortion although they desperately need to, purgatory will not wait till the afterlife.

Lunging at the Catholic Church is not my agenda. No sir! It’s just that in my initially Protestant country, Christianity has all but disappeared. Before it gave way to rationalism, much of the country was straight-backed, mirthless, harsh and petty. People were poorer in my childhood than now and often unforgiving, unhappy and far from blessed. Pleasures of the senses were Satan’s temptations, and I have childhood memories of a joyless community with a starkly plain church –  even the music was plain. Fear was everywhere; fear of the dark, the trees, the neighbours, your parents, the headmaster…

No wonder, then, that my compatriots preferred rationalism. Protestantism was unlovely.

My agenda is neither the Catholic nor the Protestant faith. I am reading Anthony Burgess, and I have read my Graham Green. They have both written about failed Catholics, outcasts from the church, who never ceased to grieve over their lost faith. Though I have never been Catholic or Protestant, I grieve with them.

In my post-protestant, secular surroundings, rationality is Law. True, we do see church weddings, mostly – I dare say – thanks to female vanity. True, some children still get baptised, mostly as a matter of hedging bets – as the parents explain: “there is no harm in being on the safe side”. And yes, people still celebrate Christmas. Apart from that, there is absolutely nothing to indicate that the majority of my compatriots are preoccupied with other than temporal concerns.

Concepts such as “faith” carry little weight. These are secular times. We are proud of being analytic, educated. We make so-called informed and rational decisions. We try to apply good sense even in our choices of partners – no sentimental baulking at considerations of the candidate’s income and medical status, after all, taking a partner is much like buying life insurance. Passion is defined as “just sex”, idealism is sniggered at, and “eternal love” is wistfully relegated to  Hollywood.

Now religion, on the other hand, does things differently. Burgess describes a young Catholic male coming home for Christmas to an adoring younger sister with shining eyes and a graceful mother with a soft contralto voice, to smells of a house full of imminent Christmas goodies, eager expectations of traditions including communion in the local village mass, followed by the falling apart of everything when it is revealed that he is homosexual. The church condemns and abhors what he is and what he does, since he refuses to promise to refrain from being what he is and doing what he cannot help doing.

The failure, to my mind, is not the young man, the failed Catholic. The failure is the Church. Its flocks need  – above all  – kindness, need to learn to be kind, need at least to try not to be unkind, need to believe that there is goodness beyond the absolutely ludicrous horrors mankind seems to insist on perpetrating.

While rationality is a fine thing, we have abused it to strip our lives of all that is transcendental. I think we need a rethink: How to reconcile rationality with the irrational, which will never go away, no matter how we deny its existence? How to marry the two and beget transcendental, rational offspring? I really think the Church – Catholic and Protestant – has missed its mark by a mile, failing to understand even a fraction of the modern mind, in the West or in the East or South, certainly in the North.

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