Why do people always disagree with one another?

The question arose whenever my articles were published on a particular website. I won't name the site, that's not my point.

I just didn't get many comments, and readers almost always rejected comments I made on other articles, often with abuse. I remember vividly one of the more polite objections to something I had written: 'You sound as if you think everyone should have the vote.'

As the penny slowly dropped, I made a serious attempt to use democracy as a test case, to talk it through with readers who all insisted they believed in free speech. I tried hard to get to the bottom of what they meant by 'democracy', what it included, and the way it worked. I never got answers, only dismissals of every answer I gave, every point I tried to discuss. In defeat, I fell back on Mark Twain's advice: 'Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.' Eventually I gave up.

But whatever my stubborn friends may have done, I went on thinking. I came to see they were not fools, that what was foolish was to suppose they were. They were not, in fact, even 'wrong'. And finally I realised the difference between us wasn't just a difference of opinion, or different politics with the usual get out that they had a 'right' to their view and I a 'right' to mine. The difference was we were different people and we had a different moral outlook.

Obvious enough - but in taking that for granted, we know and forget. We tell others this 'stands to reason' and that is 'common sense', as if reason and common sense must come to the same conclusion. We accuse a partisan media of not being 'objective', party politicians of not telling 'the truth'. In a 'real' democracy bad things like that wouldn't happen, people wouldn't have other loyalties. In a 'real' democracy everyone would know what was sensible and do it. 

Disbelieving them, we believe every word we say. Every problem has an easy solution, there's a Right and a Wrong always. It is the way we are. 

This is no counsel of despair. It is the challenge.

Putin's war of unintended consequences

War, along with all its horrors, brings change, much of it unforeseen, and Putin's war in Ukraine has already shown it is going to be no exception, assuming the world escapes a nuclear finale, which we must assume.

Away from the battleground, negotiations between Ukraine and Russia and efforts at mediation are continuous, with contradictory reports on their progress; these may or may not produce an outcome short term. Death and destruction are not stopping meanwhile, but a clear victory for Russia, with imposed terms, is unlikely now. The speculations here consider the international aftermath. 

In the Europe heartland, the Versailles Declaration March 10/11 by twenty seven heads of state and government that the EU intends to look to its collective defence, counter cyber warfare and become autonomous in food and energy, recalls Churchill and Roosevelt announcing the Atlantic Charter, which set out the Anglo-American vision for the world after WWII.

This is Europe eighty years on, warning "Russia and its accomplice Belarus" that their war marks "a tectonic shift in European history" and condemning it unmistakably as one. The affirmation that "Ukraine belongs to our European family" has the ring of a distant knell for Mr Putin. He has brought forward the unity he started the war to break up.

Across the wider world, the greatest alliance the world has seen, NATO, has been spurred to renew its purpose and energy, restoring the leadership of the US, Putin's implacable adversary, that had been compromised under President Trump. Essentially isolated, under harsh sanctions, Russia is reduced to a declining secondary power. 

The Cold War may resume temporarily and conceal this, but Russia's descent to pariah state, weakened economically and exposed militarily, is possible: the Sick Man of Europe in the 21st Century as the Ottoman Empire was Sick Man in the 19th. As an audition for the role, Putin led his country into an old-fashioned war he could not win. China, the modernising, coming world power, with no vital interests in Europe, can hardly be anxious to take part in the Kremlin's blunder.

Nor is it unduly optimistic to see liberal democracy making a comeback after a period in the doldrums. Authoritarianism is terribly revealed not only as brutal and barren, but a potential death threat to all. The millions of Ukrainians fleeing the fighting are spreading their idea of freedom to lands where millions more work for the same end. Here is what Putin's war is finally about: the ongoing struggle between two cultures, one inexorably advancing through weight of democratic numbers, the other ever more widely viewed as left behind by history.

If Russia is so sidelined, America may see a future in courting China, the only remaining equal, to impose a steadying Pax Sino-Americana. It would involve rejecting Trumpism, maybe muted trumpeting in future of the delights of democracy, and a balanced deal in the South China Sea, but necessity has led to diplomacy managing greater demands. What, after all, does Trump's national machismo have to offer when his alter ego Putin failed at that game, besides inviting the same terrifying possibility of nuclear extinction?

There was a time when speculation could see Russia and America getting together by the 21st century to resist the growing might of China. Putin has seen off that delusion. But what powerful leader would follow the Russian autocrat into a future he mapped out now?

 

Ukraine: beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin?

The dawn of the nuclear age saw the parallel understanding that war between the superpowers is henceforth ruled out. US policy towards the USSR from President Truman on became 'containment' not confrontation. The USSR reciprocated, notably at Cuba, demonstrating the Cold War in action. There could of course be small proxy 'conventional' wars, but a nuclear war was not to happen and did not.

It is reasonable to assume years on Putin calculated this situation could be turned to advantage. He would have known the US and NATO could not and would not fight for Ukraine and all he had to do was move in as fellow Russians. His miscalculation is Ukraine does not see things that way and Ukraine is not Korea or Cuba or Georgia. The country cannot play proxy: it is part of Europe and seeking to join NATO and the EU.

Nevertheless, NATO cannot intervene directly to aid Ukraine for fear of a war between nuclear powers; it looks as if Putin's thinking is right and his plan must succeed.

But, ironically, the same logic also works against him: as there is no one to defeat him, so there is no way he can win. Russia can languish, without a victory and settlement, as an international pariah, stuck with policing a large hostile country. To what end? The restoration of the Russian Empire? For how long? At what cost?

Mr Putin must be banking on the world moving on after a fait accompli and it is true 'normal relations' have a way of returning in time: outlawing a state becomes impossible for the international community to sustain indefinitely. 

But the risk meanwhile is enormous for leaders who break ranks, whether sanctions against their country work or do not work. Pressure builds for a quick victory and end that is, from the logic of the present situation, impossible. So it is for Russia now. Mr Putin has already lost by starting a war he does not have the power to finish.

Is Ukraine showing War is past its sell-by date?

An excerpt from an essay by Yuval Noah Harari, historian, philosopher and author

At the heart of the Ukraine crisis lies a fundamental question about the nature of history and the nature of humanity: is change possible? One school of thought firmly denies the possibility of change. It argues that the world is a jungle, that the strong prey upon the weak and the only thing preventing one country from wolfing down another is military force.

Another school of thought argues that the so-called law of the jungle isn’t a natural law at all. Humans made it, and humans can change it. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the first clear evidence for organised warfare appears in the archaeological record only 13,000 years ago. Even after that date there have been many periods devoid of war. 

Unlike gravity, war isn’t a fundamental force of nature. Its intensity and existence depend on underlying technological, economic and cultural factors. As these factors change, so does war.

Bertrand Russell, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959)

I have never been a complete pacifist and have at no time maintained that all who wage war are to be condemned. I have held the view, which I should have thought was that of common sense, that some wars have been justified and others not. What makes the peculiarity of the present situation is that, if a nuclear war should break out, the belligerents on either side and the neutrals would be all, equally, defeated. This is a new situation and means that war cannot still be used as an instrument of policy. It is true that the threat of war can still be used, but only by a lunatic. Unfortunately, some people are lunatics."

My response to a correspondent arguing Russia's case* 

Sir -

Your correspondent Themba Sono either misses the point or cannot be serious (“The Problem in Ukraine”). It is 2022, not 1922. And it is Russia that looks prepared to invade an independent European country at this point, not America or NATO an independent Russia.

Arguing who is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the present situation won’t settle the difficulties both sides face but stoke and inflame them. While we continue to think in obsolete terms - that is, of states ultimately having war as a legitimate course of action - we’ll never be at the end of deadly conflict in, most deadly of all, a nuclear age.

Nationalists and ideologues on both sides should be exercising maximum discretion, urging one course and one course only at this time: that war is no longer an option for governments and that diplomacy must deal with this crisis and secure the peace of the world.

*Sunday Times South Africa, February 13

 

Have we got a 'right' not to be vaccinated?

It is no surprise so many of us find the whole Covid thing totally bewildering. We never had to worry before whether we had a 'right' or not. We took any jab available to protect us, or didn't take it. Simple.

Now freedom-lovers everywhere are resisting governments, liberal and illiberal, when they talk about or introduce dreaded vaccination mandates. Yet others concerned for our rights point to the injustice of vaccine shortages. Everyone has the 'right' to be vaccinated. The implication is everyone should be.

Can there be a right to do something and a right not to do the same thing at the same time? Yes, is the answer. We are all individuals; we all have human rights. But in this, oddly, the rights bit is not the problem. The problem is the human bit.

Human beings are not individuals. Or at least not individuals alone. That is overlooked, if not forgotten, amid the hubbub of human rights rhetoric.

You can believe that dogs or birds are social animals but not individuals. But you can't believe the opposite about human beings. Human beings are individuals and also social animals. That's the stumbling block.

And the trouble with this stumbling block is there's no way round or over it. It's not as if we are all totally independent individuals except on Fridays and Saturdays when we become social. We are interdependent every day of the week, when we ask our partners where the car keys are, go to the dentist, borrow the neighbour's sugar, catch the early bus. 

These are trivial instances of mutual dependence and cooperation, among countless trivial others, but the same spirit extends to the big things. Like rescuers turning out for days to save a single cave explorer or swimmer lost at sea; like the ideas we support, which political party we vote for. An individual right is involved everywhere always; so, equally, is a general obligation.

Perhaps all the talk of our unlimited 'rights' is nothing more than politicians' talk to get us onside? Libertarians who feel there is no such thing as 'the people', ideologues who believe there is no one and nothing but the masses. Has Covid changed any of this? Is that what it may help to do over time - change things?

Take the jab: it's a contemporary slogan. Why? Who's got the right to ask that?

Anti-Vaxxers 0 Vaccinated 0. At half-time

People appear to come in two broad categories: they are either 'more conservative' or 'more liberal'.

'More' is an allowable description here because there are no certain or hard and fast dividing lines that mark differences clearly for us. People are complex and varied, with values, views and convictions that overlap and often contradict one another. Thank goodness for that.

However, people who are 'most' conservative or 'most' liberal share tendencies, views, prejudices, beliefs - use whichever term you wish - that bunch together even if they are not exactly predictable. And it seems you cannot argue radicals of either persuasion out of what they believe because you cannot argue people out of what, at root, they are.

Hence the 0-0 draw in this deadly contest so far. One side base their defence on stronger immune systems and the survival of the fittest, trusting they are exempt thereby from personal harm; the other side's attack is that if those advantages are genetic and not cultural, then many among the unvaccinated must still be doomed. 

We await the final result. For now, we can only be sure that conviction will lead the 'most' conservative to mostly accept their fate and that the 'most' liberal are mostly convinced they need not accept theirs.

A big Thank You to Jonathan Haidt

 May 4 2004

On May 4 1954 I heard the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde and the Liebestod for the first time. Words remain as helpless as they always were to describe the shattering effect it had on me. After some more fruitless runs at it as a way to start off this postscript, I give up on all attempts for good. I should have known better by now than to try.

But lying awake several nights recently, I have found myself with enough words at last to tease out from that overwhelming experience strands that are intelligible, at least to me. In with my soaring wonder at this totally new music, the tumultuous onrush of feeling that swamped and swept me away, there mingled a sense of something fathomless and frightening happening to me: an intimation that everything was changing, would not be the same again. I was hearing all there could ever be and nothing you could ever have.

This intuition was uncannily in accord with Wagner’s intention but it worked in me the other way round. When my reason reassembled I had not learned that Bliss lay elsewhere. I concluded that the world was full of wonders and that I enjoyed special privileges, even special powers, to come by them. Unable to express or share it, but never doubting it, I lived in expectation that ineffable beauty would recur, be there for me, not often perhaps but as a matter of course, throughout life. The thought that I would be looking for it in the wrong place never crossed my mind. 

As the busy years went by, I came to know that May 4 1954 would not repeat. When I thought of it I felt no sense of loss. Rather I felt a tinge of guilt, mild unease at something lacking in me, that the highest point of all had been this music one night alone. I see now those feelings were more mistaken than if I had felt loss. My out-of-this-world experience changed and magnified my life in this world. It does not relegate any part of it, even though it is more than any part of it. It is not unfortunate that you never have the moment again. It is supremely fortunate that you have it at all.

There is nothing on earth like Tristan and Isolde. Wagner composed it after he came to see ‘the world’s nothingness’. But to see the world as nothing means he must have also seen it as everything - and his to create. On May 4 1954, unprepared, uncomprehending, I shared in with the rest that frantic intensity of need to exist and exist for - that if this, this, were the only thing the world is to offer, you would live and die to get in to have it. 

           *********            

One mystery at least is solved now, October 2021. More than seventeen years after I wrote the closing piece above, this passage from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind explains and confirms for me, a lifetime later, my epiphany on the evening of May 4 1954:

The emotion of awe is most often triggered when we face situations with two features: vastness (something overwhelms us and makes us feel small) and a need for accommodation (that is, our experience is not easily assimilated into our existing mental structures; we must "accommodate" the experience by changing those structures). Awe acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns. Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life ... shuts down the self and gives people experiences they later describe as "religious" or "tranformative". (My emphasis, as they say.)

                                                                  

Are we being fair to President Cyril Ramaphosa?

People hold different, sometimes mistaken expectations of the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into state capture in South Africa. They hear the courtesies and thousands of measured words differently and take different meanings from them, some fiercely condemning as artful evasion what others will accept as guarded admission. 

Whatever his official role in this ANC disgrace, however, there is no doubt Cyril Ramaphosa personally had an uncomfortable time with the probing of the evidence leaders on issue after issue: about the failure of State Security; about the questionable work of the ANC's Deployment Committee; above all, about the failure of the party and its leadership to act against flagrant malfeasance and corruption that went unchecked for years.

It is all in the record now and due for coverage and comment in the commission's report scheduled for October. Meanwhile President Ramaphosa's testimony is widely disparaged and charges of personal escapology continue, resting on the one inescapable fact that what happened happened on his watch: that even if he was not actually responsible for it, he did nothing to stop it. 

The charge carries weight. Cyril Ramaphosa is morally compromised by remaining part of the Zuma administration and is not freed from it by appearing to claim it was someone else's job to take action against corruption, as he did in the case of Popo Molefe, Chair of the Passenger Rail Agency, Prasa.  Doing the right thing is not the sole responsibility of a few positioned to act. It is a duty, met or not, placed on each and every one of us.

As sentence is pronounced, are there any mitigating circumstances? It depends.

This is President Ramaphosa's second appearance before Zondo and former president Zuma went to prison rather than continue with his first. This could mark a difference between the two men that may be more than a fancy in the eye of the beholder. Even the Jacob Zuma Foundation acknowledges Cyril Ramaphosa is not the same man as their founder. If moral judgments are always to be made, one may be in order here.

It is worth pointing out also that when you are in a badly managed or, far worse, crooked business or institution, it is not a simple decision to leave, especially if you have a position of responsibility. You may feel things will improve or that you can help them improve by staying in there; at the very least you have your loyalty to colleagues to consider, along with all the implications that quitting your post has for your family, friends and your reputation.

It is not a 'defense' of Cyril Ramaphosa to say he was in that position and to add that it wouldn't have changed things if he had quit, nor does it confirm he was somehow exonerating or condoning ANC corruption by staying on as he did. 

It shows what is obvious: quitting would simply mean Zuma had won. Whereas now Zuma has lost.

 

 

Did Mitch McConnell do the right thing?

As I was impressed with Mitch McConnell's apparent position in the days leading up to Donald Trump's Senate trial,* am I surprised, disappointed, devastated, at his decision yesterday to acquit? 

Millions will be, and not just US Democrats. Ardent Trump supporters will be infuriated by McConnell's outright condemnation of the former president, at his damning words at the end of the trial that there was no doubt Trump was guilty as charged, a betrayal of their champion. McConnell showed he is one of the 'weak' Congressional members Trump had warned them about and mustered his cavalry against on January 6, a RINO, a traitor who will certainly not save himself by his hypocritical vote. 

But there is more to consider here than the passion on both sides to fault Mr McConnell. Trump's trial can be looked at as a legal, moral, constitutional or political case. On the moral case, McConnell was unequivocal: Trump is a disgrace. On the legal case, he was clear Trump was still open to prosecution under the law, notwithstanding his acquittal by the Senate. Indeed, his final remarks seemed to be advocating that as the proper way to go.

McConnell then took the view that for the Senate, and each US Senator, impeachment demands the strictest constitutional duty. All were agreed to follow and safeguard the Constitution and, under the Constitution, impeachment is a political not legal process. No penalty, no punishment follows a verdict of guilty in the Senate. The House prosecution team had themselves pointed that out.

Still less, McConnell argued, is the Senate appointed moral guardian of 'the president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States' who alone may be impeached for 'Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors'. The Constitution provides for those impeached to be removed from office and 'disqualified to hold and enjoy any Office of honor under the United States', but not in any other way judged. Donald Trump was already out of office, immune as a private citizen.

It seems a harsh limitation in face of the justifiable outrage at a democratic president's shocking conduct and the horrors of January 6 at the US Capitol. McConnell admitted it made it a very 'close' decision - his word - relying on a narrow interpretation of impeachment under the US Constitution. But how can it be inadmissible or 'wrong' as a Constitutional reading, or as an explanation for Mr McConnell's otherwise inexplicable vote?

Except that a nagging question remains, undoubtedly forever now. Was it an unalloyed decision, absolutely inescapable from the Constitution's written words? Or did the political case, the Republican case, in the end decide the matter?

*Mitch McConnell's Moment, January 13 2021

Will the US Senate vote to convict Trump?

 

Mitch McConnell’s speech in Congress this week was the finest a Republican could make, suspending fears that individual conscience and honour are unable to work under liberal democracy's party system that mainly turns representatives into servants.

Calmly and decently, without grandiloquence or political carping, he showed, with examples, that Democrats have no moral superiority, no right whatever to sermonize, but only that democracy cannot side with Donald Trump. If principle is involved here at all, that is the principle.

A day or so later, the news was Mitch McConnell has thought further; he feels Republicans should 'purge' the party of this president and his legacy. 

All of a sudden, the solution seemed obvious, a clear and undeniable duty: House Republicans must vote to impeach their rogue president. It was not an argument, not even difficult anymore. It is democracy to do so. And so they decided.

But a week is a long time in politics.

Now there are at least three objections and serious concerns on both sides: conviction will exacerbate not heal divisions in the US; a vindictive reaction is inherently undesirable and itself undemocratic; and if the Senate fails to convict, Trump will be vindicated and his supporters and cause encouraged, the worst possible outcome.

President-elect Biden and Mitch McConnell are said to have a sound working relationship. The best solution now could well be a political deal that saves the Republican Party's face and allows the new administration to get on with its monumental task of building America back from Covid and a threatening period of civil unrest.

No doubt talks are going on through multiple channels. The wise will wait and see. 

 

 

 

Mitch McConnell's Moment

Having addressed readers on Trump more than once over his four degrading years, I write at this eleventh hour about Mitch McConnell, so that you - and I - have a record of my thoughts before he proves me right or wrong. If right, I will not be content after this moment in history with knowing that I was and didn't mention it.

I thought his speech in Congress this week was the finest a Republican could make, suspending my fear that individual conscience and honour are unable to work under liberal democracy's party system that mainly turns representatives into servants. Calmly and decently, without grandiloquence or political carping, he showed, quoting examples from his thirty six years' experience of it all, that Democrats have no moral superiority, no right whatever to sermonize, but only that democracy cannot side with Donald Trump. If principle is involved here at all, that is the principle.

Last night, as we watched, the news was Mitch McConnell has thought further; he feels Republicans should 'purge' the party of this president and his legacy. 

All of a sudden, the solution is obvious, a clear and undeniable duty: House Republicans must vote today to impeach their rogue president. It is not an argument, not even difficult anymore. It is democracy to do so.

If Mitch McConnell is reported accurately and gives the lead when the Senate votes, he is not a traitor as many will assuredly claim. Donald Trump will lose his power and future chance of it from the right decision made for the best of reasons: that what he stands for never was democracy and democracy gives everyone the means to defeat it.

We will see if that is dreaming.

Two days later

Though a week is well known to be a long time time in politics, I have not already changed my mind by Friday. I believe Trump should be found guilty by the Senate and face appropriate penalties. I hope sufficient Republican Senators will vote accordingly.

At the same time I understand the objections we hear from both sides and share the serious concerns. There are at least three: conviction will exacerbate not heal divisions; a vindictive reaction is inherently undesirable and itself undemocratic; if the Senate fails to convict, Trump will be vindicated and his supporters and cause encouraged, the worst possible outcome.

President-elect Biden and Mitch McConnell are said to have a sound working relationship. The best solution now could well be a political deal that saves the Republican Party's face and allows the new administration to get on with its monumental task of building America back from Covid and a threatening period of civil unrest.

No doubt talks are going on through multiple channels. The wise will wait and see. 

The Unsettled Settlement: the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement

As I began with a short piece just two days* after David Cameron's calamitously misjudged Brexit referendum of June 23 2016, it seems fitting to glance now at the proclaimed end of the crisis: the passing into law four and a half rancorous years later of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. 

First, Boris Johnson has done what he said he'd do, at least as far as he and his supporters are concerned, which is what counts: he can forever boast he took the UK out of the EU; second, he and the EU managed to avoid No Deal. That comes as a relief, though as Michael Heseltine has remarked, the kind of relief with which a condemned man hears his execution has been commuted to life.

For even for the layman, without studying the small print, it is hard to see this moment as the end of the issues or Britain's woes. Apart from obvious gaps - no finality on the status of Britain's services industry or the arbitration mechanism for disputes; disappointment for the fishermen on both sides; a return to red tape and border checks, disingenuously passed over by the Tory government as 'bumps in the road' - it is plain the strained, last minute accord is neither breach nor settlement. It envisages fresh negotiations if either party diverges from its terms, a procedure likely to become permanent, similar to Switzerland's ad hoc arrangements with the EU.

Will these negotiations be an easy and cheap exercise between friends, or a fraught and costly contest of rivals, a slow poison to Britain's international relations and domestic politics as Labour leader Keir Starmer moves on from his tactical approval of the deal this week? Or will the outcome be a series of treaty revisions that restores in all but name the status quo ante Brexit?

Four and a half years ago I wrote that 'Britain is in Europe whether it likes it or not; it's called History and Geography. There is no way out of either of them.'

Who is sure this morning anything has changed?

*June 25 2016: BREXIT: WHERE TO NOW? 

Christmas Greetings, 2020

It seems wholly inadequate to wish the usual 'Merry Christmas' after this awful year for everyone, so here are my authentic thoughts and wishes for what is going to be the historic Christmas, 2020. Better luck next year and in the years to come.

The Christmas Present To End All Christmas Presents, then, will be a Brexit deal that people said was certain to happen while being unable to say how. Boris Johnson's troubles, and I would imagine and hope political demise, will start now. 

The question with Trump is whether he is actually unhinged or just building his fascist legend of no-surrender - or, what some believe, collecting the dollars he's going to need for a remaining lifetime of litigation. Anyway he will go down in history in infamy as, we must hope, will the wing of the GOP that is supporting him to the end. Similar hopes too for the Tory cabal that misled our quaint country, too easily deceived, too insular to adapt to change, into the backward step of Brexit.

So, you see, I am both downcast and hopeful at the same time now. It is sad to live in these times after a lifetime of better ones, the Cold War notwithstanding, yet more depressing to see no end to Covid. 

I hope you and yours are all safe and well and wish you the best for this holiday season that, they say, is like no other holiday season. 

Donald Trump: is it a case of the f-word?

Is Donald Trump a fascist, plotting in his White House bunker? 

Disconcertingly, the answer to the question rests with us. Fascism lies on the right of the political spectrum, though precisely where right differs from centre right and hard right becomes far right is for many to say and no one to tell. 

Scanning a person's attitudes and beliefs goes so far, but sentiments and issues always overlap, boundaries blur and collide with one another, until we are at some wild outer extreme where there are no limits. Plainly President Trump is not there.*

Ask instead, then, whether Donald Trump is a democrat (the lower case 'd' in this context taken as read). Now our answer depends on what we understand by democracy. A typical dictionary definition reads: 'Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives'. 

But this falls a long way short. It omits any reference to typical democratic institutions, bicameral parliaments and the separation of the powers; to the customary coupling of the terms democracy and liberal in 'liberal democracy'; to the working of these and other norms and practices to enable peaceful change; to the foundations of such democracy in individualism, pluralism and human rights; to the character of a leader and leadership.

How far has Donald Trump met these values, worked to bolster them, stayed not just within the letter of the law and the US Constitution, but honoured their spirit? Though he is not a Democrat and entitled not to be, is he a democrat?

Donald Trump challenges us personally on this: he has seventy million voters behind him saying that he is and he won.

But he too is challenged. It is not only the vote count that makes millions more know Donald Trump lost and democracy has won.

*Note of January 8 2021: I considered ending this sentence with 'yet' and finally decided against it as Donald Trump was not out of hand at the time of writing.

What is true in this post-truth age?

Can you believe a word of it?

All those questions that occupied us before Covid-19 arrived to scoop the lot - the ones that were not a matter of life and death: remember them?
 

Is Donald Trump making America Great Again? Will the British be better off for Brexit? Was colonialism all bad? Is government by the ANC any better? Was apartheid a crime against humanity? Oscar Pistorius - guilty or innocent?

Did Americans really land on the moon? Does homeopathy work? Is butter good for you? What exactly do you mean by 'good'?

In an already crowded and noisy world, the internet has finally done for answers. Today there is no opinion, no belief, intuition, revelation, faith, concept, hypothesis, theory, statistic, authority, logic, reasoning - no right, wrong, common sense or well known fact that someone somewhere cannot declare is not true. To Flat Earthers, the world is not round. To an economist, Covid-19 is not a simple matter of life and death.
 

Yet how does that make sense? If what we hear is false, something else must be true or how do we tell the difference? What is this something called the truth? Who has it and speaks for it? To convince everyone, it must be more than a contrary or contrasting opinion. Is the truth available in every case, can it settle all arguments?

Religion makes its claim here and insists the source is God. But while that is true for the faithful, the problem has always been too many have insufficient faith, or the wrong faith, or no faith. That religion holds the truth is probably the oldest and most disputed truth of all.

Science is more circumspect. Science speaks of what it reveals or establishes as 'regularities' rather than truth. A scientific theory - not, note, a scientific hypothesis - is the surest form of knowledge homo sapiens has because it is tested and observed, observed and tested, to a point where the outcome is predictable. But the word is predictable rather than certain. Scientists see their theories, however tried and trusted, as provisional, not as a metaphor for another world altogether. That remains the inference of non-scientists.
 

How then to proceed in what is acknowledged as our post-truth, counter-factual age with its debilitating arguments and potential for violence?
 

One view is to accept that logical argument or facts cannot make us agree with people we disagree with. Disagreements stem from a cognitive or cultural bias, or both. We disagree not because the 'facts' are in dispute or missing, least of all because one or other side is right and wrong, but because we think differently as people.
 

This is persuasive. We are often told nowadays the difference between left and right has disappeared. But differences are as marked as ever whether people are polled on traditional issues like capital punishment and rape, or on pressing contemporary issues, domestic violence, global warming, same-sex marriage.

When social conservatives disparagingly call liberals 'libtards' and liberals return the compliment by labelling social conservatives 'far  right', the difference appears to be fundamental: not one between people, but in people. If that is so, is the difference nature or nurture - in today's parlance, hard-wired or learned? Does that explain why so many insist multiculturalism does not and cannot work while millions of others pin their hopes on it?

We seem trapped in an ever-revolving door with these questions. Yet there is a way out, so wide open it is considered absurd, if not profane, to point it out: there is no such thing as the truth - that is merely the way we use words. If you stop speaking of the truth and claiming you possess it, the problems disappear.

After thousands of years of knowing otherwise, people find this idea preposterous. How could anyone do that? How would we know right from wrong, good from bad, sense from nonsense? If there's no truth, what would replace it?

Oddly enough, you have just said it: knowing would replace it. Knowledge is the word we should use, not truth. Try it ...

Some readers know President Trump is the greatest US President ever; some know he is the worst. They both know it for sure, but neither is true ...

Helen Zille definitely knows colonialism wasn't all bad, but a million EFF supporters in South Africa know it was. Insiders know the US moon landing was faked, except those who know for a fact Apollo 11 landed on the moon ...

And so on. You see, we know what we know and it works perfectly for everyone; no more arguments, no more fights.

"Nah! None of this BS's true."

Brexit: the end of the beginning

 

Brexit has not been 'done': anyone who has followed the plot at all will know January 31 2020 is only the date when negotiations between the UK and the EU start at last. But at least the date marks a new situation, the release Britain's democracy reportedly longed for, so let us pause and look at events so far.

 

In the end it was as simple as Boris Johnson has always striven to make it appear. What was necessary was a hand-picked cabinet of right wingers, Mr Dominic Cummings' hard-faced control and power to dismiss or ruin anyone who did not stay on message, and Mr Johnson's ability to reduce any serious matter to a laugh.

 

His 'oven-ready' Brexit recipe ('Gas Mark Four in the Microwave' was Mr Johnson's populist pleasantry on the campaign trail to spice up a more indigestible hash than the one he had earlier turned his nose up at and replace his original appetiser of your-cake-and-eat-it - but why not another culinary trope if it works?) was then swallowed gratefully in the general election.

 

There is no arguing with an election; that is liberal democracy even if a dated, simple-majority, advisory referendum presented as a mandate is arguably not. So what went wrong, if indeed anything went wrong? Again, it is simpler than both sides will now make out.

 

The record does not show Jeremy Corbyn supporting Europe; socialism in one country perhaps better describes his position. But whatever his personal views or those of the wing of the Labour Party that supports him, Mr Corbyn could not declare for Remain or Leave. His party, mirroring Labour voters throughout the country, was divided top to bottom on it.

The Tories, still in government following Theresa May's resignation, had to decide on a new leader and they had decided on Mr Johnson. When he said Leave was do or die, he was for once serious: that is exactly what it was for them all politically. Mr Corbyn in Opposition, lacking the conviction and leadership qualities to make a bold stand, sat on the fence to the end.

 

And a bitter end it is. Mr Corbyn is being blamed for something any political analyst could have told him: that 'the workers' can vote Labour all their lives but still be social conservatives (note the small 'c'). When to get Brexit done they were even ready to join the Conservatives with a capital 'C', how could a radical programme of tax and spend, earnest pledges to accommodate the many in a new, kinder world, win the day?

Yet no form of Brexit can make those questions disappear; for now that must be Labour's consolation. Democracy is the best form of government, not a guarantee of the best outcome. 

 

 

 

 

 

The British General Election: The Money Is Mine

One-Nation Conservatism under the Boris Johnson government?

Can the liberal vision of one world ever work?

One of the most elusive and disputed mysteries of life, if not the fundamental mystery, is how homo sapiens has a sense of identity and what its nature is.

We understand that a medieval European peasant - or nobleman - did not think as the new middle and mercantile classes began to think in the 17th and 18th Centuries and that none of them could have seen things as we 'moderns' see things today.

But the explanation for such differences is open to any interest and agenda. It is Religion - no, it's Science. It is Capitalism at work - no, Marxism. It is Society, Culture, IQ, Race. It is Progress. No, it's not - there's no such thing as Progress.

Or could it simply be we live as and with different types of people?

The conservative view today that technocratic governance is stifling individual freedom, and the claim that a common humanity is the fabrication of a left wing elite for its own purposes, need  to  be interrogated, not taken for granted. As should the nativist idea that a man or woman cannot be German or Afrikaans and also feel Austrian and South African, wider still European and African, and beyond that, a member of the human race.

People have more identities, more ideas of themselves on offer now, than the medieval peasant or educated nobleman could ever dream of. Is it possible, in the way of things, some have moved further than others since the 12th, 18th or 20th Century and haven't stopped yet?

Why do South Africans go on voting for the African National Congress?

Why would anyone vote ANC, given the party's record of corruption followed now, under President Cyril Ramaphosa, by division, bitter in-fighting and deadlock? It is more a mystery than a question, considering the negative coverage the ANC gets in the media.

Most regular journalists seem to avoid exploring it. They may feel it somehow undemocratic, even running a risk, to argue there is no real option. Or they know perhaps they can rely on the social media these days to come up with an answer.

On Twitter and in the comment columns of news and political websites, explanations are never lacking: people who vote ANC either have their noses in the trough or are looking to have their noses in the trough. Alternatively, they have been bought or are unintelligent. There are many learned exchanges on the proof furnished by IQ tests.

There’s no doubt some truth in it all, as in politics everywhere. But like all generalities, it also makes one wonder. Is there really no hope, not an honest ANC man or woman anywhere? Not in the Revenue, for instance? Not speaking out at the Zondo Commission? And can’t the people - the voters - vote ANC simply because they want to or choose to? Is that really the same as being stupid?

Another popular explanation is people vote ANC because of identity politics, sometimes termed identitarian politics to make the matter weigh more significantly. Liberals tend to bridle at this, seeing it as a threat if not racist, and they may have a point. All politics is identity politics because there has to be a sense of mutual identity to identify with anything. There is the consideration too, since the population of SA is 80% black, that the majority can hardly avoid colouring the party they vote for.  

That leaves the President Cyril Ramaphosa factor, the New Dawn that he promised South Africans, but which, the ubiquitous doomsayers insist, is a False Dawn.

This piece, however, is not to get into that debate yet again, to claim that Mr Ramaphosa may or may not be trusted, or that he is weak and not moving fast enough. It is to put another view entirely.

There appear to be three reasons people vote - or don’t vote - as they do: habit, loyalty and reason.

Habit, a very powerful human instinct/motivator, is clearly at work in people who vote for the same party all their lives - because their parents did, or the local community does, or because they just can't ever be bothered.  These include those who 'don't trust politicians' and it also explains those who don't vote at all, and why they often are the ones that grumble most at the terrible state of affairs.

It's like putting the cap back on the toothpaste: you either do or you don't.

Loyalty is hard to tell apart from habit and no doubt often overlaps with it, but it may be a more elevated form of behaviour, or more stupid, depending, ironically, on your loyalties.

Loyalty seems straightforward enough: we naturally take sides and, having taken them, we stick with them come what may; it may be related to not wanting to be proved wrong. It generally has little to do with logic and nothing whatever to do with right and wrong and it is therefore puzzling why people sneer at others who stick with a particular political party or politician, when they themselves never desert their favourite soccer or rugby team however often it disappoints.

Then there's reason. Now that's the hard one. We all have Reason; that stands to reason. We think that anyone capable of reason would never vote ANC. In the same way, we reason no one would ever vote DA and anyone who votes for Donald Trump has taken leave of their senses. Yet there are people who do it, who would vote Hitler or Stalin still, or Barak Obama, or Emmanuel Macron and give you reasons for it. After all, people even vote for Nigel Farage.

Reason, the organising principle of democracy, is as deceptive a guide as any other. It does not lead us all to do the right thing or the best thing. And it definitely doesn't make us all do the same thing.

 

Yellowhammer - the British Government's Brexit assessment, not the bird

The leaked Tory government report Yellowhammer, setting out the risks of fuel, food and medicine shortages following Britain leaving the EU without a deal on October 31, is causing yet more outrage and denial in a gravely divided country. However, it is conclusive on at least four issues:

 

It shows Brexit is little or nothing to do with 'trade', but is ideological. No rational government aware of these risks would otherwise persist in running them.

 

It shows talk of fulfilling 'the will of the people' is a sham. A government that respected 'the people' would give the people a chance to review the situation in the light of Yellowhammer, its own and latest assessment. That would mean, at the very least, holding another referendum on Brexit.

 

It shows the claim voters would lose faith in democracy if cheated of Brexit by politicians is also a sham. If the people are 'not stupid', as politicians always like to say, the people will be intelligent enough to understand the need for them to re-consider and reaffirm their earlier opinion of June 23 2016. Indeed an intelligent 'people' would now insist on the opportunity to do so.

 

It proves Brexit is and always has been about the Tory government and party's interest, not the national interest. The fact that Labour and other opposition MPs and voters support Brexit does not alter this. It shows that opposing the Conservatives does not necessarily rule out being politically and socially conservative.

 

On Covid, global warming and other heated arguments

Every scientific hypothesis and theory attracts debate and dissent and people often think that is 'proof' the science is 'wrong', or even some kind of conspiracy or swindle.

 

That is a misunderstanding of science, which is not in the business of 'proving' or 'disproving' things, but rather of pointing to tendencies and causalities that may be taken to exist until they are shown by further testing and evidence not to exist.

 

In other words, all scientific knowledge is provisional and the opposite of dogma and belief.

 

People who doubt science on Covid and global warming often cannot see that to anyone thinking scientifically, the dissenting view may also turn out to be unreliable. The heated disagreements that follow settle nothing because they are the result of a difference in people's thinking and understanding.

So what is the answer then? How do you know which side is right?

The question is wrong. Outcomes in a scientific debate rest strictly on testing and evaluation that may take many years and, in the case of Covid, global warming and our own natures and origins, may never arrive at a complete answer.

On many subjects we have no alternative but to apply to people who specialise in them. The scientific question to ask scientists is: What is the weight of scientific opinion on this, not Who is right or wrong. There will always be dissidents.

 

Will Brexit be the end of liberal democracy?

Someone asked me in the Comment section of a political website, What is liberal and democratic about this type of politics?
 

He was referring to the poisonous stalemate, the 'circus' as some call it, the divisions to the point of madness that Brexit has brought to Great Britain. I replied:

 

I think the answer to your question is that what you see happening, with all its twists and turns, backstabbing, backsliding and blatant hypocrisies, is liberal democracy. This is how it works, this is it in action. What you get is what you see. But you have to cast off illusions and wishful thinking and look straight at realities.

 

Someone else asks in a comment addressed to me, What was the purpose of the referendum? To me, it was quite clearly to solve the Tory party's internal and electoral problems: its intractable Euro-sceptic wing that existed before Britain even joined the Common Market, coupled with the alarming rise for the Tory party of the far right UKIP.

 

We can argue about this, all of us, about the meaning of 'right' and 'left', about how the other side is wrong on each and every issue as it crops up and continue arguing as long as we like. But if there's any such thing as the truth, that is the truth: the referendum was called to solve the Tory party's problems as the leadership of that party saw them in governing under the British party system. 

 

The ramifications of that decision are proving enormous, splitting the parties and country and threatening the traditional workings of the constitution, one of the oldest representative democracies.

 

That is liberal democracy, or at least liberal democracy going through one of its crises. It isn't the first and won't be the last.

 

Those who don't like it need to consider the alternatives.

So if Boris Johnson takes the UK out of the EU on 31 October 2019, you will endorse the decision as liberal and democratic?

If Mr Johnson manages to take the UK out, I will never endorse that decision, but I do not think we should overthrow the system or start a war. And because there are millions like me, the argument will continue.

 

 



First Love

Dear Elizabeth

Please read this with all your care.

There's nothing unpleasant in it, only two questions at the end only you in all the world can answer. They come from a time when your life had not really begun. Or mine.

 

I took you to the opera at Sadler's Wells. Carmen.

 

It was in 19--, in February, I'm sure it was.

 

I remember scattered fragments from the evening, five or six moments like old black and white photographs kept in a drawer over a lifetime.

 

Can you remember? Do you remember me, Paul Whelan? If you do, you must remember we never met or ever talked again.

 

I've always wondered. Was I of any interest to you at all? And if I wasn't then, could you perhaps have become interested if I'd tried?

 

Forever those questions. Please don't think you have to be polite or tactful. Take your time.

 

If you are able to say and don't mind my asking, please tell me now.

 

Best wishes.

 

 

Brexit: after parliament says No to everything

As Britain displays every symptom of an advanced stage of madness, the key symptom being political paralysis, can anything be done?

 

Assuming Theresa May’s deal does not pass in the next week, Brexit should be extended sine die, a diplomatic ‘revocation’ of Article 50 that all sides except the diehard right might find acceptable now if only to gain a breather.

 

This should go hand in hand with a General Election. Only a new government and parliament have a chance of renegotiating with the EU. The task is somehow to start again. It sounds awful, but what option is there?

 

A general election throws all the cards up in the air, which is what is needed. May would go, Corbyn might well go. Maybe Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg would go. Who can tell? If MPs of all parties and especially the government are terrified of a GE, you can be sure that’s what the country needs. Democracy must be allowed to work.

 

On no account should there be another referendum, a People’s Vote, or any plebiscite called by any other name you care to call it. Have done with referendums forever from here on, until and unless their use is carefully prescribed in law. They are nothing to do with the British way of government.

 

It is not that it is hard to discover the ‘will of the people’: there is no such thing as ‘the will of the people’. And even if there were, 'the people' do not pass laws or run a country. If we have not learned that at least, everything has indeed been in vain.

 

Meanwhile we seem to be looking at a fair chunk of the rest of our lives. A sort of Twenty First Century Thirty Years War.

 

We live and learn or are nothing.

Is a referendum 'real' democracy, like people say?

No government, it may confidently be said, would hold a referendum it expected to lose.

And, of course, that is how referendums have been used historically and up to the present: as instruments of the executive. Napoleon III of France - sometimes seen as the originator of this style of 'democracy'  - used them to get his way, Mussolini and Hitler to get theirs.

So the first point to grasp about the Brexit referendum is that British prime minister David Cameron lost it. It happens sometimes. It happened, for instance, in February 2000 when Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's referendum produced a No for his new constitution. 'The people's decision' did not suit the autocratic President Mugabe, who ignored it and seized the farms anyway.

However, Cameron's failure and the ensuing calamity are of a different kind altogether, as not only democratic Britain but Europe and the wider world now bear witness. Why has it gone so wrong? Referendums are democracy in action, the people getting the chance to express their will directly. That is proper democracy. Isn't it?

In fact, democracy in practice means representative democracy, not direct democracy, a popular term for a form that does not exist and is never defined or critically examined beyond claims for it being 'real' or 'true' democracy. Like they had in Ancient Greece.

But what institutions can direct democracy draw on today? Referendums on everything? If referendums are not held on everything, who would select what they are held on?

Workers councils or soviets? Demands by petitions, demonstrations, street marches? These are democratic already and, in any event, must still be organised by some leader, party or committee acting as executive on behalf of others. By representatives. 

Underneath it all, 'the will of the people', the idea on which direct democracy relies, is a deception. It is a metaphysical concept impossible to prove or disprove and open to co-option by any interest rich enough to push a facile message across broadcast, press and social media. Social media have not only liberated people and opinion. They have recruited them more effectively than ever.

What we are really talking about when we speak of the will of the people is the current majority for or against something. And we forget majorities change over time. There was a time when the majority was against votes for women. Before that, it was for votes for propertied men. There was a time the majority favoured laws criminalising gays. We are living through that changing right now.

The populists' reply to these objections is essentially rhetorical: an entrenched elite are accused of having contempt for 'the people', of pursuing their own agenda and power through institutions that are broken and media that have been bought. Populists love to say the elite treat ordinary people as stupid.

It's a familiar get out, skipping the question of how direct democracy would or could work institutionally to improve on representative democracy. It's the standby of the left and right in suggesting there's an easy solution to everything, without ever saying what it is.

Today we seem content to leave it there, not to address the obvious objection that if the present 'elite' were replaced it could only be by another one - not to question what that new elite represents and whether its values are democratic at all.

Such contradictions reflect the political divisions of our time rather than contribute to an understanding of how human government does or could work for a better future for all.

 

 

 

Brexit: the best way out for Britain now

The received wisdom at present is that a Brexit ‘deal’ will be scrambled together between Britain and the EU at the last moment because that is how it has always worked in the past.

I still believe that myself - just - on the basis that such a ‘deal’, in reality another face-saving fudge, can be carried over into the transition period to buy time for the desperately placed British prime minister following the rejection of her Chequers plan in Salzburg.

But, after Salzburg, there is an alternative. 
 

If Theresa May goes now or soon, and if Jeremy Corbyn narrowly won an ensuing election, a radical left Labour programme mistrusted by many voters would struggle to remain the priority. The new government would be as bogged down in Brexit as the hopelessly divided Tories. More likely worse.

However, Brexit on the failed Tory lines, and on any of the currently disputed options, would be buried or wide open to review. The new Labour government or, failing that, an ad hoc coalition of some kind, would have to go back to the drawing board.

A fresh start. Not another futile referendum, but a new realism, with 'the will of the people', the mantra that sanctified the 2016 referendum despite its obvious shortcomings, silenced as past its time and unrealisable.

Is it a possibility? Is the leadership there for it?

Back to time-honoured representative government, the bubble of populism popped?