What is Paul Whelan Writing about?

Politics, history, philosophy, psychology ... sounds heavy-going, but I don't believe you'll find that's the case, nor the thoughts on music and opera and the occasional personal recollection of this and that. 

My blog does not try to exhaust any subject it deals with, much less to exhaust what else might be said on it from different sides. It has a point of view though. All writing has.

If it tries anything, it is to make some points to think about, whether that is for, against or undecided. You'll judge whether it succeeds at that at all.

Has Rishi Sunak done the trick?

 

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his team have clearly worked hard to find a decent way round the crisis caused by Boris Johnson's Northern Ireland Protocol, it being perhaps the most disagreed part of the widely disagreed UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement*.

Together with the EU, they have paid due attention to the practicalities, the economic concerns, politics and ideological positions of the different interests the former Prime Minister neglected. By contrast, and subject to no invincible devils hiding in the detail, the resulting Windsor Framework appears as a range of considered proposals and a commendable achievement. 

The questions that will not go away are how and whether this framework can be built on. Is it solid enough to structure lasting arrangements in Northern Ireland or, failing that, how long before it must be dismantled as a makeshift? 

Perhaps more awkwardly, is it entirely fanciful to see a constitutionally devolved region, one foot in the European Union and outperforming economically because of it, becoming a kind of fifth column inside a not-so-United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? Questions around Brexit, sole cause of this and so many internal divisions and contradictions, are not going away either. 

Long term there seem to be only four dependable ways out of the Northern Ireland dilemma: 1) Defeat or ditch the DUP and Tory Brexit Irreconcilables; 2) A united Ireland; 3) Defeat or ditch the European Union.

An answer to 1) could be closer than we think: Mr Sunak has said there will be a parliamentary vote on the Framework. Tory terror of wipeout in the general election will ensure the Ayes have it and maybe some Brexit hardliners will go along with it and maybe some won't. Either way it's hard to see them carrying the same clout afterwards.

The answer to 2) calls for prophecy, always of doubtful reliability.

And 3) is just one more pipedream of Brexit, which the public are coming to see is a total fantasy. 

Many will also see the Windsor Framework is essentially a sideshow and point to the likeliest way out of the real problem given time: Number 4) Rejoin. 

Some will say it has started already.

*The Unsettled Settlement, December 31 2020

 

Has Sunak's Windsor Framework done the trick?

 

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his team have clearly worked hard to find a decent way round the crisis caused by Boris Johnson's Northern Ireland Protocol, it being perhaps the most disagreed part of the widely disagreed UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement*.

Together with the EU, they have paid due attention to the practicalities, the economic concerns, politics and ideological positions of the different interests the former Prime Minister neglected. By contrast, and subject to no invincible devils hiding in the detail, the resulting Windsor Framework appears as a range of considered proposals and a commendable achievement. 

The questions that will not go away are how and whether this framework can be built on. Is it solid enough to structure lasting arrangements in Northern Ireland or, failing that, how long before it must be dismantled as a makeshift? 

Perhaps more awkwardly, is it entirely fanciful to see a constitutionally devolved region, one foot in the European Union and outperforming economically because of it, becoming a kind of fifth column inside a not-so-United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? Questions around Brexit, sole cause of this and so many internal divisions and contradictions, are not going away either. 

Long term there seem to be only four dependable ways out of the Northern Ireland dilemma: 1) Defeat or ditch the DUP and Tory Brexit Irreconcilables; 2) A united Ireland; 3) Defeat or ditch the European Union.

An answer to 1) could be closer than we think: Mr Sunak has said there will be a parliamentary vote on the Framework. Tory terror of wipeout in the general election will ensure the Ayes have it and maybe some Brexit hardliners will go along with it and maybe some won't. Either way it's hard to see them carrying the same clout afterwards.

The answer to 2) calls for prophecy, always of doubtful reliability.

And 3) is just one more pipedream of Brexit, which the public are coming to see is a total fantasy. 

Many will also see the Windsor Framework is essentially a sideshow and point to the likeliest way out of the real problem given time: Number 4) Rejoin. 

Some will say it has started already.

*The Unsettled Settlement, December 31 2020

 

Should we trust what we read in the newspapers?

The tradition among the print and broadcast media is 'balance'. They assume an overriding duty to a public interest commonly taken to be 'the truth'. All news and issues are supposed to be presented objectively, shorn of politics unless it is covered from the two sides, for and against. The media see themselves as being either neutral or fair.

The notion of balance has a powerful audience appeal. We, the people are said to be capable of thinking for ourselves and need only to be given the facts without bias. A favourite saying of politicians is 'the people are not fools' and media professionals repeat the flattery. Everyone agrees we can decide what's true once we have the facts.

It may feel we're all on the same page on this, but the story is unconvincing. The media, on the left or right, plainly do not offer balance. They take sides and press opinions more uncompromisingly than ever because social media can leave them behind now on any tricky topic of the day. 

Distracted if not divided by this though we are, we citizens, as a body, complain unceasingly about the media's wicked ways, whatever their political colours. 

We rail against the influence of press barons and wealth, the glaring omissions and outright lies of MSM news coverage and TV documentaries; we claim the 'woke' have taken over or the fascists have. Across social media there's relief that Donald Trump's once vaunted truth-telling is no longer the force it was; in the UK, the right wing are outraged by the BBC's pushing 'lefty views' and the lefties are outraged by Britain's national broadcaster 'suppressing' them. 

Can some sense be found in this jumble? Rather than look only at what the media are doing, we need to look at the media's audiences. That's all of us.

Aren't we, the people, simply showing 'confirmation bias'? Everyone's heard about confirmation bias today. It's our tendency to seek out opinions that we agree with. Life is less of a problem that way. 

Confirmation bias may be exercised consciously but, much more often, works unconsciously. Either way we're not buying our usual tabloid or tuning into CNN or Fox News because we're looking for balance. We're spending our money and time on confirmation. Far from the media offering balance, it appears the media are telling us what we want to hear.

This cannot be made illegal; people are entitled to their different loyalties; we take sides. That's individual rights and democracy. But it raises questions we can easily overlook.

Do the media manipulate us, pull the strings as the illustration to this article proposes, or do they simply reflect our biases? If the media are biased only because we are, is there any harm in it?

On the other hand, if they are manipulating us, what are they doing it for? If the usual answer is correct - it's for money and power - why don't they make money and grab power by taking the other side? It's equally open to them. What makes them choose?

Whatever the answer to that, we cannot escape our own part here. Confirming time and again that we're right about something - shocking! just like I spotted before! - can convince us we're always right about everything. If that's not good, what's worse is that it makes other people, other opinions, always wrong. Which ones? All of them! They're either hiding some sinister agenda or fools. (The italics indicate irony: the people aren't fools, remember?)

And if we refuse to negotiate because the others are wrong, if we mustn't give in because we're always right, if we scorn to work with fools, how can we or society manage to succeed? What's the answer? 

A start would be never to trust what you read in the papers.

Is Susan's order of noodles not rice a free choice?

 

It was a question in an online Masterclass: was Susan making a free choice when she ordered noodles instead of rice with her Chinese meal?

Most of us would say at once, Of course. She could have ordered rice if she’d chosen to. Or not ordered rice or noodles and asked for chips that were not even on the menu. Susan can do what she likes. Susan has free will.

Well, has she? Science and thinking about it can suggest otherwise.

I answered first that she did not make a free choice. There were alternatives on the menu, but Susan chose noodles because she wanted noodles, not rice. Obviously. That left her, in effect, with no choice.

Then I thought, it’s a question in a Masterclass. They must expect more thought than the obvious. And so I thought some more.

Did Susan choose noodles because she always chooses noodles? Wouldn’t that suggest that she hasn’t got free will like I said - that she’s just ‘programmed’ to choose noodles? Then I thought, on the other hand, even if she’s programmed like that, she’s still free to break with the programme. She could order something else, including rice, if she chooses to. And so I changed my answer to she has got free will.

But now I examined my reasons more closely. I was seeing this little Masterclass problem in terms of Susan’s choice, which of course begs the question - meaning the question itself assumes she has a choice. (We all assume that, don’t we?) But what if we don’t have a choice? So I changed again and decided, finally, Susan did not make a free choice. What she wanted determined she would choose noodles, at least on that occasion.

Which means my first, instinctive answer was the right answer, though it didn't explain why. In this way.

The choice and the action are not always two ‘events’ - that is, first we decide to have noodles as opposed to rice and then we order noodles. The two can be one and the same thing. This idea can be confusing at first, contrary to common sense, but becomes clearer with another example.

I choose to raise my left arm .. and it’s raised. I choose not to raise my left arm .. and so it’s not raised. We believe we’re making a choice between two options when our action must plainly be one. Your arm is raised because you’ve chosen to raise it; or it stays put because you’ve chosen not to raise it. The action does not involve any choice: the action is the choice.

Now that still seems strange, even wrong, until we see there's a quite simple explanation for all this.

Susan could have chosen rice, looking back, because free choice and free will are what we always have when we’re looking back or forward, not faculties we necessarily exercise at the time. Occasionally we glimpse and confirm this. We say about something we've done, I felt I had no choice. Is freedom only what we believe we have, not a reality?

 

Why are we conscious of having a mind?

As we go through life, our mind and body seem separate from each other, to exist independently. We could list endless examples of it here but there is no need to; we're all familiar with the feeling and most of us take it for granted to the end. Especially then, perhaps.

Psychologists and neuroscientists and philosophers of course do not. They wonder what consciousness is, who ‘I’ am, what 'the mind' is that experiences the outside world, and an inner world, as ‘me’. They’re hard at it more than ever these days and will never stop.

I’m not a neuroscientist, a certificated psychologist and not, I rather hope, a philosopher, which sounds a stuffy thing to be. But I have an answer for me myself that may network with you yourself - if we've connected so far.

Remember when you were a child? How the world was exactly like it seemed - real? You didn’t know about the difference between reality and perception and so never had any illusions. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy visited. Even now, it is forever warm summer teatime in the garden with the fresh green smell of someone mowing the grass, and Mum and Dad and your sister there, with you always.

“We do not know the substance of things, we have no idea of them,” wrote Isaac Newton, around the time grown-ups were starting to enquire in earnest about such matters - to reason scientifically. As children, we didn’t know philosophers and thinkers had spotted, perhaps always known, the world could not be just as we see, hear, touch, taste and smell it: in other words, fully known through our senses. It didn’t occur to us in childhood that we were part of what the world was and, as part of it, must partly create it*. As adults, the evidence is there, as plain as it could be, in everyone conceiving the world and themselves within it differently.

The question today is to what extent we create reality. That can lead, for the perverse, to whether there is reality and us in it at all, when a myriad of virtual worlds is now ‘fact’.

But at least how we create the world and us in it seems to have become clear: we couldn’t do it without our bodies.  Without our bodies, there is no world. As we build cities and plan to visit other planets, real or imaginary, our bodies, when aroused, declare us in love; our face flushes when we’re flattered or angry; tears flow when we're sad; in danger, we find our legs quick to run away; our arms and hands move to write something serious down, or pick up a cup.

Our bodies, with our brains as control centre, grapple with the world as part of the world. Like the child knows its body is everything, we can know the idea that ‘I think, therefore I am’ is not everything. Our body is our actions, our perceptions, beliefs, hopes and dreams, our understanding and what makes up what we call our consciousness. Me. You. Everybody.

     *In philosophical terms, we did not know about Kant's separation of subject and object.                            

                            My wonderful sister Barbara left her world and ours last night    

                                                                           

                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

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.