We are the weeds

My previous post on Katrina and its aftermath focused on the contribution made by incompetence – albeit willed and cultivated incompetence. This post is about malice.

As I wrote earlier,

FEMA is now functionally subordinate to the Department of Homeland Security, founded after September 11; this may help explain why FEMA’s interventions in New Orleans placed such an emphasis on securing the perimeter of the city and ensuring that nobody, as a general policy, moved. The triumph of the Homeland Security worldview: natural disasters as a public order problem.

Apparently the Homeland Security worldview predates the Department itself; here’s a passage from the FEMA article I quoted earlier:

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration endowed FEMA with extraordinary powers to keep the country running – powers bordering on martial law, critics argued. The agency became responsible for “continuity of government” plans devoted to salvaging national authority in the event of a nuclear attack. Other plans, drafted by the likes of National Security Council aide Oliver North, laid the groundwork for rounding up rabble-rousers in the event of societal breakdown, whatever the cause.

Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Stronsky’s story, in case you haven’t read it already, is a graphic illustration of how this approach works out in practice. Now picture the forces of order going from house to house as the floodwaters subside, taking survivors away to ‘refugee camps’, in handcuffs if necessary (I heard that last detail on BBC Radio 4 this morning). And picture the forces of order waiting outside New Orleans until they had built up a large enough force to pacify a supposed insurrection. (Not for the first time, China at Lenin’s Tomb has got the goods: the army had no delusions about their remit – it was not to secure human life and bring supplies, but to suppress an “insurgency”.) If the aftermath of Katrina is a problem, in other words, the survivors aren’t the people who have got the problem – the survivors are part of the problem. In the words of a FEMA staffer at an Oklahoma internment camp, You don’t understand the type of people that are about to come here.

What type of people is that? Here’s Barbara Bush, wife of one President and mother of another, visiting a stadium in Houston which was being used as a holding camp:

What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this – this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them.

And here’s her boy, visiting Mobile, Alabama:

The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.

Even if we forget who Trent Lott is, this is dreadful, Marie Antoinette stuff. All those people have lost everything? They’ll be OK – after all, my friend lost his house, and he’s building a new one… If we remember that Trent Lott is the Republican who endorsed the segregationist Strom Thurmond (“we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years”); and if we remember that most of the people who got stuck in those New Orleans internment camps are Black… I’m not suggesting that George W. Bush and his government are pursuing an actively racist agenda – that they saw the chaos caused by Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to to treat poor Black people like dirt. I suspect it’s worse than that. I’m suggesting that the government is genuinely attempting to mount an effective response to the disaster – but that its criteria for an effective response don’t exclude treating poor Black people like dirt, and may even encourage it.

It’s as if the government is running two sets of books on its responsibilities to the public. There are the deep-rooted assumptions of the social contract: if we have a government, and if it intervenes in our lives, it must surely intervene to maximise the safety of its citizens and prolong our lives – all our lives, without distinction. But then there’s a political contract, which isn’t cited openly but informs the government’s rhetoric as well as its policy-making – and that contract says, quite plainly, that those people don’t count. Hence, perhaps, a certain genuine bafflement on Bush’s part in the face of the public reaction to the aftermath of Katrina: what’s up with them? they knew what they were voting for, didn’t they?

Here’s Alasdair Gray in 1982 Janine:

[Frazer] was telling us about Machiavelli’s The Prince. “Listen,” he said, “you have just conquered a neighbouring state, right?, and you want to conquer another. So what do you do to the defeated people to stop them revolting against you when you withdraw most of your army?”
We could not answer because we had not read Machiavelli.
“Easy!” cried Frazer, “You split the population into three, take most of the wealth away from one-third and divide it with the rest. The majority have now profited by being conquered. They accept your government in return for your help if the minority start a civil war to get their own back, a civil war which will not occur because the impoverished losers know they are bound to be defeated. The conqueror can now repeat his manoeuvre elsewhere. What I don’t understand,” said Frazer, “is why no
governments have taken Machiavelli’s advice? Surely the first to do it would conquer the world?”
…
Alan, who seemed not to have been listening, said, “They do.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
After a pause I said, “You don’t mean the British Empire.”
“No. I mean Britain.”

I don’t think this is a question of racism, in other words. (A friend of mine once wrote that she saw just as much evidence of a class structure in the US as she had in her native Britain; the only difference was that Americans persisted in referring to class as ‘race’.) The concerted neglect and casual brutality which have characterised the US government’s response to Katrina seem to be the product of an authentically Machiavellian philosophy of government, which holds that leaders can gain consent by mobilising their subjects against one another. We don’t get many hurricanes here, thankfully, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought that this was someone else’s problem:

Mr Blair said he wanted to change the culture of the criminal justice system. He called for “an historic shift from a criminal justice system that asks, first and foremost ‘How do we protect the accused from the transgressions of the state or police?’ to one whose first question is ‘How do we protect the majority from the dangerous and irresponsible minority?’”.

A criminal justice system which downgrades the presumption of innocence, the better to neutralise the ‘dangerous and irresponsible minority’. An emergency management system which lets people die, the better to control poor and unruly survivors. All we need now is more votes for the decent folk – and perhaps that’s not far away (Non-registration was highest in densely populated urban areas with mobile populations, particularly inner London, and areas of economic deprivation).

“Where?”
“Here.”

What the public gets

One possible reason why the aftermath of Katrina has been so dreadful is provided by the piece by Jamie I quoted earlier. There’s something weirdly soviet about all this. We’re seeing this immensely powerful country which has somehow stopped working. Perhaps we should take this image literally: perhaps the reason why it looks as if the US Government is broken is that the US Government, or at least its capacity to act promptly and effectively, is broken.

Or rather, the government’s effectiveness has been broken. This article from 2004 throws some light on the weirdly sclerotic approach which the Federal Emergency Management Agency has displayed during the crisis. Over the last few years, FEMA has been systematically exposed to the logic of the capitalist market. Firstly, the agency has been told that everything it does could be done just as well by external contractors and consultancies; the result has been cost-cutting and corner-cutting, running to stand still and general demoralisation. Secondly, FEMA’s own services have been marketised – thrown open to competitive bidding from potential ‘clients’. The predictable result has been that FEMA’s attention goes disproportionately to richer areas, rather than to those most at risk (such as Louisiana). Thirdly, preventative and ‘mitigating’ action – protecting people from natural disasters in advance rather than clearing up afterwards – has been downgraded, despite having been one of FEMA’s great strengths. There is, after all, no market logic to this type of action: there’s no demand-pull if the disaster has yet to happen. (Come to that, if it hasn’t happened yet it may not happen at all, and then how would you cost-justify your ‘mitigation’?) Read on:

In June [2004], Pleasant Mann, a 16-year FEMA veteran who heads the agency’s government employee union, wrote members of Congress to warn of the agency’s decay. “Over the past three-and-one-half years, FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen, and our nation’s emergency management capability is being eroded,” he wrote. “Our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors.”
…
From its first months in office, the Bush administration made it clear that emergency programs, like much of the federal government, were in for a major reorientation. … The White House quickly launched a government-wide effort to privatize public services, including key elements of disaster management. Bush’s first budget director, Mitch Daniels, spelled out the philosophy in remarks at an April 2001 conference: “The general idea–that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided–seems self-evident to me,” he said.
…
As a result, says a disaster program administrator who insists on anonymity, “We have to compete for our jobs–we have to prove that we can do it cheaper than a contractor.” And when it comes to handling disasters, the FEMA employee stresses, cheaper is not necessarily better, and the new outsourcing requirements sometimes slow the agency’s operations.William Waugh, a disaster expert at Georgia State University who has written training programs for FEMA, warns that the rise of a “consultant culture” has not served emergency programs well. “It’s part of a widespread problem of government contracting out capabilities,” he says. “Pretty soon governments can’t do things because they’ve given up those capabilities to the private sector. And private corporations don’t necessarily maintain those capabilities.”
…
In recent congressional testimony, a NEMA representative noted that “in a purely competitive grant program, lower income communities, those most often at risk to natural disaster, will not effectively compete with more prosperous cities…. The prevention of repetitive damages caused by disasters would go largely unprepared in less-affluent and smaller communities.”

And indeed, some in-need areas have been inexplicably left out of the program. “In a sense, Louisiana is the flood plain of the nation,” noted a 2002 FEMA report. “Louisiana waterways drain two-thirds of the continental United States. Precipitation in New York, the Dakotas, even Idaho and the Province of Alberta, finds its way to Louisiana’s coastline.” As a result, flooding is a constant threat, and the state has an estimated 18,000 buildings that have been repeatedly damaged by flood waters–the highest number of any state. And yet, this summer FEMA denied Louisiana communities’ pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. In Jefferson Parish, part of the New Orleans metropolitan area, flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue is baffled by the development. “You would think we would get maximum consideration” for the funds, he says. “This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it.”

Within FEMA, the shift away from mitigation programs is so pronounced that many long-time specialists in the field have quit. “The priority is no longer on prevention,” says the FEMA administrator. “Mitigation, honestly, is the orphaned stepchild. People are leaving it in droves.” In fact, disaster professionals are leaving many parts of FEMA in droves, compromising the agency’s ability to do its job. “Since last year, so many people have left who had developed most of our basic programs,” Mann says. “A lot of the institutional knowledge is gone. Everyone who was able to retire has left, and then a lot of people have moved to other agencies.”

A lot of the institutional knowledge is gone. In the name of not doing anything the free market could do – and not doing anything the free market wouldn’t do, because anything the market wouldn’t do can’t be worth doing – the government has, in effect, broken itself. It’s divested itself of so many responsibilities that, when disaster strikes, the capabilities which it needed to maintain in order to meet those responsibilities just aren’t there any more. Paul Krugman‘s peroration is horribly persuasive:

The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor. At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures.
…
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job.

Which brings us back to Jamie’s strange ‘Soviet’ parallel. The last years of the Soviet system saw a command economy undermined from within by a pervasive disillusionment with the system: if you were a factory manager, not only was there no point trying to reach your targets, after a certain point there was no point even bothering to doctor the figures to make it look as if you had. Everyone knew – above you in the chain of command as well as below – that the system wasn’t working, if it ever had. Worse, everyone knew that the system they had in the West – where supply and demand information was exposed through the price mechanism – worked better. In that situation, there was no point keeping the system working, or even feeding the system the lies it needed to pretend it was still working. And so the system ground to a halt and fell apart. Unfortunately there wasn’t much to replace it, initially; the years after the collapse were dark (note the change in the death rate between 1992 and 1993, in particular).

Mutatis mutandis – and yes, that’s a lot of mutandis – something comparable seems to be happening in the USA; there, ironically, the ideology which is corroding the machinery of government is promulgated by the government itself. For the Bushites, it seems, the function of government is firstly to maintain a favourable environment for business, and secondly to step out of the way and let business do its thing. When this worldview is superimposed on the prudential, interventionist, humanitarian public-service ethic of an agency like FEMA, the result is confusion and bureaucratic paralysis at best. At worst… It’s worth remembering that FEMA is now functionally subordinate to the Department of Homeland Security, founded after September 11; this may help explain why FEMA’s interventions in New Orleans placed such an emphasis on securing the perimeter of the city and ensuring that nobody, as a general policy, moved. The triumph of the Homeland Security worldview: natural disasters as a public order problem.

One last point. Louisiana, we now know (thanks to China at Lenin’s Tomb) was one of the areas where the ‘free market’ reforms of FEMA took effect: in 2004, a private consultancy called IEM was paid half a million tax dollars to develop a ‘Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan‘. It’s not clear whether this plan was ever completed, let alone implemented. According to one source (cited by China), hurricane-oriented workshops in July and December 2004 produced “a series of functional plans that may be implemented immediately”; moreover, “resource shortfalls were identified early, saving valuable time in the event an actual response is warranted.” However, a January 2005 report from the National Emergency Management Association (PDF) notes, “Participants from this exercise are waiting for a private contractor to finish the after-action report and plans from this exercise”. Perhaps IEM’s ‘functional plans’ weren’t quite finished after all.

I said I had a theory – well, two theories, but this is long enough already; I’ll keep the other one for the next post. Here’s a theory. That NEMA report was dated 21st January 2005. You’d think that IEM would have got its ‘functional plans’ ready to go some time in the next seven months, but maybe not. Perhaps the reason why the local and national response to Katrina looked so shambolic was, quite simply, that the people in charge didn’t know what to do. Oh, sure, they’d had policies and procedures in place for this kind of thing, but those were the old procedures. Under the new procedures… well, funny thing, they’d had a presentation about the new procedures and it all looked pretty good, and then an email had gone round saying the new procedures were about to be issued, but that was a while ago and they should really have had them by now…

Ridiculous, of course – that couldn’t happen. Not in America.

Update: Shelley of Burningbird has some relevant reflections and pointers here. In particular, Shelley links to some searching questions about the preparation for and the response to Katrina, and to this extraordinary piece by Dave Rogers. Dave tells some sea stories, does some serious thinking about the meanings of faith, honour and leadership, and comes to conclusions similar to some of the things I’ve said in this post, but with less pussyfooting. Finally, Dave in turn links to this bizarre piece by Daniel Henninger; all I’ve got to say about that is that if I’m right, Henninger is precisely, diametrically, dead wrong. (And, I suppose, vice versa, if you insist.)

It’s only water

They order these things better in Cuba; there, evacuation means that everybody leaves, down to dogs and cats:

they have family doctors in cuba (!), who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know who, for example, needs insulin.
…
they also have veterinarians and they evacuate animals. they begin evacuating immediately, and also evacuate TV sets and refrigerators, so that people aren’t relucatant to leave because people might steal their stuff.

(The ‘(!)’ isn’t mine; I don’t know what’s funny about the idea of Cubans having family doctors.) Perhaps this isn’t a great source evidentially – the speaker is talking about how things work in general – but it is borne out by the Red Cross in this story from 2002:

Hurricanes Isidore and Lili battered the whole country, especially the tobacco-growing province of Pinar del Río and the nearby Isla de la Juventud, causing widespread devastation.Cristina Estrada, a regional spokeswoman for the Red Cross, told BBC News Online that only the country’s prompt and well-organised evacuation procedures ensured no-one was killed.

“In any other country in the region it would have been a disaster in terms of loss of life,” she said.

In any other country in the region, indeed.

Going back a bit further, in 1974 they ordered these things better in Australia. As Brian notes, Cyclone Tracy passed through Darwin on Christmas Day(!) 1974. The result was the effective destruction of 70% of the buildings in the town – and a death toll of 65, or slightly more than 0.1% of the pre-cyclone population. (‘Pre-cyclone’, because all but 10,000 of the population were evacuated, and many of them decided not to come back. Understandably, perhaps – apart from anything else, do you know where Darwin is?)

What happened in New Orleans wasn’t much like either the Cuban system or the Darwin experience. On Saturday 27th August the city authorities issued a mandatory [sic] evacuation order, which was followed by many (most?) of those able to do so. For those who remained behind, the city laid on buses – which transported them, by the thousand, to assembly points within the city and left them there. Once inside what were effectively internment camps, the people of New Orleans were treated like internees everywhere – which is to say, like cattle (and not very highly-valued cattle at that). Water, food, sanitation, shelter and medicine were supplied haphazardly or not at all. No one was allowed out of the camps: locals who had survived unscathed offered to take people away in their cars but were told to stay away; survivors who could have walked out of the city were told to stay put. When buses out of the city finally came, survivors were not told where they were going until they’d got on one – nor, almost incredibly, were they allowed to get off a bus before it reached its destination.

The city at large, meanwhile, was effectively written off – far more decisively than seemed to be justified by the outbreaks of gang violence, as alarming as those were. My immediate reaction to those pictures of stranded survivors, waving from balconies and roofs as TV crews passed overhead, was to imagine similar scenes in Britain. And there my imagination failed me: I couldn’t picture that scene without adding a boat of some sort, crewed by concerned neighbours or the RNLI or Red Cross or St John’s Ambulance or the WRVS or the local Rotary Club… If disaster struck a British city, I thought, surely there’d be half a dozen charities and voluntary organisations and ad hoc committees lining up to help, even before the flood waters began to subside. What had happened to civil society over there? I still don’t know if the St John’s Ambulance and the WRVS have any US equivalent, but as it turns out that’s not really the point. What had happened was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been approached by several hundred locals who wanted to rescue survivors using their boats, and they had turned them away. FEMA had also refused to permit external agencies to enter the city – the American Red Cross included – on the grounds that their presence in the city would slow down the evacuation. They had also refused… but I won’t go through the list; you can see it here. The long and the short of it was, the city was locked down, and locked down it would stay – whatever the immediate cost to the inhabitants of the city. In the context of a disaster recovery operation, this order of priorities seems odd, to say the least.

If all this is hard to understand, the personal interventions of George W. Bush beggar belief. He visited New Orleans on the 3rd of September – by which time evacuations were, finally, proceeding; his presence promptly halted food distribution for several hours, by imposing a no-fly zone. More culpably, he had relief and rebuilding work started for his media appearances – and halted afterwards. The story of a Potemkin food stall in New Orleans which has been circulating seems to be unfounded (thanks to Chris (in comments) for the nudge). What has been reported on German TV – the video is here (from about 3:20) – is a sudden outbreak of ground-clearing and construction work when Bush and his media crew visited Biloxi. The workers downed tools after Bush left; it was all done for the cameras. But the Biloxi charade was no more than a missed opportunity to do something more constructive – the workers had been clearing an area where nobody had actually lived before the hurricane. More seriously, vital repair work in New Orleans was started for the President’s benefit – and stopped when he no longer needed it. Also via Kos, here’s Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, writing on 3rd September:

perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.

Paul Krugman, writing on September 1st, sums up:

Katrina hit five days ago – and it was already clear by last Friday [26th August] that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you’d expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help – and help wasn’t provided.

Something’s going on. Or rather, something’s going wrong – really horribly wrong. Jamie nails the mood:

So the hurricane strikes and all of us foreigners watch the footage on the news with concern but without much anxiety. It’s just a matter of time before can-do America rolls up its sleeves and cleans up the mess, right? Time goes by and then the Mayor of New Orleans pops up on the BBC talking about bodies floating down the streets and suddenly the estimate of deaths goes up into the thousands. It’s like watching someone jump out of an aeroplane and slowly realising that that person does not, in fact, have a parachute.
…
There’s something weirdly soviet about all this. We’re seeing this immensely powerful country which has somehow stopped working. There’s sand in the joints and the parts don’t fit together properly. There’s a general air of sluggishness and fatalism. No-one in authority seems to know what to do about anything, or if they do, they don’t have the resources. The president looks on with vague stupefaction as bits drop off and float away.

As for what‘s going wrong, well, I’ve got a theory. Two theories, actually, and I’m not sure yet whether they fit together. I’ll let you know when I find out. Tune in tomorrow ect ect ect.

[Update: the analytical posts are here and here.]

That shallow feeling

Light blogging ahead – life calls.

Very briefly: Ken Macleod asks, “if you are going to limit free speech at all, is it more illiberal to do so by making the proclamation of certain specific and narrowly defined doctrines illegal, or by making administrative decisions based on broad and vague provisions?” It’s an interesting dilemma, but what strikes me most forcibly is that both alternatives are counsels of weakness. A thriving political movement – and, by extension, a government confident in its ability to rally support – will not issue Clarkean all-purpose anathemata against anyone who might in future turn a bit dodgy; but neither will it spend time and effort coming up with a precise legal definition for the Men of Evil, their Evil Groups and their Evil Ideology.

I’m not even sure that this second approach is a real alternative to the first: in practice this type of definition would, I think, inevitably catch too much or too little, and end up so garlanded with interpretative codicils as to amount to an alternative approach to Clarkean constructive vagueness. The real alternative – the counsel of strength – is not narrowing the field of free speech. A thriving movement or a confident government would engage its opponents (or, more to the point, their sympathisers) in open debate, secure in the knowledge that its resources and its support were superior to theirs – so that anything good they had to offer could be quietly appropriated and re-framed within its own ideological and tactical vocabulary, bringing (most of) their supporters across into the bargain.

Of course, the idea of New Labour doing this with radical young British Muslims would make a cat laugh – but that’s a reflection of the weakness of New Labour in 2005, not a statement about the general conditions of political dialogue with disorderly social movements (or with British Muslims in particular). We are where we are – but the conditions of possibility imposed by our current situation aren’t absolute.

And the market forces play

Time for a commercial break. This goes out to all my readers in the Northampton area, particularly those who may be in the market for a photographer – perhaps because they’re planning to acquire a passport, or because they want to celebrate the purchase of a nice new sundial. There are many local businesses competing for your custom; I might mention Profile Photography, Charles Ward Photography or Harvest Studios. Then there are John Roan Photography and PRS Digital – the list goes on. Weddings, of course, are big business for photographers, in Northampton as in other areas. (I had a wedding once, and a very nice day out it was.) If a wedding is on your agenda – assuming once again that you’re in the Northampton area – you might want to consider going to Nene Digital Wedding Photography, or getting the whole thing on video courtesy of April Productions.

I’m not able to endorse the quality of the work carried out by these businesses, as I know nothing about any of them. However, they do have one point in their favour, which sadly isn’t shared by one of their competitors. None of these businesses has attempted to gain cheap publicity by spamming the comments section of this blog. For that, I salute them.

(CC’d by email to… you know who you are.)

[Update: the offending photographer was only the first in a stream of comment-spammers, all of whom have presumably signed up to a particularly scummy direct-marketing service. Deleting them individually was getting to be a pain, so all comments are now giftrapped (thanks to Chris for the term). Sorry about the inconvenience.]

Bullet got the wrong bloke

For a few hours on the 22nd of July, Jean Charles de Menezes was a terrorist suspect. What he wasn’t was a capital-S Suspect; he wasn’t ‘known to the police’, as we used to say. (Or rather, he wasn’t the known person the police thought he was – apparently he was mistaken for Osman Hussain.) What if he had been?

Following last night’s appalling revelations, much attention has focused on the police’s apparent failure to verify that de Menezes was the Suspect they were after. What if they had done? What if it had been Osman Hussain who was shot?

Consider:

I heard shouting which included the word ‘police’ and turned to face the male in the denim jacket. He immediately stood up and advanced towards me and the CO19 [firearms] officers … I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side. I then pushed him back onto the seat where he had been previously sitting … I then heard a gun shot very close to my left ear and was dragged away onto the floor of the carriage.

The male in the denim jacket was (self-evidently) not about to detonate any explosives: officers had no reason to suppose that their lives, or the lives of the tube passengers, were in danger. (As I wrote back here,“was de Menezes, in his denim jacket, seen as a low enough risk to be watched on the bus rather than being intercepted, and rugby-tackled on the tube train rather than being shot from a distance?”) He could, when he approached the firearms officers, have been intending to go for a knife or a gun – but pinning his arms to his sides and pushing him back into his seat handily dealt with that possibility.

So it’s hard to see any legal – or rational – justification for the shooting; and this would still be the case if they’d got the right bloke. To quote myself at greater length,

was de Menezes, in his denim jacket, seen as a low enough risk to be watched on the bus rather than being intercepted, and rugby-tackled on the tube train rather than being shot from a distance? But if so, why was he killed? Not, surely, because he had been misidentified as one of the July 21st bombers – this would be summary justice pure and simple.

What I wonder about, after last night’s news stories, is: what if it had been Osman Hussain wearing that denim jacket and forced back into that seat on the tube train – what would be the mood of the country now? Would a leak from the Police Complaints Commission have been front page news? Would we be hearing calls for multiple resignations? Or would an act of summary justice – an extra-judicial execution in broad daylight, a truly appalling precedent – have been accepted? Would we now be being encouraged to hail the Metropolitan Police for its resolute stance against terror and its willingness to take the fight to the enemy? (They might cut a few corners here and there, but what’s the odd dead terrorist to you or to me?)

The charge that Ian Blair, like his namesake, is a liar has gained some traction lately. The possibility I’m considering here is that he’s a gambler: that he saw the July 21st bombings – and the Stockwell operation – as a chance to massively extend the effective power of the Metropolitan Police, and to do so without endangering its support in the political class and the media. I don’t know if the gamble would have paid off; I’m glad we never found out.

The Templars and the Saracens

In a piece which appears in The Salmon of Doubt (I don’t know whether it was published in the author’s lifetime), Douglas Adams writes:

There’s always a moment when you fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. For me it was hearing a stand-up comedian make the following observation: “These scientists, eh? They’re so stupid! You know those black-box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? And you know they’re meant to be indestructible? It’s always the thing that doesn’t get smashed? So why don’t they make the planes out of the same stuff?“The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke didn’t really work because flight recorders are made out of titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium rather than aluminium, they’d be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place? … There was no way of deconstructing the joke (if you think this is obsessive behavior, you should try living with it) that didn’t rely on the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did. It sent a chill down my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, well, ignorant.

De mortuis, but I tend to think the (self-)criticism was apt. A lot of Hitchhiker is less like a novel – or radio series – than a student revue (a very good student revue, admittedly): take the paper-thin characterisations, the dialogue built around gag lines or – more importantly for the current argument – the evocation of weird and counter-intuitive areas of science and philosophy, undercut by a common-sensical English ordinariness. This is amplified by the Pythonesque dogged persistence which won’t let go of an idea until it’s been pushed to its logical limit, taken over the limit, fined for exceeding the limit and embroiled in a lengthy but inconclusive case in the Court of Over-Extended Metaphors. Stylistically, this gives us Arthur’s exchange with Prosser over the planning notice (“…behind a door marked Beware of the Tiger”) or most of Marvin’s lines (“The second million years, they were the worst too.”) – great lines all, but very unlike anything anyone would actually say. Put it together with the common-sensical idea-juggling and you get, for example, the argument for atheism derived (all too logically) from the Babel Fish. What’s most striking about this argument is that it’s got nothing in common with the arguments of actual proponents of “intelligent design” – which are no less ridiculous, but turn on the idea that the wondrous complexity of the universe does provide evidence of the handiwork of a Designer. There’s a lack of engagement with the Creationist mindset here, which ironically makes that mindset harder to combat. If you assume that everyone starts from the same set of common-sense precepts, genuinely alien world-views will only be explicable on the grounds that the people holding them are irrational or stupid – which isn’t the best way to open an argument, even (or especially) an intransigently critical argument.

The mindset that this kind of writing seems to represent (and affirm) is that of someone who’s learnt a lot of valuable stuff in a short time, and who now doesn’t see the need to learn very much more. There is stuff out there that you could learn, but most of it’s not really worth the effort – at best it’s inessential, at worst it’s a pile of pretentious verbiage. If you demonstrably know a lot more than the average person about genuinely important topics, the chances are that you know enough – enough to see through the people who tell you there’s more to be known, anyway. It speaks to the inner second-year science student, in short. (One of the benefits of doing an arts degree is that you never forget that there’s lots of important stuff out there that you genuinely don’t understand. You never forget this if you have any contact with second-year science students, anyway.)

Terry Pratchett has a lighter hand with the dogged persistence than Douglas Adams, but in most other respects he’s a far better writer (he’s much better at people, for a start). That said, some of his jokes suggest the same kind of self-enclosed common sense, evoking the alien without engaging with it. (Does Pseuds’ Corner take nominations from blogs?) One example is the (admittedly funny) dwarfish war-cry “This is a good day for someone else to die!” Some years ago, the KliLakota original of this slogan (“This is a good day to die!”) was discussed on the alt.fan.pratchett newsfroup. The tone of the discussion was cheerful and uncomprehending. I wouldn’t say that anyone jeered at the KlinLakota, but very few people showed much sign of understanding the slogan, as distinct from Pratchett’s common-sensical inversion of it). One’s own death is, after all, an eventuality to be postponed as long as possible, not to be embraced. One poster even suggested that the slogan had begun as a deliberately-tempting-Fate insurance policy, akin to “break a leg”.

Fortunately one poster – the wonderfully-named ‘Catherine Denial’ – pointed out that death in battle was an honourable fate for KlingLakotadammit warriors, so that the slogan could actually be taken literally (‘death in battle’='good death’, ‘today’='day of battle’, therefore…). [Update 23/6/2007: it's just come to my notice that Catherine Denial is in fact not a clever pseudonym but the name of a real person, who has written widely on nineteenth-century American history. Apologies.]

And I’m not sure even this goes far enough. The point is, surely, that the function of soldiers (contemporary, dwarfish or KlingoLakota) is to kill and risk being killed – and that unwillingness to do the latter makes them less effective in doing the former. The tone is very different, but in terms of the underlying worldview “This is a good day to die!” isn’t so far from the Royal Navy saying “If you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined.” Meaning, in the words of a post from soc.history.what-if by the late and much-missed Alison Brooks,

When it is raining and dark, your feet are giving you hell because they have been wet for two weeks, when you are carrying a pack weighing your own weight, when you are on the edge of a minefield, aware that, well within range, are more people than you who want to kill you, and they have the capacity to do so, when your best friend standing ten feet from you gets hit, and you have to wipe his brains from your face so that you can see, and when the instruction is given to go forward, if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.

You risk death – and, if so instructed, take actions which you know will increase your risk of death – because that’s what you do: that’s what being in the armed forces is all about. (Not that you’ll find it in the recruitment literature.) In its more aggressive form – getting back to the Native Americans – this outlook also makes for a more formidable opponent: an enemy who wants to save his own skin first and kill you second is a lot easier to deter than one who just wants to kill you.

As you’ve probably worked out by now, this post isn’t really about Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett; it’s not even about the Royal Navy or the Lakota (let alone the blasted Klingons). It began life about a month ago – a decade or so in blogtime – in response to this post on Brian Barder’s blog and the ensuing comments, this one in particular. Brian writes:

it’s obviously psychotic, isn’t it?, to be unable to perceive the large-scale random murders of wholly innocent people as anything but evil? And when the murders are deliberately and unnecessarily accompanied by the suicides of the murderers, doesn’t that suggest minds that have become completely unhinged? Isn’t it psychotic to suppose that some desirable result can be achieved by killing others and oneself because of ‘grievances’ that have nothing whatever to do with the murder victims, and which can’t possibly have a better chance of being remedied as a result of the murders committed?
…
As long as we persist in seeing [the bombers] as politically and rationally motivated people whose response to their grievances is to go out and kill people, and as long as we strive to ‘understand‘ that behaviour, we shall encourage more of the same. It is insane as well as evil to act in the way that they have done, and while we need to try to hack out the roots of the insanity as well as of the evil and criminality, we need to beware of giving the impression that by trying to understand them and what they did, we regard murder as an understandable (and therefore in some sense defensible) response to a political grievance. Psychiatrists may properly seek to understand the roots of insane and evil behaviour: the rest of us need to be clear that the behaviour is insane and evil and that it can never be condoned.

Brian conflates two arguments which, I think, urgently need to be disentangled. On one hand, I don’t believe that it does any good to deny that the bombers acted rationally, let alone to describe them as ‘psychotic’: their world view was certainly alien to me, but I don’t think it was also insane. Apart from anything else, is it necessarily a sign of psychosis to kill innocent people, to carry out attacks which will cost your own life, or to attack people whose death can’t in itself advance your cause? Not, I would argue, if you’re a soldier – or an irregular combatant (were Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads ‘psychotic’? is Hamas?). Similarly, the bombers’ actions make sense if we assume that they saw themselves as part of a guerrilla force, fighting in one front of a war with Britain (among other nations), and prepared to use any means – however inhumane – to further their cause.

Obviously this world-view – as well as the acts it inspires – is vile and cannot be condoned: to understand it is not (pace Brian) to see it as in any way defensible. But, as I said above, there are two separate arguments here. Yes, the London bombings were evil and can never be condoned; but no, this does not require us to characterise them as insane. Visualise concentric circles. To demand that Britain withdraw from Iraq is a legitimate political point of view which is widely held (and which is not necessarily counter to British national interests). To demand that ‘the West’ withdraw from ‘Islamic lands’ is a legitimate point of view which has rather fewer adherents (and which is counter to British national interests). And to set out to kill at random in order to further this point of view is unforgivably evil; moreover, it is an unforgivable evil committed in a bad cause. (As I’ve argued before, it’s hardly possible – and may not even be desirable – to uncouple your assessment of a terrorist act from your assessment of the cause involved.)

This is what I mean by ‘understanding’ – and I don’t see that it involves any ‘condoning’, any ‘in some sense defensible’. What it does involve is visualising those concentric circles – which I think is essential, if we’re to have any hope of stopping the flow of recruits from outer circle to inner.

Ashtrays of emotion

This blogpost is in conjunction with the Elect The Lords campaign, who recently made a Pledgebank appeal to blog about Lords reform, which I signed. It marks the anniversary of the first Parliament Act, according to which

it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis

The 94th anniversary, to be precise. Related posts can be found via Technorati tag electthelords, and the New Politics blog.

In the beginning, there were barons. In the time of the Normans – and the Anglo-Saxons, for that matter – the people who mattered were the people who owned land and commanded allegiance; the monarch was essentially Top Baron, the capo di tutti capi. Taxes were collected, percentages were taken and favours were granted; it was a system.

Over time, the distinction between monarch and barons grew stronger; in reaction, the barons began to operate as a power in the land in their own right, independent of – and sometimes in opposition to – the Crown. Simon de Montfort took things further in the thirteenth century, buttressing his own power base with the support of commoners (landed gentry and knights of the shire, that is). Another century and the ‘commoners’ are themselves seeking collective representation, so that they can also make demands of the Crown – although not the kind of demands made by Wat Tyler, of course. (They weren’t that kind of commoner, either; these people were about as ‘common’ as the average Cheshire magistrate – who is of course their direct descendant.)

There it is: we’ve got a House of Lords and a House of Commons, and we’re not even up to the Tudors. Members of the House of Commons are even elected, although the electorate is small and rather select. Subsequently the balance of power tipped still further against the Crown; you could say it tipped quite decisively on the 30th of January 1649, although that date isn’t generally celebrated in histories of parliamentary democracy. By the eighteenth century, anyway, Parliament is starting to run things; this is when we start hearing about the Ministers appointed by the Crown, chief among them the Prime Minister.

In the nineteenth century, after the unpleasantness in France, we started to hear about democracy. By 1900 the electorate of the House of Commons is a pretty high proportion of the adult male population; getting there only took a couple of mass movements, a few years of near-insurrectionary agitation and a dead Prime Minister. (The assassination of Spencer Perceval had nothing to do with any of this, but it must have concentrated some minds.) Another mass movement and a world war, and even women are voting. Never let it be said that reform is impossible. (Never let it be said that it’s easy, either.)

The vote for all adults (aged 21 or over) was finally conceded in 1928. All this time, the House of Lords had been sitting there unreformed, preserving its ancient traditions and generally getting in the way – more and more so as the House of Commons becomes more representative. The decisive confrontation had come in 1911, when the Lords and the King, under duress, conceded the supremacy of the Commons – and endorsed the project of replacing the House of Lords with something more representative.

And then nothing happened, for 94 years.

To put it schematically, from Simon de Montfort to Edward VII there were always two sides: a ruler on one side, an opposition with its own power base on the other. It’s King vs Lords; then King vs Commons; then the 30th of January 1649 (although, as I’ve said, we don’t really speak about that). Then 1688, after which it’s not King vs Parliament so much as Parliament vs King; and finally 1911, when it’s decisively Commons vs Lords (and King). But what should have been the final victory of the Commons was never pressed through. What happened instead, oddly, was that a new opposition developed: Prime Minister vs Commons. In the penultimate stage of this development, under Thatcher, the unreformed House of Lords was even brought into play on the Prime Minister’s side. Still more bizarrely, in the Blairite final stage the Commons were so thoroughly managed that the Lords began to seem a bastion of liberty, due process and free speech, if not democracy. Perhaps this is the final act in the re-centralisation of government power in Britain: Prime Minister vs Lords. It’s not hard to see how that one will play out – particularly given that the Prime Minister has inherited the Crown’s power to pack the House of Lords with his own capi. And the barons, the damned stupid barons…

Ninety-four years after the Parliament Act, arguing for a democratically-elected second chamber isn’t particularly hard: it seems like a reform whose time has come, to put it mildly (ninety-four years!). Given the background I’ve sketched out above, it’s also a reform which would have some very far-reaching consequences. Replacing the current bodged-up medieval absurdity with an elected second chamber would instantly create a massive counterweight to the power of the Prime Minister – perhaps more massive than we can readily imagine in these diminished times. (Think of the ‘control orders’ debate, only with the aura of democratic legitimacy which Ken Livingstone gained when Thatcher started threatening the GLC and a free-spokenness somewhere between Lord Hoffman and George Galloway. Something like that.) It would also open several cans of democratic worms in the House of Commons itself – if members of the second chamber are elected on a fixed date and with a proportional system (and I can’t see why they wouldn’t be), what about the Commons? For both these reasons, it’s vanishingly unlikely to happen, unless a lot of people shout for it loudly and persistently – and even then, it’ll be pretty damn unlikely.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth shouting.

In another country, with another name

In a comment thread on his blog, Brian Barder writes:

You [meaning me - PJE] take a more generous view than I do … of the opinions, implied or explicit, of those many commentators who have been saying (and continue to say) that because Blair must have known that UK participation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be used by Muslim extremists to generate additional anger and resentment against Britain, and that this would increase the likelihood of a terrorist attack in Britain, therefore Blair has a share of responsibility for the London bombings. Attributing responsibility in this way has two unavoidable implications: (1) that Blair deserves a share of the blame for the bombings and (2) that the increased likelihood of a terrorist attack in Britain ought to have been a factor influencing Blair against his decision to join the Americans in invading Iraq, even if on other grounds he believed it right and necessary to do so.You come perilously close to adopting this view, it seems to me, when you write:

the Iraq invasion created new opportunities for terrorists, created anti-British feeling which was likely to make it easier to recruit new terrorists, and created disaffection among British Muslims which was likely to produce active or passive support for terrorists – and that all these consequences were probable, could have been predicted and should have been weighed in the balance when Blair & co were contemplating joining Bush’s invasion. To have overlooked predictable consequences like this in a good cause would be bad enough (pace Geras); when the cause in question is the Iraq war as we’ve known it, Blair’s responsibility is heavy.

Once you accept that the threat of terrorist attack in response to a specific act of policy is a factor legitimately to be taken into account in making decisions on that policy, you are handing over control of our foreign (and eventually our domestic) policy to terrorists. This is exactly comparable to yielding to the demands of a blackmailer. The only consequence of such surrender is that the demands of the terrorists (and of the blackmailer) will become yet more frequent and more exorbitant. In other words, the increased risk of terrorist attack in the UK should have been totally excluded from Blair’s calculations of the pros and cons of taking part in the Iraq war.

In response to Brian’s first point, I don’t think that Blair’s government can sensibly be blamed for the bombings, unless there’s an unusually long and obscure trail yet to be uncovered, leading from the Foreign Office back to the madrassas. What does fall to the government’s responsibility is protecting its citizens from arbitrary killings. The question is whether the government may bear a share of the blame for failure to protect us from the bombings – a failure which may include failure to avert the bombings altogether, by contributing to the development of conditions which made the bombings more likely. The second argument – that Blair would have been correct to leave the threat of terrorism out of his pre-Iraq calculations – is more substantial, but I have to say that I find it highly counter-intuitive. As Tony Hatfield said in comments here,

The State has an obligation to consider every effect flowing from its policy-especially its foreign policy and certainly a policy involving a declaration of war. That must include the effect of any “blowback” from terrorism. … If that is so, then there must be circumstances- the threat is so immediate, and disproportionate to the benefit you seek- that it tips the balance firmly against the policy.

Brian’s analogy with blackmail is suggestive, but I don’t see that it can entirely sustain his argument – after all, any concession to anyone may be interpreted as a sign of weakness and exploited accordingly. When one government makes demands of another, there is always the possibility that one of the two will end up paying Danegeld or conceding the Sudetenland; however, in practice these extreme cases can be disregarded, and demands can be considered on their merits (bearing in mind the foreseeable consequences of granting or refusing them). Certainly it would be absurd to say, as a matter of principle, that no government should change its policies based on demands made by another government. Should we exclude demands made by non-governmental actors? But that’s not right either – we would expect (and in some cases hope) that governments would be responsive to demands made by multi-national businesses, by the world’s major faiths, by trade union confederations, by charities and campaigning organisations.

There’s obviously something about terrorist organisations which makes it reasonable (from Brian’s perspective) for governments to refuse any demands outright and on principle: something which turns pressure into blackmail and recognition into capitulation. Intuition tells me that the difference is staring me in the face, in the word ‘terrorist’, but in this case I think intuition is wrong. The problem with terrorist groups, in other words, isn’t the fact that they back up their demands with arbitrary and random violence. Imagine an organisation which attempted to gain publicity for its demands by planting dummy bombs. At first the bombs would be taken for the real thing and there would be a certain amount of panic and alarm, even if nobody was actually injured by them. After a while, though, the ‘bombs’ are treated with contemptuous lack of interest, by police and public alike. At this point, has the group ceased to be terrorist – and should the government become willing to negotiate with it? Conversely, imagine a campaign for constitutional reform whose rallies, ignored by the government, grow larger and more unruly, to the point where violent clashes with the police are a predictable occurrence. The campaign’s activities have led directly to the wounding of police officers, in other words; does this mean that it has turned into a terrorist campaign, whose demands should be ignored on principle? In both cases, the reverse appears more likely.

It seems that the judgment of whether a terrorist organisation is terrorist – meaning that its demands should be rejected unconsidered – is independent of what it does. The key is, perhaps, provided by Brian’s analogy with hostage-taking. A terrorist group, we could say, is criminal by nature: in order to achieve its aims, it needs to undermine the state and attack the rule of law. Criminal actions carried out by a constitutional political group are an anomaly which only have a limited effect on our willingness to recognise or deal with them. By contrast, criminal actions carried out by a terrorist group reaffirm the criminal nature of the group and vindicate our refusal to recognise them.

The trouble with this line of argument is that it brings the aims of the group into play as well as its tactics: if terrorist groups are defined by their fundamental opposition to the state and the rule of law, we need to be sure that the groups we describe as terrorist are fundamentally opposed to the state and the rule of law, rather than using criminal tactics to promote demands which could in principle be granted by the state (and legitimated by the law). Hence, perhaps, Blair’s bizarre argument that what sets Al Qaida apart from the British Army is that “They don’t regret the loss of innocent, civilian life. They rejoice in it, that is their purpose.” (Let’s hope for Blair’s sake that Al Qaida never takes lessons in PR from the IRA, who were past masters in regret for the consequences of their actions (we deeply regret the loss of innocent life, caused by a conflict which will inevitably continue…).) I’m not going to go into the question of whether the aims of Al Qaida are non-negotiable in this sense, beyond recommending some cogent arguments for and against the proposition. I think it bears stressing that the ‘blackmail’ analogy rests on an assumption that terrorist groups are different in kind from other political actors, and – most importantly – that this difference derives primarily from their goals rather than their actions (however criminal – however vile, come to that – those actions may be).

But let’s say that, in the case of Al Qaida, we are dealing with a criminal conspiracy with no political aims which could possibly conceded. Even in that case, I don’t think it follows that principled policy-making should take no account of them. Consider a less controversial criminal conspiracy, the Mafia. The Mafia certainly has no demands which any responsible government would grant; formulating policy in order to benefit the Mafia would be reprehensible. However, according to the ‘blackmail’ logic, allowing the government’s opposition to the Mafia to influence policy – perhaps by favouring policies which limited the Mafia’s opportunities to penetrate British society – would itself represent a tacit recognition of the Mafia as a force to be reckoned with, and should therefore be rejected. The responsible course of action would be to take whatever actions the government believed would benefit Britain, leaving the Mafia – and the possibility that government action or inaction might favour the Mafia – out of consideration.

This argument is clearly fallacious. Whether or not the government’s decision is influenced by the existence of the Mafia, the Mafia continues to exist and to have significant effects on the government, both at the time the decision is taken and at the time it is implemented. There is no possible decision which does not have a relationship to the Mafia, in other words; the choice is whether that relationship is favourable or unfavourable. A decision which limits the opportunities available to organised crime (perhaps by putting a lower limit on the number of casinos to be licensed) is unfavourable; a decision which does not limit those opportunities is favourable, whether it does so actively or by default. As with the Mafia, so with Al Qaida: if the government did, in fact, deliberately ignore the possibility that the Iraq invasion would expand the opportunities open to terrorists, it can fairly be charged – on those grounds alone – with making this outcome more likely.

Brian also argues that there is a fundamental and important discrepancy between the (wholly unacceptable) tactics of the bombers and the (potentially legitimate) political causes with which they have been associated.

The other implication of much bien-pensant comment has been that we need to ‘understand‘ what drove the suicide bombers (successful or failed) to commit such dreadful acts and to accept that we (or the Blair government, or western society, or whatever) are all partially to blame for the policies and actions that drove the bombers to do what they did. This seems to me an utterly unacceptable proposition, too, for the reasons eloquently expressed by Brownie in the passage that I quoted. The idea that the pursuit of policies with which others violently disagree is partly responsible for acts of criminal madness committed, apparently, as an expression of that political disapproval, is nonsense, and we shouldn’t hesitate to say so. You write that

people aren’t born terrorists. People have to become terrorists – even that subset of people who are also fundamentalist Muslims and believers in a restored Caliphate. Obviously the terrorists are to blame for their actions, but for those people to have become terrorists something must have gone wrong – something more than being exposed to an ‘evil ideology’.

but it’s a far cry from that to the assertion that the whatever ‘must have gone wrong’ is something for which our own society, or government, or culture, or original sin, must be to blame.

My point here was that successful terrorist actions require a continuing supply of recruits – all the more so in the case of suicide bombings, obviously – and that each of these individuals must go through a whole series of events and influences before they become a terrorist. Pace Brian, I’d say that it would be absurd to assume – on the grounds that terrorists have carried out ‘acts of criminal madness’ – that nothing about “our own society, or government, or culture” played a part in the formation of those terrorists. That is not to say that we can necessarily identify what those contributions are or how significant they were – in absolute terms or in comparison to other influences. But to say that no one other than the terrorists themselves bears any responsibility for their actions, and that we cannot – and should not – address the grievances which motivate terrorist sympathisers, seems to me to set up an absolute separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which is highly unhelpful. Something did go wrong for the eight bombers we know about; as far as we know it went wrong right here in Britain, some time in the last few years. In the circumstances, it seems to me, the burden of proof lies with anyone maintaining that the Iraq invasion was not a factor.

Postscript: at Veritatis Splendor, enigmatic NederlanderVlaming D says it all more succinctly than I’ve been able to:

The pro-war people will argue that the jihadists will always find some excuse to launch another terrorist attack on us, regardless of what “root causes” we take away. They’re confusing two things. It’s true that you can’t make deals with or give in to the jihadists. You can’t take the “root causes” of their hatred or extremism away. They will always hate us, for it is our very existence, our “way of life,” that is the root cause of their hatred. Their ideology is so diagonally opposed to our own, that peaceful co-existence with these people is not possible. And indeed, we shouldn’t try to appease them or adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards them. The only strategy against these people is confrontation: not only do we need to prevent them from attacking us, we need to attack them. Again, this is a matter of police and intelligence forces.We can however tackle the “root causes” of Muslim support for these people. As I’ve argued above, a radical minority is nothing without the support of the mainstream. This jihadist “radical minority” will cease to exist (or cease to be consequential in any case) without fresh recruits to carry out its suicide missions and without the silent, or vocal, approval of ordinary Muslim communities. The war in Iraq is a good example, because this is where the opinions of ordinary Muslims and jihadists “overlap”: they both think it stinks to high heaven. By stressing how much they have in common, the jihadist can persuade the average Muslim.

Conversely, jihadists are not that successful in gathering real, practical support for their ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam, or for their utopian “Caliphate.” We naturally oppose these ideas too, but why be so bothered with them when we know they have no real basis of support within the Islamic community itself? Does anyone seriously believe Europe will one day be overrun by massive hordes of Muslim warriors bent on establishing the Caliphate?

The average Muslim in Europe doesn’t want to kill homosexuals, or prevent women from driving a car, or stop us from eating pork, or burn every copy of Harry Potter. If we are to prevent his radical counterpart from convincing him he should do all these things, our job is to convince him of the contrary (“battle for the hearts and minds,” anyone?), stress what is clearly unacceptable and what is open to civilized debate (this as opposed to shutting down the debate in its entirety with the fallacious mantra “opposing the war = supporting terrorism”), and finally, do more to promote alternatives. In doing so, you take away the ordinary Muslim’s every reason to believe the jihadist.

Such a waste of energy

Nick Cohen is getting careless. On the Guardian Web site, a recent Cohen column with the uncompromising headline “Face up to the truth” is now prefixed with the following health warning:

The comment piece below was wrong to say that the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was ‘delighted’ at the attack on the World Trade Centre, describing it as ‘a great work of art’. In fact, Stockhausen made a statement to the effect that he believed the devil was still an active force in the world and condemned the attack as ‘Lucifer’s greatest work of art’. Apologies.

And what are we to make of this?

In 1989, the number of sexual offences recorded by the police shot up. … The Home Office’s statisticians took a hard look at their data, and noticed a peculiar increase of 500 in the number of arrests for indecency. Odder still, 350 of the arrests had been made in Slough or, more specifically, in the public conveniences in Slough town centre.In 1988, there had been just six. Within a year, Slough had become the San Francisco of the south, the Sodom of suburbia. The Home Office dug deeper. Its researchers found that one of the local police commanders had firm views on the homosexual question and had ordered handsome PCs to go to the lavatories and arrest any man who tried to seduce them. The purge of Slough’s lavatories sent recorded indecency offences in Britain back towards the highs of the 1950s, when homosexuality was illegal. Until, that is, the policy changed and Thames Valley Police pulled its men out of the cottages.

Slough’s gays carried on cruising, but their assignations were no longer recorded. The crime figures depended on what the police were looking for and what the police counted.

The broader point, in this case, is reasonable – the last sentence is an essential caveat for anyone dealing with crime statistics – but the way Cohen gets there is distinctly questionable.

Here are the figures (from the Home Office Web site):

Well, yes, there was a spike in 1989, and the figure recorded had only been surpassed in 1954 and 1955. Beyond that, though, Cohen’s account of these figures is alarmingly slipshod. First, a minor but significant point: the figures didn’t go up by 500 between 1988 and 1989, but by over 700. This in itself suggests that Cohen’s story is a little too neat: if Slough’s extra 344 arrests had been added to the 1988 total, the result would have been a spike of 1,650, well above the levels of the mid-eighties but below the levels recorded in 1974, 1975 and 1978. (All together now: The British police are the best in the world…). Second, the law. Cohen’s reference to “the 1950s, when homosexuality was illegal” sounds plausible, but in fact it’s irrelevant twice over. On one hand, the Wolfenden reforms weren’t introduced until 1967; (male) homosexuality was just as illegal in 1965 (when arrests were in the low 800s) as it was in 1955 (2,322) – or, for that matter, in 1949 (852). On the other hand, these arrests were for ‘gross indecency’, an offence which stayed on the statute book until 2003. The police devoted considerable resources to ‘gross indecency’ during the ‘Great Purge’ of the mid-1950s, then gave it a lower priority in the run-up to Wolfenden. However, there was another period of high arrest rates in the mid-1970s, followed by another trough in the early 1980s. Against this background, the 1989 spike looks less like an aberration caused by an individual police force, and more like an abortive third peak. (Before 1989, it’s worth noting, arrest numbers had risen for three years in succession.) In other words, it looks as if the situation developing in 1986-9 parallelled 1950-3 and 1970-3 – the difference being that the Home Office reined in police forces (not only in Slough) earlier and more sharply than it had done on previous occasions. Taking the 1989 spike out of context, then blaming it on one off-message senior police officer, is hardly a shining example of intellectual honesty.

Intellectual honesty, however, is Nick Cohen’s stock in trade; we have it from the man himself. Cohen made a brief appearance on a Crooked Timber comment thread recently. Both the tone and the content of his intervention are interesting, so I’ll quote it in full:

Look, I’ve learned after the last few years not to appeal to basic principle or to imagine that those who say they’re leftists are within one thousand miles of the left. But after being sent to this thread by Harry I’m genuinely curious: didn’t you people take my reference to the best and the brightest to refer to the democrats, liberals, women—and, yes, for there are still a few—socialists who are being slaughtered in the Middle East?
Can one person here name one genuine secular democratic party in Iraq—or Iran, or Syria or Palestine—they support and which acknowledges their support?
If your answer is no, and you fully understand why it is no, you may at least, after all this time, be experiencing the novel thrill of intellectual honesty.

The argument is stark and simple, not to say simplistic. I am True Left, you are False Left. I am intellectually honest, you are congenital liars.

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of this line of argument is its insulation against any possible rebuttal. It doesn’t greatly matter what Cohen’s opponents say in reply, because he already knows they’re liars. This, of course, is an appallingly dangerous train of thought, reminiscent of the mentality of commissars and heresy-hunters through the ages: if those who oppose you are also liars, you won’t accept new information unless it supports your existing position. We’re back with Caliph Omar, who (apocryphally) ordered the burning of the Library of Alexandria on the grounds that it contained works which conflicted with the teachings of the Qur’an; on being told that some of the works in the library were in conformance with the Qur’an, the Caliph replied that they could be burned as well, as they were clearly surplus to requirements.

Ironically, Cohen appears to be well aware of the shortcomings of his current position, although he associates it with his opponents:

The least attractive characteristic of the middle-class left – one shared with the Thatcherites – is its refusal to accept that its opponents are sincere. The legacy of Marx and Freud allows it to dismiss criticisms as masks which hide corruption, class interests, racism, sexism – any motive can be implied except fundamental differences of principle.

I think Cohen’s describing a real problem here, but I don’t know what Marx is doing in there (let alone Freud). I blame the rationalism which goes along with a certain kind of commitment to bodies of ideas. (As the anarchists used to say, ‘theory’ is when you have ideas, ‘ideology’ is when ideas have you.) The logic goes like this. You know that you’re a reasonable and well-intentioned person, in possession of the facts; and that you’re on the Left; and that you believe in policies X, Y and Z. I tell you that I don’t believe in X, Y and Z – perhaps even that I oppose those policies – but that I am also a reasonable, well-intentioned and well-informed Leftist. But your beliefs are underpinned by a rational assessment of the facts and a freely-chosen commitment to Leftist principles. My beliefs are therefore wrong. I am clearly mistaken in thinking of myself as a Leftist; if I persist in maintaining that I am, I should be resisted and denounced. Cue Caliph Omar: if I am trustworthy, I will agree with what you already believe; if I disagree with you, I am untrustworthy and can be ignored.

I agree with Cohen that this mentality is distressingly common on the Left: I’ve criticised Chomsky along these lines before now. What Cohen seems not to have registered is that the Leftists he prefers are not immune: witness Geras’ recent tirade against people who have recently written articles which he interprets as erring on the side of apologia for terrorism (or, as Geras puts it, against apologists). Nor, sadly, is Cohen himself.

Postscript: here’s Cohen, back in February :

Over the past year, I’ve been astonished and delighted by the quality of British political blogs. What’s happened reminds me of the punk explosion when I was a teenager. People are ignoring the established system and beating it at its own game. Obvioulsy, there’s a great deal of dross, but what is heartening is how much original and intelligent journalism is coming from people entirely outside the media class, whose only chance of talking to the world would once have been confined to a few paragraphs on a letters’ page or a few minutes on a radio phone-in.As I’m on the left I started out with Harry’s Place, Normblog and Socialism in an Age of Waiting. But as my confidence has grown I find myself zooming all over the net and listening to people I would have crossed the street to avoid in the past. I’ve also realised with a feeling close to despair that if I write a lot of nonsense, it will be exposed and dissected.

We try, Nick. We try.

So say I

Why I use ‘ethnoclassification’ rather than ‘folksonomy’.

1. ‘Ethnoclassification’ recalls ‘ethnomethodology’, Harold Garfinkel’s coinage for the study of the collective construction of everyday life. Garfinkel took a great deal from Alfred Schutz; I think some of his work develops Schutz’s social phenomenology in the wrong direction, but to have Schutz’s work developed at all is a good thing. In this context, the term ‘ethnoclassification’ suggests a process that’s continual, provisional and embedded in practical activity: the place where it happens (to borrow a phrase from Russell Hoban) is Everywhere All The Time. I think this is a good emphasis.
2. ‘Folksonomy’, by contrast, suggests both a process and the end result (a viable folk-taxonomy); as such it’s confusing and promotes fuzzy argument.
3. It’s also a term with a strong positive value: forward the taxonomy of the folk! a bas les bibliothecaires! It’s a marketing term as well as a term of analysis, and lends itself to slippage between description and advocacy.
4. (Last and least) It’s etymologically ghastly and obtrusively American (I don’t say ‘candy’, I don’t say ‘diaper’ and I don’t say ‘folks’).

Henceforth – starting in the previous post, to be more precise – I’ll be using ‘ethnoclassification’ to refer to the (real, universal, continuing) process and ‘folksonomy’ to refer to the (hyped, unrealised, arguably unrealisable) end result.

Not available before

Thanks to a couple of links posted by Thomas, I’ve just read Bryan Boyer’s Correspondance Romano (Corriere Romano, surely? never mind) closely followed by this post from February by Tom Evslin. Tom:

People don’t think hierarchically – at least most people don’t. We think in terms of associations. Our dreams give this away as they hyperlink through experiences of the day and memories of the distant past. A conversation meanders horizontally from one topic to the next.
…
Hierarchies like Lotus Notes or the Dewey Decimal System were necessary when computing power was non-existent or very expensive. As computing power has become relentlessly cheaper thanks to Moore’s law, hierarchies of information have become unnecessary. … So long as Google or its competitors can index almost everything I might ever want to find, why should any arbitrary order be imposed on information?
…
Once we didn’t need hierarchies to organize our approach to information, they became an impediment. It is very hard for one person to figure out which node in which folder tree another person would have put a particular piece of information. A document may be relevant to one researcher for entirely different reasons than it is relevant to another researcher.
…
The relationship between documents is actually dynamic depending on the needs of the reader. Not incidentally, open tagging and hyperlinking are both ways to impose particular relationships on documents to meet the need of some subset of readers.

In passing, this suggests that the contribution of tagging to the grunt work of actually finding stuff may not be all that significant. After all, “a document may be relevant to one researcher for entirely different reasons than it is relevant to another researcher”: in this respect the same strictures apply to tags as to folders, with the proviso that tagging does at least give you multiple chances to get it right. I’ve found useful and interesting stuff by browsing del.icio.us, but I’ve also found useful and interesting stuff by browsing library catalogues, running partial name searches on booksellers’ sites, googling common phrases and going to the eighth page of results, and so forth. But then, I’m a catalogue-hound and I like being surprised. If you’re looking for something specific, Tom’s argument (inadvertently?) suggests, you’re probably better off with Google.

Bryan’s post doesn’t discuss taxonomies, ontologies or search engines, largely because it’s a series of emails from 2002. But it does contain this beautiful piece of ethnoclassification:

Italy is about all of these things: cured meats, standing up to drink your coffee, stiffling heat, mid-day naps, skulls in churches, hot men in suits on scooters, Ananas, and cheap groceries.

This is very much the kind of freewheeling associational approach to knowledge that Tom describes – and very much the kind of ground-up, non-exclusive, plural, open-ended classifying process which has become known as ‘folksonomy’.

But what happens if we take that sentence and map it onto the current ‘folksonomic’ toolset? Is there an ‘Italy’ resource somewhere – a really really authoritative Web page, say – that we can tag with ‘curedmeat’, ‘coffeestandingup’, ‘stifflingheat’ and so on? (Never mind the problem of cross-matching with the tags ‘meat.cured’, ‘coffee.standing’ and ‘heat.stiffling’ – let alone ‘heat.stifling’.) Or are we going to use an ‘italy’ tag and apply it to single identifiable resources on ‘cured meat’, ‘hot men in suits on scooters’, etc? If so, did all those resources exist before we tried to tag them – and if not, are we going to have to create them?

The kind of association described by Tom – and exemplified by Bryan’s old mails – is actually a very bad fit for the Technorati/del.icio.us style of document tagging, for two reasons. One is that it’s two-way: if ‘Italy’ is associated with ‘skulls in churches’ then ‘skulls in churches’ is necessarily associated with ‘Italy’. (In the case of document-based tagging, the relationship is asymmetrical and the inverse relationship is weaker: Document 1 ‘is about’ T1, T2, T3; Topic 1 ‘has some relevant information in’ D1, D2, D3.) The other is that it’s descriptive rather than annotative: we’re not tagging stuff-about-stuff, we’re tagging… well, stuff, and tagging it with other stuff. These bi-directional relationships between concepts can be approximated by the associations between tags which emerge out of the cumulative process of document tagging, but this seems like going a very long way round. “We think in terms of associations”: should we have to say

this has been applied to resources which have also been classified as that

when what we want to say is

this is like that ?

There’s one glaring exception to this argument: Flickr. It’s easy to imagine an ‘italy’ photoset including images which were also tagged with ‘curedmeat’, ‘churchskull’ and so forth. Descriptive tagging, bi-directional associations, it’s all there – job done. This is deceptive, however. Flickr runs on discrete objects – individual images – and the relationships between Flickr tags really describe the images themselves, or at most the universe of Flickr images. If we didn’t have any images of stifling heat in Italy, that association wouldn’t exist; if we had three salami pictures and only one of a skull in a church, the ‘curedmeat’/'italy’ association would automatically be three times as strong as ‘churchskull’/italy’. Once again, we’d have to go to considerable lengths in order to represent the associations which Bryan effortlessly set out in 32 hastily-composed words.

Ethnoclassification: do we have the technology?

A new kind of charge

“I find I’ve nothing to say about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes that hasn’t already been said”

OK, I lied.

The story has evolved, to put it politely. We were told that de Menezes was wearing a jacket with wires coming out of it, then a ‘bulky jacket’; we were told that he had been challenged and run into a tube station, then that he was challenged in the tube station and ran onto a platform, vaulting the barrier. Five days after the shooting, the Metropolitan Police revealed – by the means of a private meeting with de Menezes’ relatives – that de Menezes had been wearing a denim jacket and hadn’t jumped the barrier (the man who did was one of the policemen pursuing him).

The story may yet develop further, perhaps becoming even less flattering to the Metropolitan Police. As it stands, though, it’s still got a couple of significant holes in it. Firstly, we need to know how the police challenged de Menezes. Did his pursuers try to tell him that they were armed police, or that his life was at risk if he didn’t comply with their orders? Was he given any opportunity to surrender? Did he even know that police officers had challenged him?

It certainly seems that there was no second challenge – that de Menezes was not challenged again after the initial challenge, despite the decision to use lethal force. Depending on the wording of the initial challenge, this may mean that he had no warning that his life was in danger. According to a police source quoted in the Guardian, “If the firearms team are reasonably certain the person is a suicide bomber then there is no need to issue any warning. Experience from other parts of the world shows that if a suicide bomber knows they are being followed by police, they will detonate.”. A source quoted in the Times concurs. But this suggests that, once firearms officers had concluded (wrongly) that de Menezes was on the point of causing an explosion, his life was forfeit: there was nothing he could do that would have allowed him to come out of the tube station alive. If so, this is an extremely disturbing development in British law enforcement – and would be even if de Menezes had been loaded with explosive.

We also need to know why, if the police genuinely believed de Menezes to pose an imminent danger to those around him, they allowed him to catch a bus, intervening only when he switched to the tube. It’s not as if buses hadn’t been targeted. Again, if his killer believed de Menezes to be a suicide bomber, why was he pinned bodily to the ground before he was shot in the head? Surely this might risk setting off the explosion that killing him was supposed to avert. Or was de Menezes, in his denim jacket, seen as a low enough risk to be watched on the bus rather than being intercepted, and rugby-tackled on the tube train rather than being shot from a distance? But if so, why was he killed? Not, surely, because he had been misidentified as one of the July 21st bombers – this would be summary justice pure and simple.

Time – and the Police Complaints Commission – will tell; at the moment these are just a couple of plausible scenarios. But, amid a flood of reminders that the police do a difficult job and that terrorists are evil murderers, I think it’s worth keeping in view just how starkly unacceptable some of these scenarios are. Last word to the Graun:

Insiders say there may have been flaws in the operation that led to Mr de Menezes’s shooting, which is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. There are questions about why the intelligence was so faulty and about the identification of Mr de Menezes as a target. … One officer said an examination of the intelligence used, the decision making and identification of the supposed suspect “may reduce the culpability [of the officer who fired] quite significantly”.Another senior Met insider said: “When the truth comes out it is going to be horrific.”

It’s no real reason

Let us just take this issue of Iraq and expose it for a moment – frankly, the obscenity of these people saying it is concern for Iraq that drives them to terrorism. If it is concern for Iraq, why are they driving a car bomb into the middle of a group of children and killing them? Why are they every day in Iraq trying to kill people whose only desire is for their country to become a democracy? Why are they trying to kill people in Afghanistan? Why are they trying, every time Israel and Palestine look as if they could come together in some sort of settlement, they go and wreck it. … They will always have a reason and I am not saying that any of these things don’t affect their warped reasoning and warped logic as to what they do, or that they don’t use these things to try and recruit people. But I do say we shouldn’t compromise with it. I am not saying anyone says any of these things justify it, but we shouldn’t even allow them the vestige of an excuse for what they do.
…
What is happening in Iraq is that ordinary, decent Iraqis are being butchered by these people with the same terrorist ideology that is killing people in different parts of the world. … there is all the difference in the world in us taking action against these terrorists and as will happen when military action is taken innocent civilians get killed. We deeply regret every one of those lives. They don’t regret the loss of innocent, civilian life. They rejoice in it, that is their purpose. And all the instability in Iraq would stop tomorrow if these terrorists and insurgents stopped. … Until we get rid of this frankly complete nonsense in trying to build some equivalence between what we are doing helping Iraqis and Afghans get their democracy and these people going in deliberately killing wholly innocent people for the sake of it, until we eliminate that we are not going to confront this ideology in the way it needs to be confronted and my point to you is this, it is time we stopped saying OK we abhor their methods, but we kind of see something in their ideas or maybe they have got a sliver of excuse or justification. They have got no justification for it.
…
we will start to beat this when we stand up and confront the ideology of this evil. Not just the methods but the ideas. When we actually have people going into the communities here in this country and elsewhere and saying I am sorry, we are not having any of this nonsense about it is to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense, and we have got to confront it as that. And when we confront it as that, then we will start to beat it.- Blair, 26th July 2005.

If nothing else, Blair is commendably clear. The terrorist threat to Britain – “this evil” – is the work of a single identifiable group, operating in Palestine as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. Their programme is unclear and may be incomprehensible (“warped reasoning and warped logic”). Their “terrorist ideology” leads them to kill at random and “rejoice” in “the loss of innocent, civilian life”. Their claim of solidarity with the people of Iraq (or Afghanistan, or Palestine) is contradicted by their own actions, as they repeatedly undermine democratic progress in those countries; by implication, progress will now only be possible after they have been defeated. What they do has no justification: “it is time we stopped saying OK we abhor their methods, but … maybe they have got a sliver of excuse or justification. They have got no justification for it.” The Iraq war, in particular, is not a justification, because the war is right and what they are doing is wrong: there is no comparison “between what we are doing helping Iraqis and Afghans get their democracy and these people going in deliberately killing wholly innocent people for the sake of it”. In fact, the suggestion that the Iraq war is a justification is itself part of “the ideology of this evil”, and must be rejected if the terrorists are to be defeated: “It is nonsense, and we have got to confront it as that. And when we confront it as that, then we will start to beat it.”

In order to make sense of this stuff, I think we need some definitions. First of all, it would be correct to say that the Iraq war didn’t cause the London bombings, if only because actions don’t have causes: they aren’t precipitated by facts about the world. Actions have agents: people who make decisions and carry them out. Behind every action there’s a choice – and people who are responsible for making that choice and acting on it.

What actions do have is motives, which are closely related to beliefs: how you want the world to change cannot be divorced from how you believe the world currently is. Political actions, in particular, are generally capable of being justified (if not necessarily in ways you or I would accept). That is, their motive is a desire to change the world – to change the distribution of resources, of power over resources, of power wielded by some humans over others – and to change it in the direction of greater justice, as the agent sees it. In this sense, the motive of a political action is also the basis of its justification. It should perhaps be emphasised that saying that an action can be justified is not the same as saying that it can be justified in terms that I would accept. A justification which is framed in terms of beliefs and motives I don’t share won’t get my endorsement – but I can, and should, still recognise that it is a justification. You can learn why somebody thinks something is a good idea without being persuaded that it is a good idea.

Of course, actions also have intrinsic qualities; some actions, in particular, are intrinsically repugnant. Indeed, some actions – such as, for instance, the murder of random passers-by – are corrosive of any imaginable society; our sense of repugnance in these cases has a fairly good claim to universality. That said, we know that there are – and always have been – people willing to carry out repugnant actions; if this were not the case there would be no need for laws against them. Nor is it the case that any identifiable social group or political cause has a monopoly of ethically repugnant tactics; again, if this were the case we could simply legislate against the repugnant minority and dispense with the law among ourselves. As I argued back here, repugnance is not political; it only becomes a political stance when it is brought into dialogue with our own beliefs, our assessment of how the world is and how the world needs to be changed.

we have always to ask (we cannot help asking), unforgivable and… what? Was that particular act unforgivable and irredeemably vile, unforgivable and contemptibly cynical, or unforgivable and horribly mistaken? Might it even, in some circumstances, be unforgivable but tragically constructive?

(Am I saying I don’t oppose every imaginable suicide bombing? Yes, I am. More to the point, I’m saying that actual suicide bombings – repugnant as they unquestionably are – don’t invariably revolt me in exactly the same way and to exactly the same degree. I expect that this is also true of you.)

Actions, in any case, don’t have causes: every action is the product of a free choice, taken within the context of a framework of beliefs and motives. It is not precipitated by the facts of the situation within which it is taken. It is bound up with those facts, however, in two ways. Firstly, some choices are freer than others: for some agents, the effective range of choices for which they can take responsibility is very narrow indeed. If we were to watch a hundred vagrants in temporary accommodation and a hundred Eton schoolchildren for a month, it’s a safe bet that more thefts would be committed by the vagrants than the toffs, despite the fact that each individual had free will throughout the period. Nor is this a question of justification or extenuation. I’m more likely to steal if my family is starving; I’m also more likely to steal if I don’t know where my next fix is coming from, or if I’ve committed murder and gone on the run. In any of these cases, the facts of the situation constrain my exercise of free choice. The situation – and the chain of causality which brought it about – does not produce my behaviour, but it does make certain choices more likely than others. As somebody once said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” (It’s since been established that women do something similar.)

Secondly, if freely-chosen actions do not have causes, they do have consequences: typically, consequences which ramify in multiple directions, not all of which can be identified beforehand. If agents are responsible for their actions, they must surely also be responsible for the consequences of those actions – including the constraints which are placed, as a result, on other individuals’ freedom to choose. We might make an exception for consequences which, in principle, could not be foreseen by the agent, however well-informed and reflective they were – but it is difficult to imagine how the consequences of an action could meet this criterion and still be identifiable as consequences.

Circumstances do not cause actions – but they can make certain actions more likely, by validating some beliefs and motives (e.g. “you’ve got to be hard if you’re going to survive”) while undercutting others (e.g. “it’s wrong to steal”). By extension, every action also makes other actions more and less likely. And, of course, circumstances – and hence the consequences of actions – can also affect beliefs and motives more directly, by appearing to demonstrate what the world is like and how it needs to be changed. The changed balance of opportunities and constraints which an action produces, as well as the sets of beliefs which it is likely to confirm or challenge, must play into how we perceive that action.

In the case of the Iraq war, the invasion clearly created opportunities for terrorist activity and removed constraints against it. It also tended to confirm beliefs according to which Western nations – the US and Britain in particular – are engaged in a lawless and predatory ‘crusade’ against the Islamic world. Regardless of whether these beliefs are sustainable or fallacious, they are widely held. The perception that the Iraq war bore out these beliefs – irrespective of whether that is sustainable – is also widespread. As such, it seems beyond question that the foreseeable consequences of the war – as well as the deposition of Saddam Hussein – include an aggravated sense of grievance among Muslims against the British and US governments, and the exposure of Britain to a higher risk of terrorism.

There are three main answers to this line of argument. The first and weakest appears in Geras’s polemic against ‘apologists’:

If Mabel borrows Zack’s bicycle without permission and Zack, being embittered about this, burns down Mabel’s house, Mabel doesn’t share the blame for her house being burned down. Though she may have behaved wrongly and her doing so is part of the causal chain leading to the conflagration, neither her act nor the wrongness of it justifies Zack in burning down her house.

This simply begs the question. Retaliatory violence cannot be justified because it is disproportionate – but it is disproportionate because that’s how the example has been set up. Assuming that we’re still talking about Iraq, compare London and Falluja, or the career prospects of a Republican Guard with those of a British intelligence officer: it’s not immediately clear to me that we are the ones whose house has been burned down. In any case, if Mabel were a friend of mine, I’d tell her to be careful not to cross Zack again and ask her what the hell she was doing stealing the bike in the first place.

The second and third arguments, which also appear in Geras’s piece, are fuzzily invoked by Blair. One is that, while the Iraq war may have created grievances, those grievances are wrong (only the enemies of democracy can oppose the new democratic Iraq). The other is that those grievances are irrelevant (even without the war, “this evil” would still have existed and Britain would have been one of its targets). Geras offers handy thought-experiments for these as well. Firstly, the grievance which can be disregarded because it is wrong:

In circumstances he judges not too risky, Bob, an occasional but serial rapist, is drawn to women dressed in some particular way. One morning Elaine dresses in that particular way and she crosses Bob’s path in circumstances he judges not too risky. He rapes her. Elaine’s mode of dress is part of the causal chain which leads to her rape. But she is not at all to blame for being raped.

Once again, this is a heavily-loaded example: rape is one of the few crimes which (within the cultural context shared by Geras and myself) cannot be justified under any circumstances whatsoever, so there is no imaginable scenario in which Elaine would be culpable. A better example might be the socially-conservative Muslim areas – such as present-day Basra – where women who walk the streets with their hair uncovered risk abuse or assault. This treatment appals me, and I side unreservedly with the women who suffer it against the evil sexist scumbags who perpetrate it – but, as with my light-fingered friend Mabel, I can easily imagine asking someone who persistently defied the scumbags whether she wasn’t, to some extent, bringing hostile attention down on herself.

Geras’s use of the word ‘blame’ here is both significant and misleading, I think. Elsewhere in the same piece he argues that, if the Iraq war was ‘right’, then

no blame attaches to those who led, prosecuted and supported that war, even if it has entered the causal chain leading to the bombings, by way of the motivating grievances of the ‘militants’ and ‘activists’

This, it seems to me, imposes an artificial distinction between the war and its consequences, assuming that the war is justified whatever its consequences may ultimately be. It seems far more appropriate to assess the consequences of the war and judge its ‘rightness’ or not accordingly. Similarly, if we cause outrage and offence by challenging a world view which we regard as deeply unjust, it is hard not to say that we are in the right – and, by extension, it is hard to say that we can be ‘blamed’ for causing offence. Nevertheless, we might prefer – if only for the sake of a quiet life – not to outrage and offend those people any more than we have to. Of course, we could – and Blair sometimes seems to think that we should – make a virtue of offence and tackle “the ideology of this evil” head-on, wherever it can be found. However, this is a rather more ambitious – not to say open-ended – version of ‘ethical foreign policy’ than we have been accustomed to; never mind Iran, we’d be lucky to escape without declaring war on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The other argument, also invoked by Blair, is that any grievances roused by the war are irrelevant. Geras again:

Me, David and Sam are chatting. I make a remark to David, David gets cross because of the remark and he punches me in the mouth. Sam says ‘You had it coming’. In this story it is uncontroversially true – I can tell you this, being the story’s one and only author – that my remark to David and Sam is the cause of David’s anger. Is Sam, then, right to tell me in effect that I either share the blame for David’s punching me in the mouth or am entirely to blame for it myself? Well, the content of my remark was ‘I love the music of Bob Dylan’. David for his part doesn’t like the music of Bob Dylan. I think most people will recognize without the need of further urging on my part that, contrary to what Sam says, I didn’t have it coming, David is entirely to blame for punching me in the mouth and I, accordingly, am not to blame in any way at all. If, on the other hand, my remark was not about Bob Dylan’s music, but was a deeply offensive comment about David’s mother, then without troubling to weight the respective shares of blame here, I’d say it would have been reasonable for Sam to tell me that I must bear some of it.

What this tells me is, primarily, how difficult it is to construct a really good thought-experiment. I have never been punched in the mouth, I’m happy to say. I did, however, once go to Spain with a friend; after travelling together for a week or so we split up in Madrid one morning, both agreeing it was best, and returned home separately. We hadn’t come to blows, but we parted on very bad terms. The immediate cause of our separation was an acrimonious argument about the lyrics of the songs “Tangled up in blue” and “If you see her, say hello”. (Twenty years later, I’m absurdly gratified to find, courtesy of bobdylan.com, that I was right! Ha!)

So it seems to me that, in the right circumstances, “I love the music of Bob Dylan” could be a grossly provocative statement. Moving away from one-line utterances, to think in terms of actions and their consequences, makes it harder to come up with a definitively ‘innocent’ intervention. Confining ourselves to political interventions – attempts to alter the balance of power or the distribution of resources, favouring one group or another – makes it harder still. (And confining ourselves to the category of political interventions known as ‘wars of invasion’… but enough already.) True, jihadist terrorism didn’t start with Iraq; its motivations range from the religious deficiencies of the house of Saud to the existence of Spanish rule over Andalusia. But the war has created – and continues to create – grievances which can be channelled into support for the jihadist world-view.

To borrow a bit of sociological jargon, it’s a question of frame-bridging: gaining adherents to one set of beliefs (or ‘frames’) by stressing how much they have in common with another set. Blair seems to realise that some such process is going on, although he doesn’t seem to realise (or admit) that taking Britain into the Iraq war made it eminently foreseeable. More to the point, he doesn’t show much sign of realising that the best way to counter frame-bridging is to do it yourself. You certainly don’t deal with it by telling everyone responsible to stop it at once (“I am sorry, we are not having any of this nonsense”). If there is anything that people need to be “going into the communities” and saying, it’s more along the lines of “Yeah, sure, Britain needs to get out of Iraq – but restore the Caliphate, are you crazy? And blowing people up – that’s just sick.”

I don’t know if anything like that is happening right now, but I hope it is. I think it’s our best hope for peace and reconciliation. If it’s not happening – if the government and its friends are succeeding in their attempt to equate opposition to the war with support for terrorism, opposition to the jihadists with support for New Labour – then I’m afraid that things can only get even worse.

Last boat leaving

I find I’ve nothing to say about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes that hasn’t already been said by Chris, by Jamie and (slightly to my surprise) by Oliver Kamm:

If the police tailed him from Tulse Hill, did they have any grounds for regarding his behaviour as potentially threatening, and if so why did they not apprehend him before he boarded a bus or a train? Did they hear him speak? If so, were their suspicions in any way allayed or were they heightened? Or were they unable to tell, so shot anyway?
[...]
Mistakes do happen, and sometimes for understandable reasons – but those reasons don’t protect those who have failed. … there will have to be resignations at the least, and at the top. I’m surprised that Tony Blair’s normal political instincts seem to have deserted him on this. It is of course true that the police would have been criticised for failing to act if the suspect had been a terrorist, and that anyone who knows the identities of the real bombers has a duty to tell the police. But these are truisms, and a man has been needlessly killed.

Chris also hits the right note:

Jean Charles de Menezes deserves justice every bit as much as the 52 people who were murdered on July 7th, and that means removing the false and dangerous idea that just because a decision is difficult, one should be absolved of responsibility for its outcome.

“So what would you do?” I don’t know – but whatever I did, I hope I’d take responsibility for doing it.

Tired of being upset

Apparently the government’s much more left-wing now than it was a few years ago: much less authoritarian, much less pro-capitalist and generally much more sensible. I didn’t know that. Did you know that?

Nick Cohen, 2001:

The first Labour government for a generation, blessed with office in a time of peace and plenty, spent a smaller proportion of gross domestic product on the hospitals and schools than John Major’s 1992 administration. Then there’s privatisation. Not even Thatcher at her most imperial shovelled public money and patients into remarkably inefficient and understaffed private hospitals, whose death rates are five times above the NHS average.If you vote for Blair you will also be lending your good name to the curtailment of the right to trial by jury, the turning of demonstrators into ‘terrorists’, the persecution of asylum-seekers, the imposition of tuition fees, the incessant manipulation of the media, the rigging of elections, the refusal to renationalise the railways, the abasement before corporate interests.

Nick Cohen, 2005:

Britain still has a Labour government. It isn’t going to be out of office anytime soon, however loudly its opponents scream, and its policies are generally sensible. Why bother with the battle of ideas?

Why indeed, Nick; why indeed.

(Hat-tip: Simon.)

Tag tag tag

Tom Coates’ interesting post Two cultures of fauxonomies collide has been getting a lot of attention lately, mainly thanks to Dave. There’s a particularly interesting discussion running at Many-to-Many. The discussion has progressed quite rapidly, with several bright and articulate people pitching in to illustrate how Tom’s original insight can be developed. My problem is that I’m not sure what the discussion’s based on. For example, Emil Sotirov writes:

Seemingly, given the freedom of folksonomy, people tend to move from hierarchical “folder” modes of tag interpretation (one-to-many) towards more open “keyword” modes (many-to-many).

Keywords are flat, many-to-many, open; folders are hierarchical, one-to-many, closed. (In short, folders are bad, m’kay?) But what does this really mean? If I think that tags are ‘like’ keywords or that tags are ‘like’ folders, what difference does it actually make?

From Tom’s original piece:
Matt’s concept was quite close to the way tagging is used in del.icio.us – with an individual the only person who could tag their stuff and with an understanding that the act of tagging was kind of an act of filing. My understanding was heavily influenced by Flickr’s approach – which I think is radically different – you can tag other people’s photos for a start, and you’re clearly challenged to tag up a photo with any words that make sense to you. It’s less of a filing model than an annotative one.

Incidentally, “an individual the only person who could tag their stuff”? That’s Technorati rather than del.icio.us, surely?

But anyway – the main question is, what are you actually doing differently if you use a tag as an ‘annotative’ keyword rather than a ‘classifying’ folder? In either case, it seems to me, you’re pulling out a couple of characteristics of an object and using them to lay a trail back to it. The only real difference I can see is that you’d expect to have more ‘keywords’ than objects and fewer ‘folders’ than objects, but I can’t see how this changes the way you actually interact with the tags or the tag-holder services – or the objects, for that matter.

Perhaps I’m just not getting something – all enlightenment is welcome. But I suspect that, in practice, Flickr and del.icio.us and… er, all those other social tagging services… are converging on a model somewhere between ‘keyword’ and ‘folder’. The tag cloud is crucial here. Flickr may start by enabling you to “tag up a photo with any words that make sense to you”, but the tag cloud display “conceals the less popular [tags] and lets recurrence form emergent patterns” (as Tom notes here); it also prompts users to select from previously-used tags if possible. Conversely, the (more rudimentary) tag-cloud display in del.icio.us gives less-used tags more prominence than they had when they were left to scroll off the screen, prompting users to select more widely from previously-used tags. In effect, the tag cloud draws del.icio.us users away from big-tree-of-folders thinking, while also drawing flickr users away from the keyword-pebbledash approach.

[No, that wasn't my promised post about the Long Tail. (It doesn't exist, you know.) Yes, I will get round to it, some time.]

All those pretty lies

A few weeks ago I spotted a really dazzling example of stupidity – and cynical exploitation of same – in the LRB. David Runciman was writing about the American campaign to repeal death duties (‘estate tax’), which succeeded despite the fact that the change only really benefited the top 1%. Ah, but…

A poll conducted by Time/CNN on the estate tax issue in 2000 revealed that 39 per cent of Americans believe that they are either in the wealthiest 1 per cent or will be there ‘soon’.

There it is. If you think you already are obscenely rich – or that you’re going to be obscenely rich some day soon – you aren’t likely to identify with all those little people down there. People who aren’t obscenely rich and probably never will be. People like you yourself. In the immortal words of Kermit, stupid, stupid, stupid.

But there’s more to this than stupidity – quite a lot more. There’s the politics of aspiration (got to keep selling the Dream, or the people will vote for somebody who will); behind that, there’s the politics of division and atomisation (treat the workers mean, keep the workers keen); and behind that there’s the 1% themselves, pursuing business as usual by swinging a ‘democratic’ government behind their interests. The layers fit together only too well.

Still, only in America, eh?

Charles Kennedy yesterday sought to capitalise on the feelgood factor from the Cheadle byelection victory, calling on his colleagues to be “bold, positive and united”.
…
Mr Kennedy said the party was not afraid of redistribution, but added: “High taxes are not a moral good in themselves. We were correct to point out at the general election that only 1% of all taxpayers would be affected by our proposals on top-rate taxation. But we must not lose sight of those who aspire to achieve income levels which will bring them into the top rate taxation band in time to come.”

Do they really believe this – do they really think we won’t vote for them if they don’t sustain our ‘aspirational’ illusions by lying to us? After May 7, surely not – the party’s great successes were against Labour, and much of its political capital derived from the appearance of being a little more honest than Labour, willing to tell a little more of the truth. The simplest explanation is the most depressing: that the Lib Dems have finally taken the blue pill and rejoined the neo-liberal consensus.

“Yellow Tories”? Not quite. ‘Tory’ has to mean ‘worse than Labour’, to my mind – ‘worse than New Labour’, even – and I can’t see that the Lib Dems are quite that bad. But by God, it’s getting to be a close thing.

Meaders can have the last word:

“Left-wing”? This shower?

Never even not known

Just to clarify, I’m not saying Johann Hari is crazy.

Language is weird – weird and treacherous. It gives thought a medium and a structure, and yet it has its own properties – both formal regularities like verb forms, and arbitrary quirks like puns – which cut across whatever it is you’re trying to say. (With the result, if you believe Freud, that what you want to say can leak through.) When I was much younger I worked as a psychiatric nurse, briefly. Looking back on the way the people I was caring for talked, one of the things I can hear is how language can betray the person using it; language is full of trap doors and dead ends. Language is a place where you can get lost.

A character in the Residents’ Not Available uses what sound very much like schizophrenic speech patterns:

To show or do
Or to be shown
Some questions never
Even not known
Not even by many
To exist, to show

Or to be shown
Some questions never
Even known
Not even by many
To exist…

The character is plagued by these “never known questions” – questions he can’t answer and can’t ask anyone else, questions which have never been asked before. Questions like, for example:

How much marriage urges a windmill to paint infinity?

It’s a tough one, you’ll admit.

I’m not saying Johann Hari’s crazy. I don’t think he’s a very good columnist (I could name six people who could do a better job without drawing breath, and without even naming myself); I like Nick’s suggestion that he would have made quite a good Jon Ronson/Louis Theroux-type interviewer, drifting inscrutably between charmingly genuine naivety and calculating faux-naivete. (I mentioned Jon Ronson on alt.folklore.urban once, years ago, and he mailed me shortly afterwards. Hi, Jon!) But there’s something strange about the way his mind works (Johann Hari’s, not Jon Ronson’s) – there’s something strange about the places language takes him.

I’m not going to fisk his column from Saturday’s Indie – it would take far too long. Besides, what can you say about weird, overworked constructions like “with one leap of faith” or “defuse the ticking-bomb of jihadism”? (Better a ticking-bomb than the exploding kind, I suppose.) “We are more likely to discuss Coke vs Pepsi than justice vs injustice” – possibly because there’s room for discussion on the difference between Coke and Pepsi. “It took seventy years and fifty million deaths until nobody would kill or die for Bolshevism.” Shame Stalin didn’t step up his work-rate, it could all have been over in half the time.

Figurative language, in particular, does strange things when Hari gets hold of it.

We have all seen the Rumsfeld approach. Fill screens across the Muslim world with the orange jumpsuits of Guantanamo and the Muslims-on-a-leash of Abu Ghraib.

“Muslims-on-a-leash“? But anyway…

The Galloway approach is just as dangerous: give them what they want. Meet Osama’s immediate demands and hope they’ll leave us alone. Both encourage the totalitarian ideology to spread faster, one by beating it with a bloody stick and the other by offering it a carrot.

The basic problem here is asymmetry: you can’t just follow that ‘bloody stick’ with a carrot. It should be an Iraqi carrot, perhaps, or a Jerusalem carrot. An oily carrot, maybe. And does Osama bin Laden even like carrots? It doesn’t really work.

Then there’s the oestrogen:

No ideology can survive on terrorising half the population indefinitely. When it comes, the Islamic Reformation will be drenched in oestrogen.

That first sentence is deceptively tricky, incidentally. The message seems to be something like “Any community in which the dominant self-understanding of social norms is such as to mandate terrorising half the population cannot perpetuate itself unchanged indefinitely” – only with ‘community’, ‘norms’ and ‘self-understanding’ collapsed into a lump labelled ‘ideology’ and the possibility of change edited out.

But the oestrogen… My problems with the oestrogen begin with the disconcerting physicality of that ‘drenched’: an abstraction collides with a (physical) liquid substance and gets (physically) wet. It gets worse when you remember what oestrogen is: a hormone. Which means that it’s carried in the blood. Which suggests that Hari’s envisaging a Dantonesque heroic generation of Islamic feminists, cut down (literally) by some Islamic female Robespierre. Presumably that wasn’t quite what he wanted to say. (Unless you believe Freud.)

All this and a carrot for Osama, not to mention a ticking-bomb and some Muslims-on-a-leash. Some images never even known, not even by many to exist…

Well, well, well

I heard the other day that I’d been awarded a doctorate. Which was nice. I started doing it at the beginning of 1999, walking out of a perfectly good job in the trade press in the process, and several times in the intervening six years it had looked as if it wasn’t going to happen. But happen it did, and I’m now an accredited authority (sort of) on the Italian Communist Party’s relationship with the cycle of contentious activism which ran from 1973 to 1979. (A subject which has turned out to have a lot more contemporary relevance than I thought it would.)

I’m also Dr Phil Edwards – a name which you’ve probably seen in print already, and not referring to me. I’ve told the Guardian that they’re attributing quotes to a pseudonym a number of times, most recently in response to this rather unedifying story. Greatly to my surprise, the writer actually rang me up to talk about it. She was quite apologetic and had obviously never heard the story before; I got the impression that relations between the Guardian and the BNP are already a bit strained (which is probably no bad thing).

But that’s just one story and one writer; I should imagine I’ll have it all to do again before long. Perhaps I’ll change my name to John Tyndall.