The Danger of Imagination

Why do democracies not apply higher taxes to the wealthy? One might suppose that the majority who would fall well below the threshold of a higher tax would support such a fiscal programme as it implicitly reduces their tax contribution or increases government spending from which they benefit.

One reason lies in the prescriptions of government economists. But different liberal democracies have very different tax regimes and flatter tax economies are not necessarily more effecient (but that I know is a whole debate in itself).

Another factor is the disproportionate influence the wealthy have in democratic elections. Not only do they vote in greater numbers but in most countries the personal contributions of the wealthy to major political parties are essential to election campaigning.

I believe there is another overlooked explanation. A cultural one. Aspirational indivualistic cultures will have lower taxes for the rich. Why? Because one day we all plan to be rich and when we are we don't want to give up too much of our hard earned cash. Similarly we resent paying taxes to fund social security and health provision because we like to imagine that we ourselves will not need them. No one likes to think about losing their job or their home or suffering an incurable disease. It is much more fun to plan the size of our yacht or the location of second and third homes.

But of course most of us will not be rich. We cannot all be rich otherwise who will clean our carpets and serve us coffee. But we do not imagine that we ourselves will fail. We are the protagonists in our narrative and the good guy always wins.Right?

There are no 'Great Artists'

It is dangerous to teach artists the history of their art. It can if not carefully controlled lead them to see all art as the product of Great Men, Great Artists who singlehandedly remade the world. This is a false impression due the undue fame and prominence of a few but, since we as human take easily to a human interest story it is a easy fallacy to believe. Even for those who profess not to believe it the attitude it inspires is hard to resist. So much so that those who aspire to create seek to become 'Great Artists' rather than to produce great art.

This is dangerous not only because it is an ambition that has no clear focus - how much of what quality makes one great? - but because it causes undue attention to personal reputation rather than personal achievement.

A 'Great Artist' is only like to produce great art because he has mastered his profession not due to any intrinsic property that he possesses. This focus on the personality of the artist only detracts from an appreciation of art and confuses its production. Forget the playwright. The play's the thing.

Classy Words

Yet again the UK media is full of 'bad' words. The debate about the words that children should be exposed to has flared up again (and as usual ignores the fact that only the most sheltered of young people will not have heard all of these and worse). GP Taylor's school appearance in which he used 'bum', 'fart' and even 'bogey', words which I don't doubt are used in that's school's playground every day has made it into the national press .

But aside from increasing the sales of his childrens books what is the issue?

Of course there are words we should not use. Words that have had so much hate stored up in them over long years that they now almost unusable for anything else. Although now many members of the groups on the sharp end of these words have started to reclaim them and refashion them as positive identity markers (eg NWA) they still retain their power to hurt because of their powerful negative associations.

There are words that we should consider not using. Words that some would consider blasphemous. Words that offend unnecessarily.

But we should ask why certain words offend. Some have religous meaning, often now forgotten by most, others like 'bum', 'fart' or 'bogey' clearly do not.

Make a list of banned words. I am sure that you will find apart from those hate words which have more recently and rightly been considered unfit for use most of the words there refer to sexual acts or body parts. More importantly they are common words for sexual acts and body parts. Anglo Saxon words not French or Latin ones. The are vulgar words, coarse words, impolite words. Words which when spoken mark one out as being lower class. That is the root cause of their ability to shock.

Look at the terms or approbation applied to these words: coarse, vulgar, impolite. All of these originally refered to a low class status. It is this which, unconsciously, troubles 'well brought up' parents whose children use these words. It's less the sexual content than the social context. We don't use those words.

Words that express hatred should be considered unusable (although if the hatred is not dealt with, simply changing the language does little or nothing) but ought we still judge a person by their vocabulary and accent? Words that indicate class difference and provoke the despite of (self selected) polite society are not offensive. Social snobbery is.

The Necessity of Self Deception

One of the most useful skills a politician can learn is how to believe a thing not because of rational conviction but because of expediency. By that I don't mean pretending to believe it - that is lying and may be found out - but actually believing it. This adds the force of sincerity to a political argument. I imagine Tony Blair genuinely expected to find WMD in Iraq. At least he did after he had convinced himself they were there.

This is a basic human ability - to convince ourselves of the truth of something beyond all reasonable evidence, sometimes in direct contradiction to obvious facts. It is one that we all use, not only politicians. (Some might expect me to discuss religous conviction here but I will not. I am, to declare an interest, a believer myself, and I do not see the claims of religion, or of Christianity at least - I will only speak of what I know - as simply falsifiable. That is a discussion for another time.)

A common use of it today is the justification of power, privilege or wealth by those who have it, indicating of course why they should keep it. This has a long history from the divine right of kings through theories of racial superiority through to market outcomes and 'fair' competition.

Believing their position of power and wealth is deserved, whether by parentage, racial status or marketplace success allows the priveleged to ignore the less fortunate as unworthy and to deny part or all of their obligations to society. It was this very attitude held by Charles I that sparked the English civil war and led eventually to the limited monarchy that could only govern with the (at least nominal) consent of the governed however difficult it might have been in practice for that consent to have been withdrawn.

Some of you will object to my deliberate juxtaposition of discredited beilefs such as the hereditary principle (the children of the 'deserving' are 'deserving' and so on forever) and racial classification (I am not myself convinced that 'race' has any useful meaning) with 'free' market outcomes. Surely markets are impartial and select those who are most 'deserving'?

But markets do not exist in a vacuum. They are controlled and defined by society and government. The form of corporate capitalism which is now the undisputed economic paradigm in the West requires a large amount of legal infrastructure and regulation to function even according to the most radical 'free' marketeers. Markets in that sense do not exist in a state of nature.

This is not to say they are necessarily a bad thing. Many things that are desirable do not exist in a state of nature. Civilisation itself can be seen as the exchange of natural behaviour for material benefit. It may not be natural to work in an office, but neither is it natural to be warm in the winter or to live to be seventy. This is why 'back to nature' movements have failed - the benefits of civilisation outwiegh the costs - for most people at least. All too often the 'nature' that we are told to return to is no such thing but a different and usually earlier form of civilisation. It may indeed better, but calling it 'natural' doesn't prove anything.

To return to the main point: Markets are contrained and constructed by society. They therefore produce certain results. But they are not a level playing field. Leaving aside the genetic, some people have monetary and educational advantages confered on them by their parents which mean those without such benefits can rarely compete. The fact that some do and can does not prove that there is not a problem. The fact that some people survive cancer does not mean it is not dangerous.

'Free' markets may allow for such individual anomolies in a way that more obviously prescriptive systems do not but their results on the large scale are clearly to preserve privilige. Even the older systems were not impervious to social climbers and arrivistes. 'Free' markets use them as a justification. But they are the exception and not the rule.

To put it more clearly: People don't succeed because of talent and hard work although these help. So many people succeed without either and so many fail with both that this thesis is clearly untenable and yet is still commonly held. We do not like to believe that our fate is out of our hands. Hubristically we believe we can master destiny. Not only can but must. We see it as a moral failure in the individuals that do not. We refuse to face the facts. Most people aren't rich. Most people don't make miraculous recoveries from illness.

Yet when it comes to ourselves - we all expect to be the exception. We are the hero of our own narrative. The hero always survives the hail of bullets. He always gets the girl. We expect nothing less for ourselves.

The large monetary rewards given to the powerful are often justified in terms of market value. This ignores the fact that these rewards are determined by people - in this case usually the powerful people concerned themselves or their friends and colleagues. The 'impartial' market has very little to do with it. Otherwise CEO's would be paid only as a proportion of the profit/share dividend of their companies. This of course never happens.

If we wanted to create a level playing field for free markets to operate in we should first of all ban all corporations. These massive pools of capital and people distort the market and lead to monopolitic and ologopolistic behaviour. We should also have all children reared communally as in the Israeli Kibbutz or A Brave New World. Then, as long as inheritance of money is also outlawed everyone will begin with an equal chance and market merit will determine their success.

Unfortuantely I do not think many 'free' market disciples would support such a programme. Until they do do not believe what their economic theory tells them. I do not doubt that they believe it. I do doubt that they have thought about it.

The Gulag and the Guillotine

Why have so many people, many with ideals we share and apparent personal integrity, done inexplicable and even monstrous things after achieving political power? Why does power corrupt? Is corruption an inevitable consequence of the nature of power?

I don't pretend to know the answers. I do have a suggestion as to why the ideologically committed are in the greatest danger of perpetrating atrocities.

I think it goes further than simple 'the ends justify the means' ruthlessness. I think we can trace a process in the leadership of any movement that finds itself in power that goes some way to explain the gulag and the guillotine.

At first a person joins a particular political party or grouping because they believe in its ideology (for whatever reason, rational or otherwise). They come to identify with the movement. All the more so if they come to lead it. Then the movement becomes identified with them (eg Leninism, Maoism, Thatcherism). They can start to see the movement as an extension of their will. They become infallible.

They move from
"I need to get into power so that I can implement policies I believe to be right." to
"Everything I believe is right and the best for the country/party/faith." to
"Those who oppose me (and my obviously righteous policies) are necessarily evil and must be dealt with."
This a consequence of the native tribalism of the human race.

I think moving along this line of thinking is almost inevitable for those in power especially if they are surrounded by their own appointees and sycophants. The degree to which they can get away with such an approach depends mainly on the checks and balances inherent in their particular system. Those without any effective control (eg Soviet Russia, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, any military dictatorship you care to mention) inevitably see the grossest abuses.

This leaves us with a problem especially for those of us such as myself who lean to the left. This misunderstanding of the nature of power is the flaw in the Old Left. At the time their ideas were formulated there was no example of a state that was not explicitly run for the interests of its ruling classes. An intelligent observer could believe that the problem was not power per se but that in was in the wrong hands. This is no longer tenable. However, it is not enough for us simply to curtail the state when we want it to actually do some good and even social reform.

On the other hand, nothing I have said should be taken as support for complacent lassez faire liberalism. It is easy to be uncontroversial in an age of consensus. It easy to compromise when there is nothing at stake. It is easy to be patient when you are well served by the status quo.

The impossible choice between power with compromised ideals (the Stalinist or Blairite road) and failure with pure ideology (the Menshevik or Bennite approach) is explored well in Arthur Koestler's trilogy of political novels: Darkness at Noon, The Gladiators and Arrival and Departure (I call them a trilogy but they have no common characters or even setting; their only link is thematic). I would recommend them to anyone, they are books which fully justify themselves as novels, but they will especially interest those who think about politics and society.

Koestler doesn't provide us with any answers. Neither will I. We could hope for a new kind of politics. A politics with fewer tribes and fewer Great Leaders. A politics with more humility and recognition of the humanity of our opponents. We can wish that people were better than they are. But that is not a political programme. It is a daydream.

Predicting the Present

It is inevitable that we look at history with contemporary eyes. We explore current ideas and obsessions in the events of the past. Each generation writes a different history.

In doing this we often discover people and ideas which appear strangely prescient, as if they had seen clearly into their future. This is no doubt partly explanied as a reporting phenomenon - ie we notice the few times a prediciton is spectacularly right and ignore the far larger number of mistaken guesses.

But there is more to it. Ideas that have shaped our world will necessarily appear to have foreseen the way we live. History is written by the victors and they have also shaped the cociety in which we live. Similarities between the two are no coincidence

Big Spenders

It is a truism in our society that leisure involves spending. Drinking is the obvious example with people capable of spending hundreds of pounds in an evening. Eating out is the same. Toys and games (both the computer and old fashioned kinds), music and film and mobile phones - enjoying them on what is now considered a normal scale requires a reasonable cash flow . Shopping as leisure is the ultimate example of this.

The games schoolchildren play have changed. Whereas in the past by necessity they made use of freely available material such as conkers now playing involves the purchase of cards or even handheld consoles.

The effect of this can be detrimental to society sharpening the divide between have and have not and driving many children to petty crime as they try to keep up with their peers. The do not see why they should not have an equal right to leisure. They are no different from any other children, save for the accident of parentage.

As Aldous Huxley observed fifty years ago in A Brave New World it is vital in a highly developed capitalist economy that leisure pursuits should be complicated and expensive and preferably require the purchase of extensive apparatus.

Thus when we are not economically productive ourselves we are at least consuming and so providing markets for the economic productivity of others. In addition this connection between enjoyment and spending encourages, (or for those now in debt necessitates) us to maximise our personal earnings locking us in to jobs we cannot afford to lose (even as we try to climb above them).

I am not arguing that we should not enjoy ourselves, nor that we are in a material sense far better off than previous generations in the wealth of leisure opportunities open to us. Only that we should appreciate better what we have and also enjoy leisure pursuits that, because no one can sell them, do not get advertised on television.

Take a walk. Have a conversation outwith the pub. Play a game that doesn’t require complicated and expensive apparatus. Maybe even write a blog.