Author Archives: Charlie Whitaker

About Charlie Whitaker

Charlie is an architect living and working in London. Increasingly, he is also a philosophy graduate of Birkbeck, University of London. When he is not doing his real work, he puzzles needlessly over news stories and current events.

The monopolarist recession

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For a while now I’ve had a private theory about the way our world used to work. It goes like this: although communism may have been bad for the people of Russia (and of the Soviet satellite states), it did a useful job in keeping the west honest through negative example. Free speech? Yes, we in the west have that. Imprisonment without trial? No, that would be evil and wrong. Peace through international treaties? Naturally. As long as communism was going on, a sense that it would be better to be on the side of the angels permeated western society, its institutions, and its way of conducting relations abroad.

Anyway, I don’t expect that this suggestion won’t be falsified through multiple counter-example, and all to the muffled sound of laughter. But I thought it might give some colour to the background of this week’s events. For one, we have the French president in Moscow, brokering some sort of deal in which the Russians agree to (mostly) stop moving their tanks in the direction of the Georgian capital. Today we have the German chancellor meeting Medvedev in Sochin. And Condoleeza Rice, the US foreign policy chief, is in Tbilisi to show the Aghmashenebeli the surrender document he doesn’t know he’s already signed. It looks more like peer cooperation to me, and not so much like the dismal, chauvinist picture of a monopolar world that kept getting pushed our way circa Iraq.

Mentality gap

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I hadn’t paid much attention to this Reuters report from yesterday: it says that mobile rocket launchers are being ‘given priority’ in the queue of armor moving from Russia into South Ossetia / Georgia. These are Soviet-era weapons which are said to have a range of 35 km. There may be a propaganda angle to this news item, of course.

While I still think we have to make an effort to incorporate the situation into a larger view of things – and I’ll admit that this effort can lead to some fairly strange-sounding statements – it’s dawning on me that there is an appalling local precedent: the 1999-2000 siege of Grozny, in which the city was more or less levelled through use of artillery, including rocket artillery. This has to be seen as a worst case outcome for Tbilisi and Georgia. However, there’s not much doubt that the players involved have form.

One of the least pleasant things about this episode is the lack of any honest attempt on the part of the Russian leadership to give a clear account of its aims and intent.

How many disputed territories have you annexed this week?

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James Sherr writes in today’s Telegraph:

… Russia is exasperated with the West and also contemptuous of it. In the Georgian conflict, as in the more subtle variants of energy diplomacy, Russians have shown a harshly utilitarian asperity in connecting means and ends. In exchange, we appear to present an unfocused commitment to values and process. Our democracy agenda has earned the resentment not only of Russia’s elite but of the ordinary people who are delighted to see Georgia being taught a lesson. Our divisions arouse derision.

I suspect that this kind of writing will seem alarmist in hindsight. For a while now, I’ve had the view that it’s probably better not to talk up Russia and Russian strength. From the playground perspective, that kind of talk only encourages the bully. More importantly, it gets things out of proportion, and lack of proportion surely belongs to the psychology of escalation.

There’s a distinct retrograde character to this week’s events. This makes following the news exciting, but nonetheless I don’t think we’re seeing the beginning of a return to the state of affairs pre-1989. For a start, with communism, for decades, there was the fear that maybe, just maybe, the reds might be outproducing us. In other words, whether or not communism was ethically sound, it worked. (And there’s more than a hint of this mentality with respect to China today.) I tend to believe that if you follow this road assiduously you get to a situation where – through reference to some sort of biological analogy – ‘strength’ or ‘fitness’ is given as the highest purpose of a nation. This bad.

Luckily, we don’t need to go there: communism (at least, communism as practised by the Russians) turned out not to work. The consequences are still with Russia today, and can be seen at various levels and in various applications, including military applications. For example, shells fired from a Leopard 2 will likely pass clean through the hull of a T-80, but not vice versa. (Korolev’s rocket designs were good, admittedly.) It’s only because military investment was such a high priority in the USSR that we see today’s Russia in possession of a variety of functional materiel.

Now that we can measure it,* we find that Russia’s GDP is approximately equal to that of Portugal Brazil (which is not to knock Brazil). Much of Russia’s wealth comes from resource extraction: in other words, Russia is not making stuff. Is it thinking stuff instead? Well, is there a nascent biotech or semiconductor industry in Russia today? (Or is there maybe some other, more esoteric kind of activity that hasn’t yet permeated popular consciousness?) How are Russian universities doing?

Russia is fairly populous, although no one would call it densely populated. However, its population is shrinking; in part, because it is not a healthy country.

So we’re left with territory – Russia borders a lot of places – and with its military, which still has some potency. Put those two together, and maybe it’s not surprising that some Russian tanks will pop across the border from time to time. Or at least, they’ll want to.

One thing I found hard to understand about the last few days was the BTC pipeline bombing. I don’t think that anyone doubts that the Russian air force could hit it eventually, if they chose, but what would be the point? There’s no short term strategic consequence: nothing exclusively depends on that particular piece of infrastructure. So unless the Russians bombed it every day – which in itself would delay a profitable peace – they’d only see the thing rebuilt. If on the other hand, they wanted the pipeline – preciousss – for themselves, they’d have to invade (and take any further consequences). This possibility must be on people’s minds, but it seems less likely today than it did yesterday. My suspicion is that the Russians simply missed the pipeline, and then, having thought things through, decided not to have another go.

My geostrategic recommendation, for what little it’s worth: have strong words with the Ukrainians so that the Russians are allowed to take their boats home unmolested. Negotiate the introduction of a UN monitoring force to be stationed somewhere in the vicinity of South Ossetia. Continue to reduce dependency on oil and gas. And wait. Looking back, one lesson is this: if the Georgians had been militarily competent, they could have made this particular excursion punishingly difficult. The terrain favours defence. Whatever training and equipping may have been going on, it was obviously not up to scratch: we’ve just seen a failure of basic, local deterrence.

*Probably not a straightforward job

The message

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If anyone qualifies as candidate material for the position of the new Solar King, then David Miliband certainly does. So perhaps the young contender doesn’t have to say anything, he just has to be heard to speak. For potential admirers, tone is what matters, and as far as that goes he seems to have banged out a workable melody in sentiment couplets. Miliband is passionate/dispassionate. He’s also youthful/wise, rational/emotional, optimistic/cautious, critical/supportive. He is very much of today’s Labour party, but he also lets slip a hint of what tomorrow could be. Or rather, he might give a hint about that, later on. For right now we’re at a starting point:

The starting point is not debating personalities but winning the argument about our record, our vision for the future and how we achieve it.

He then says:

When people hear exaggerated claims, either about failure or success, they switch off. That is why politicians across all parties fail to connect. To get our message across, we must be more humble about our shortcomings but more compelling about our achievements.

Of course, they also switch off when you attempt to bend credulity into a pretzel. Or rather, they give up because it just doesn’t make sense any more. It’s been ten years, and the message has long since emerged. Broadly, it’s this:

1. We admire business leaders and entrepreneurs; their wealth is evidence of their achievement. We will always take the word of such people as law.

2. You, on the other hand, are a prole and the best part of your income belongs to us.

3. There will be capital investment in the healthcare, education and transport sectors, but it will be with money borrowed from the high achieving business leaders and entrepreneurs we admire. Naturally, they will expect to be rewarded in the years ahead. This is where your taxes come in.

4. Some of your tax money will be spent on higher pay for teachers and doctors. Of course, in the long run we’d like see health and education providers become ‘high achievers’ themselves.

5. The civil service shows little potential for ‘high achievement’, so instead we will pay Accenture and similar companies to provide a top quality ‘civil service’ in parallel. And quality costs.

6. Some of your tax money will be spent in support of American foreign and defence policy, whether it’s lawful or not. In connection with this we will either buy American weaponry or the sorts of weapons the Americans tend to buy.

7. China! India!

8. Some of your tax money will be spent on poorly specified IT systems, all of which will have the general intent of increasing the government’s powers of surveillance and control. In scope, these systems will overlap in an unstructured, chaotic way. In practice, many of these systems will not work as intended. Your personal data will get leaked all over the place. Also, we will encourage the police to take samples of your DNA.

9. We will talk up the threat of Islamic terrorism to the point of incitement to racism. We may condone torture.

10. There will be constitutional change. Generally, we will enlarge the powers of the executive and decrease all forms of oversight.

11. The Olympics! Technology!

12. Economically, the good news will be because of us, the bad news will be because of ‘the global situation’. Specifically, we will encourage our citizens to speculate in a local market that has no mechanism for arbitrage; the UK property market. This speculation will be unsustainable and a recession will follow. We will do nothing to anticipate or moderate this outcome, because that is not what business leaders and entrepreneurs say they want. Whichever way it pans out, expect to pay much more to a bank over the course of your lifetime than your parents did.

13. All of this is good. If there are to be further improvements, they will have to come from you. Don’t complain. Embrace change! Be fitter! Work harder!

I think that’s most of it, but I’m sure you can think of more. Miliband finished with this:

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few. When debating public service reform, tax policies or constitutional changes, we apply those values to the latest challenges.

We can remember it as his four legs good, two legs bad moment.

Regression Roundup

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DTV (digital television) is here; just at a time when people are giving up on watching TV in favour of YouTube. Or so we might have thought. There’s also going to be a switchover in America. What if you’re poor and can’t afford a new television? US Congress has thought of this: two $40 vouchers are to be made available to every US household, on application; redeemable at your local Best Buy. Precedent: the Plebeian Games of Emperor Commodus.

A senior British police forensic scientist wants to put the DNA of children aged 7-12 on the British national DNA database (NDNAD). If they show signs of becoming troublemakers, that is. Precedent: criminological phrenology.

In the UK, unemployment benefit is taxable. (News to me, if not to anyone else.) Precedent: the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834.

This is the first in a series of posts monitoring regressive trends in our supposedly modern globalised economy. If you have any stories to share, let me know and I’ll include them in next month’s roundup.

Iraqi employees campaign

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This will be of interest to UK residents (and it’s worth noting that every resident, documented or otherwise, has access to an MP). I hope everyone else won’t mind my cross-posting it from www.perfect.co.uk.

Iraqis who have worked for the British Army – as translators, typically, but also in other roles – are likely to lose their lives once the army leaves Iraq and the protection they offer goes with them. Needless to say, this is a betrayal. These men and women took a huge risk in helping us. However, the government can reciprocate by granting these people – and their families – special asylum and free transport out of the country. At the moment the government is reluctant to do this.

Next Tuesday (9 October) there is a lobbying event at parliament: Committee Room 14, 7-9 pm. I’ll be there. My MP (Susan Kramer – bless her) will be there. Other MPs will be there. We will have Iraqi and British Army speakers who will explain the situation in detail and answer questions, and the event will be reported in the broadcast and press media.

We need to get every MP to come along, because this event will provide evidence direct from Iraq that every MP needs to hear. The best way to get your MP to come along is to go and ask them in person. Seriously, this makes a huge difference. Do it this week. If you can’t do that, then write a letter today. Then come to the event yourself. This is a blogger’s campaign: blogging has made this happen. We have made this happen, and we need to see it through.

(Dan Hardie’s resources for this campaign, including a proforma letter, are here.)

The grinch who stole talent

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Chris Dillow (of Stumbling and Mumbling), responding to Gordon Brown’s recent speech to the Labour Party, says that “economic success requires that talent not be unlocked, and remain unused”. So Brown’s call for the development of “all the talents of all the people” is “purest wibble” because “all profits come from power, and this means disempowering talented workers”.

Now Chris may be shooting for some sort of curmudgeon of the year award here, but what’s worse is that his argument is misleading. The first problem is that he politicises something which can’t be changed, which is the fact that life involves choice. Chris says:

… specialisation stifles many of our talents. The musician who becomes a lawyer never fully unlocks his musical talent. The cricketer who becomes a doctor lets his cricketing talent wither.

But these examples are chosen so to contrast the ‘world of work’ with ‘fun’ things. You could just as well say ‘the gymnast who becomes a lacrosse player never fully develops his vaulting skills’ or ‘the muralist who becomes a photographer never fully develops her drafting skills’. Even an imaginary society of extended lifespans and perfect leisure will produce these sorts of choices. I’d hope we can agree that Gordon Brown can’t be blamed for not having an answer to that.

When you do turn to ‘work’, of course, you have to agree that it does constrain people. This is because work is transactional: you have to keep your side of the bargain. But you get things in return, including things that help you to develop your ‘talent’, not the least of which may be a context through which to define your talent. The transactional framework of skill development is, in fact, wider than what is often understood as ‘work’. The trainee gymnast, for example, has to agree to stick to a certain diet and a certain training schedule. If he doesn’t, he won’t receive further coaching. So becoming a gymnast resembles work (even if no money changes hands). Many gymnasts might say it is work. Conversely, work can be fun and rewarding: you get to get better at something.

Of course, Chris would argue that while this might be an ideal formulation of ‘work’, most jobs just aren’t like that. Part of his argument is that the transaction is unequal: the ‘skills’ you get to acquire are in fact demeaning and – crucially – you’re often expected to work at less than your full capacity. True, plenty of jobs are dull and demeaning. But use any economic model you like – and Chris is using a Marxist model – the trends have been going the other way. There is more automation. There are more high skill jobs than there used to be; people live longer, and have longer retirements in which to develop other skills. There is more leisure time. Politically – and this is one of the EU’s finest achievements – there is greater labour mobility and therefore more choice of occupation. And there are more educational opportunities. Many of these things could be reversed – and our political culture will be one determinant of this – but drudgery for all is not yet a requirement.

Another problem with Chris’s argument is that he takes ‘talent’ as essentially personal. In Chris’s view, talent is a thing that lies within which can either be released or kept imprisoned. The latent premier league footballer inside the call centre operative; fully formed but denied opportunity for expression. I would suggest that a better way to think of ‘talent’ is as a predisposition to respond quickly to development in the context of a willing audience. Skills and admirers: for ‘talent’, you need both. On this understanding, latent premier league footballers don’t exist: there are only those who actually do play in the premier league. The rest (including you and me, possibly) are ‘other’ footballers. We might in some sense be ‘better’ than the premier leaguers, but we don’t have their audience. Or look at it from the other end. Imagine that the number of premier league clubs were halved tomorrow (the TV audience has declined). None of the premier leaguers are changed, physically. Their passing and dribbling skills are undiminished. But now, suddenly, half of them are no longer premier league players. So was that talent ever fully theirs?

This is significant in the context of increasing diversity, which has been the trend. There are more kinds of sports than there used to be (new sports get invented). Handball is popular in Germany but not – so far – in Britain: after the 2012 London Olympics this could change. And it’s not just sports: there are more kinds of job than there used to be. Necessarily, the ‘audience’ for each is smaller. What does this mean for talent? Less opportunity, or more? We seem to have to give a mixed verdict.

Finally, there’s personal experience. My experience of work is that there’s no limit to how challenging you can make it. You can aim to make it easy, of course, and that’s a sensible aim. But despite occasional idiocies, there are regular opportunities to do things in a new way. I think this is true at least of every profession. By contrast, here is Chris’s view of the way things work in medicine:

If you had to go to hospital for a minor operation, who would you rather perform it: the brilliant surgeon for whom the operation is a dull routine one, or the young and mediocre one for whom it’s a challenge requiring full use of their talent?

I suspect this situation never arises, and not just because surgeons, like most people, tend to work in teams so as to combine experience. The young surgeon will be committed to doing her job well – on the basis of her training – and the older one is likely to want to innovate. Both are good.

The luxuriant growth of objects

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Jean Baudrillard died recently and the obits – this one in particular – persuaded me to give his writing a try, starting with The System of Objects (1968), which addresses the interaction of the technical and the cultural. In conversation with Steven Poole a few years ago, Baudrillard said – apparently of this book – ‘I did this critique of technology, but I would not do that any more. I am not nostalgic. I would not oppose liberty and human rights to this technical world’.

The System of Objects is aphorism dense. It is also somewhat puritanical. An example of the first:

The fact is, however, that automating machines means sacrificing a very great deal of potential functionality. In order to automate a practical object, it is necessary to stereotype it in its function, thus making it more fragile … so long as an object has not been automated it remains susceptible of redesign …

And an example of the moralising:

… sexual perversion is founded on the inability to apprehend the other qua object of desire in his or her unique totality as a person … the other is transformed into the paradigm of various eroticised parts of the body, a single one of which becomes the focus of objectification.

It’s hard to read The System of Objects without feeling fingered. Personally. Whether it’s your tastefully muted yet minimally accented interior decor (‘nothing but an impossible echo of the state of nature … aggressive … naive’), or your small collection of Galaxie 500 B-Sides (‘in short, there is something of the harem about collecting’), or the iroko antelope head sculpture you and your girlfriend brought back from Africa (‘… narcissistic regression … imaginary mastery of birth and death’), your way of living holds moral lessons for you. Yes, your plan was to pass a pleasant sunny afternoon reading on the sofa; but look, a swamp of guilt and self-doubt is rising around you, and it comes from all the things around you which you thought were good, or at least OK.

Baudrillard connects the moral to the everyday, the mundane, and so his net is cast very wide. This follows from his initial purpose of giving a systematic account of popular culture. The author’s opening challenge to himself – ‘Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?’ – is followed up with a granular chapter structure that at first takes on items such as ‘… Walls and Daylight, Lighting, Mirrors and Portraits … Seats … The Lighter …’ and then shifts by way of cars and robots to broader classifications: ‘The Ideology of Models … The Ambiguity of the Domestic Object’. Ungenerously, you imagine Baudrillard starting out in his apartment – and writing about everything in it – then shifting his attention out the window (some cars down there), reminiscing briefly about that kinky phase he went through (embarrassing, frankly), then trying to remember how it was that time he went shopping at Christmas and found all the advertising incredibly irritating. In other words, The System of Objects has some of the qualities of a confessional. And because you too, reader, are bourgeois, your milieu will be very similar. And so you can connect, no?

The ambition to write big, to write it all, but then not to finish, also seems reassuringly European. (Being and Time remains two-thirds incomplete to this day, measured against its own table of contents.) Then again, Baudrillard’s contemporary, Roland Barthes, seems to have tackled the issue of popular culture by means of postcards and essays, and his piece on the Citroen DS from Mythologies (1957) is conveniently pocket sized.

I haven’t read enough Barthes to be able to convincingly compare him with Baudrillard (and I haven’t read enough Baudrillard either) but I suspect that not only did Barthes get there first, he had more poetry:

It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales.

Baudrillard’s metaphors, though similarly starry, are less beguiling:

… the intimacy of the car arises from an accelerated space-time metabolism and, inextricably, from the fact that the car may at any time become the locus of an accident: the culmination in a chance event – which may in fact never occur but is always imagined, always involuntarily assumed to be inevitable – of that intimacy with oneself, that formal liberty, which is never so beautiful as in death.

Yet when he is not reaching, he is often impressively direct:

Objectively, substances are simply what they are: there is no such thing as a true or a false, a natural or an artificial substance. How could concrete be somehow less ‘authentic’ than stone? We apprehend old synthetic materials such as paper as altogether natural – indeed, glass is one of the richest substances we can conceive of.

The modern idea of the nobility of materials is still very widespread; perhaps more entrenched now than it was in 1968, having acquired an environmentalist gloss. You can test the modernity of this idea yourself by taking a pocket knife into an eighteenth century grand house and having a (discreet) poke: underneath the gilding it’s cheap softwood and plaster.

So why would Baudrillard ‘retract’? One possible reason is that reactions to modernity are easily connected with fascism. And although technological ‘lock-in’ (‘fragility’ is Baudrillard’s term) remains a reality, a counter-force is technological entrepreneurship. And then there are computers, of course.

(My thanks to Alex and David for letting me guest post at AFOE.)