The belief that dare not speak its name?

 

It’s an old story, a very old story. Who rules? The Greek city states were torn by strife between the Aristocracy (a term which comes from the Greek, aristokratía. Aristos means “excellent,” and kratos translates as “power”) the rule of the Excellent, and Democracy, which again is from Greek, demokratia, or “rule by the demos or common people”.

 

And then I read this blog http://quillette.com/2016/07/08/remain-vs-leave-elite-technocracy-vs-liberal-democracy/ where he discusses Elite Technocracy versus Liberal Democracy.

 

Both sides have good antecedents. The democrats can look back to Cleisthenes, Pericles, Locke and the English Whigs. Their stance is the citizen is central and the state must govern with the consent of the citizen. Without consent there is tyranny and the right of rebellion.

The aristocrats, or in more modern terms the technocratic elite follow Plato, Thomas Hobbes and Georg Hegel. These stress the authority and wisdom of those in government as the only ones who really understand what is going on and are the only ones equipped to make the decisions about the future.

 

In Greece the conflict between the two ideologies led to strife within the state between the competing groups. As always it is more complicated than a simple ‘class’ war because the leaders of the demos were often men drawn from the same wealthy class which provided the aristocracy. Personal feuds and factions complicated and intensified the battle.

Obviously personal feuds and factions are unlikely to have a part in our modern politics, doubtless the dispute between Boris Johnson and Michael Gove was over the deepest philosophical conjectures. Similarly within the Labour Party, the current bickering between Jeremy and virtually everybody else has nothing to do with the fact that his MPs see little chance of re-election with him at the helm and again is a nuanced dispute over high political principles.

 

The last couple of weeks have thrown the fault lines into high relief.  We have those for whom the will of the demos, the common people is sovereign. (Even when they disagree with it.)  We have others who believe that some people are just too stupid, or too ill-educated to be allowed to decide matters of any importance. I’ve seen suggestions that persons over a certain age should not be allowed to vote, or that there be IQ tests before people are allowed to vote. (Or in extreme cases restricting the franchise to nice people like us who live within the M25)

 

The Greeks had many faults, but one they don’t seem to have suffered from was political correctness. They were perfectly happy to give something the label it deserved. I think we would start seeing things far more clearly if we were to do that. Let the believers in the rule of a technocratic elite proudly stand for their principles, let them boast of them, let them flaunt them in the market place of public opinion. “The man from Whitehall knows best, trust us to look after you.”

 

Or we could try democracy. The problem with democracy is that it’s difficult. It demands a lot of hard work from both the leaders and the led. Leaders really have to make a constant effort to keep in touch with people, not merely to know what hoi polloi are thinking and saying, but also to educate them and explain. Leadership is a two way process, where both sides listen and are changed.

And for the led, democracy cannot work alongside the cult of celebrity and a culture which emphases me, me, me. It also works best when you have a population that have been educated, not abandoned in sink estates and sink schools.

♥♥♥♥

There again, what do I know, you might as well ask the dog

 

As one reviewer commented “This is a selection of anecdotes about life as a farmer in Cumbria. The writer grew up on his farm, and generations of his family before him farmed the land. You develop a real feeling for the land you are hefted to and this comes across in these stories. We hear of the cattle, the sheep, his succession of working dogs, the weather and the neighbours, in an amusing and chatty style as the snippets of Jim Webster’s countryman’s wisdom fall gently. I love this collection.”

Come the revolution?

 

It was Plato who said “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” There again he also said “This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.”

So I was minding my own business, honest I was. But then it broke out all over Facebook like a rash. One overpaid media ‘personality’ metaphorically slaps another overpaid media ‘personality’.

Yeeehaa, cat fight everybody.

I’m afraid that I’d let my two grandmothers judge Brand. They’d have scrubbed his mouth out with soap and water. I remember one of them using the phase ‘foul mouthed and ignorant’ to describe someone. They knew that good manners and basic courtesy was one thing that ‘they’ couldn’t take off you. But then my grandmothers were decent working people, they weren’t ‘edgy’ or ‘relevant’.
(This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.)

Now I’m not all that old, but I’m old enough to have heard men sit and talk; men for whom Spain was the killing fields of their youth rather than a cheap holiday destination. If you want Anarchy, if you want Revolution, then I’ve talked to the men who tried the real thing. Revolution isn’t posturing on the media or even ranting on facebook, it’s hugging the ground closer than you ever hugged a lover. It’s clutching a cheap mass-produced rifle, nursing it like a child because it might keep you alive. I was told you can always tell the winners, they’re the ones who stand up unaided when the shelling stops. Apparently the dead have probably achieved a no-score draw. The losers are the wounded, depending on whose hands they fall into. If you want revolution, just look at Syria where they’ve got one. Revolutions aren’t discrete, something to be enjoyed solely by consenting adults. Once you’ve got a revolution, everybody’s got it. Pity about the old people and kids but hey, you wanted a revolution.
(This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.)

And then you get people saying things like they want to kill Tories. Well here I can help. It’s a doddle, any fool can do it.

“Basically you kneel them along the edge of the ditch. Not got a ditch, why let them dig their own, and then you can chuckle as you watch the bloated plutocrats do some honest toil. Then you take your automatic pistol in your right hand. (You are right handed? Yes? Then start from the right hand end of the line so you’re not shooting across youself.) Place the pistol barrel at the back of the neck, if they’re blind folded then just below the blindfold. Then as you release the trigger, with your right knee just nudge the body forward with your knee, it’s tidier that way, more professional, the body should topple forward and the weight of the torso will bring the legs down after it. Then just move onto the next.”
“What if you miss? From this range? OK you might not get a clean kill but being buried alive will finish them off. After all there’s not many ever manage to dig themselves out with their hands tied behind their back is there. But if they’re lucky someone will finish them off with a spade so it’s not your problem.”
“Filling in the ditch? Lawks child, that’s where experience comes in. You have the next lot to be shot dig their ditch parallel to the one that needs filling, so they dig their ditch and fill the previous one at the same time. Told you we’d done this before. And don’t worry about there not being another lot. This is a revolution, there’s always another lot. OK they might not be what you initially meant by Tories this time, they might just be people the Party disapproves of, or troublemakers who upset some local bigwig, or just ‘enemies of the people’. (We get a lot of them.)”

(This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.)

So you want to change the world? Here’s a tip. You’re not going to achieve anything on Facebook. Facebook is the circuses bit of our ‘bread and circuses’. It’s here as a displacement activity, so people can vent in the comfort of their own homes and then go and hunt down cute cat pictures. It’s here so that people can rant, mock, troll, whatever to their hearts content.
(This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.)

How many people have ever been to an open political meeting? I went to one a few years back, so long ago I cannot remember the subject under debate. My excuse is that oldest daughter was at archery and I needed something to do to kill a couple of hours. Mind you ‘debate’ wasn’t really the right word for it. The entire audience was pretty well on first name terms with each other, they seemed genuinely surprised when someone new walked in, and even more surprised when I explained I’d come to listen to the discussion.
Because there wasn’t a discussion, it was a case of ‘we hold these things to be self evident’. The talks were a series of rants directed at their demonised opponents and they were greeted with enthusiastic applause by the faithful gathered in the congregation.
Doubtless there was some sort of mirror of this meeting being held elsewhere in town, where the rants would be in support of the opposite proposal and the congregation of the faithful equally enthusiastic.
But, Lord love them, it isn’t their fault. If everyone sits on their backsides at home and doesn’t take part, who is going to raise a polite hand and ask “I say, could you just run through that point again, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense?”
(This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.)

In fact if enough people turn up, the two opposing groups might even work up the courage to hold their meeting in the same room on the same night!

If you want to change the world then walk out of the door and into the world and actually do something. Chat to an elderly neighbour, go and help out at a youth group, help at the homeless drop in or somewhere providing respite for carers. Some people out there are actually doing this. They’re the cement that holds society together, not cute catch pictures or witty political posts on Facebook.
(This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.)

And politics? “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” If you don’t like the choice, then stand yourself. Obviously there’s a risk that you might get elected and have to take responsibility and do the chuffing job but hey, into each reign a little life must fall.
You never know, just by standing you might force the others to up their game; you might get people interested and involved. What is important is what happens, not how many ‘likes’ it gets.
Wonder how many people ‘unfriend’ me after this?
(This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.)

Waiting for the Barbarians

Why are we in the mess we’re in? Plato probably summed it up when he said; “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

Someone drew my attention to the poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and it did the most dangerous thing a poem can do, it started me thinking.
At the moment we are ruled by a political class both introverted and incestuous. The leaders of the three main parties are all millionaires, (although inflation has devalued that tag). One party cannot offer more than a continued squeeze, another wants to go back to the 1970s and the prices and incomes policies that worked so well then. The third still struggles to cope with newly achieved political relevance and responsibility, a reality which appears to be anathema to many of its electorate.
We even have ‘millionaire Marxist academics.’ (Am I the only one who finds the term confusing?)

We have a serious problem. It isn’t just that successive governments have been lying to us; we’ve been lying to ourselves. We’ve got to the stage where we expect infrastructure and stuff to be paid for by the fairies.
Back in 1964 I was sitting in the kiddies chair in Ernies, getting my hair cut. One of the men in the queue was a local councillor and there was a discussion going on about the sewers in the town. (Before old Ernie died, I actually asked him about this discussion, just to make sure I remembered it correctly, and Ernie had remembered it as well.)
Basically this town got by because we tipped raw sewage into the tide. Even then the councillor informed us, there were plans for a proper sewage system, but neither party would suggest it because it would mean an extra 2d on the rate and they’d be out of office. This was the sort of attitude which means we got left with a lot of slowly decaying Victorian infrastructure. Now we’ve privatised a lot of things, and because the enforcement agencies will act against private companies when they never acted against public agencies, we’re finally getting caught up with maintenance. Guess what, it costs money.

Now there are two side issues here. The first is the culture of entitlement. It’s costing more than it should because all these companies have expensive layers of management that expect good money. This differs from the NHS and other government agencies exactly how? Too many people in management positions expect to be paid far more than they’re worth. That is an area which needs dealing with. Just don’t expect the BBC to lead the campaign.

The second issue is that government has kept putting expenses ‘off the books.’ Because private companies have to pay to fix the sewers, the money is collected via charges, not via rates. It’s the same with wind-farms and alternative energy, it’s being subsidised by adding to people’s bills, not out of taxation.
Then we have the private finance initiative. Only a fool, a politician, or a bureaucrat could find that a good idea. Build it now and leave it for our children to pay off the debt.
But this raises two problems. The first is that if something is paid for out of income tax, it’s potentially basically fair in that the poor pay less. Pay for it like we are doing and actually the bill falls more heavily on the shoulders of the poor who pay a larger proportion of their income for these essentials.
The second problem is that when government stopped paying for these things, in theory they didn’t need to collect tax to pay for them, so tax could have fallen. But it didn’t, they found other black holes to pour our money into. So if government took these things back on the books, tax would have to rise again.

And now we’re getting to the time of reckoning. The bills are pouring in, the proportion of national income spent on debt repayments continues to rise, and at the moment our political masters are more interested in curbing ‘the power of the press.’
You can see their point, after all it’s the press that holds them to account.

So for want of better, we sit here waiting for the barbarians.

Waiting for the Barbarians
By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), translated by Edmund Keeley
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.