What is wrong with us humans?

What is wrong with us humans? Something is amiss. We are not, overall, a happy bunch.

Violence has always been part of human behaviour.  There is some evidence that we are making progress.  Also, despite the impressions conveyed by media reports, figures show that wars at least, wars between states, are getting less frequent and destructive in recent times.  Maybe the UN should take more interest in resolving separatist conflict.

Nevertheless, we have a way to go. Humans have symptoms: War, crime, violence, hatred, rape, greed, theft, anger, prejudice, unkindness, coldness, psychopathy, disputations, thoughtlessness and arguments, you name it, we show it at some time or other.

The infinite diversity of vices can all be traced back to one single vice: selfishness.
Prioritising our own individual interests above the interests of other people.

In the case of the psychopath, the individual is absolute. In some cases, the "Family" (or in-group)  is treated well, but those outside the Family are not respected. The Family may be the biological nuclear or extended family, or a social family, as in groups like Mafia or Cosa Nostra, or to sect members in the case of closed religious sects or cults.

This problem of selfishness can be viewed as a developmental problem. The human infant lives in a bubble of self-absorption. When a baby has needs - hunger, thirst, cold, etc, it yells, and the need (usually) gets attended to. Growing up is a process of learning that the needs of the individual must be balanced with the needs of other individuals. This is the process of socialisation, of learning that one is a member of a society.

If this process is radically disordered, we end up with a psychopath (aka sociopath) who cares only about his/her own needs, and is blind to the needs of others.

All this is pretty obvious. Why spend time setting it out?

Because the dominant ideology of our time is individualism.  It is the ideology behind free market capitalism and libertarianism, and these are the dominating themes that drive climate change denial contrarianism. They are also squaring up as distinct anti-green campaigners. It is individualism that leads to the idea that the State is intrinsically bad, and wants to reduce the size of the state, regardless of whether that should lead to (more) corruption.

We must always remember that individualism is also unscientific, since homo "Sapiens" is a social animal.

This is not to claim that all capitalists are sociopaths (though some are)  The point of all this is, that for humanity to function optimally, we need to see beyond our immediate individual needs, and take a broader and longer view of the situation of all humanity, and of the environment that keeps humanity alive. We need to be able to see that others have the same emotions and needs as ourselves. We need to take a social and an ecological view of the world.

The point is that a world view based on individualism is unlikely to build the best of all possible worlds, because the narrow, individual world view is so often the problem, not the solution.

Reith Lectures: How Niall Ferguson and the markets diverge from reality

Niall Ferguson Protector of the City

I've been listening to the second Reith Lecture on BBC Radio 4, The Darwinian economy, by Prof Niall Ferguson, summarised here.


This is my comment:


Niall Ferguson's central thesis is that deregulation of banks did not cause the crash. However, he needs to establish this thesis in face of the work of David Moss at Harvard Business School.
His key finding is expressed in a graph here:


It relates income inequality measured as share of income held by the top 10% of the pile compared to bank failures going back to 1917. There is a very clear correlation between income inequality and bank failures. It is strong backing evidence for the position of the Equality Trust -  that greater equality is better for social cohesion. 

Of course, correlation is not causation, though causation must always be accompanied by correlation.

Naturally Niall Ferguson will wish in to deny causation, because it negates his free market assumptions. He has an easy task, because it is always impossible to "prove" causation, because it is not a matter of irrefutable positive logical deduction, but rather a matter of inference, of pattern recognition. This recognition is very much related to our basic assumptions, as well as a mounting body of evidence. Neo-liberals will be far slower to recognise causation in David Moss' observation than someone who understand the scientific truth that man is a social animal.

One of the elements necessary for recognising causation is finding a plausible mechanism to relate cause and effect. So the question is, how could income inequality cause bank crashes?

There is a possible mechanism in the capacity of humans to suffer from biolar illness - manic depression as was. If we look at the financial markets through the lens of a psychiatrist, it is very easy to see the parity between the individual mood swings of the bipolar sufferer, and the boom-bust mood swings of the society of market traders.

This idea is developed on this blog here:

The root problem with Niall Ferguson's reasoning is trying to isolate the banking sector from the real economy, which is, or rather, ought to be, founded on ecology. He, as a free market fundamentalist, has come unstuck from reality, just as a bipolar sufferer comes unstuck from reality.

Free Market Fundamentalism's absurd contradiction

Regular readers know that I have been debating with a free marketeer.

Free market fundamentalism (FMF) has an inherent internal contradiction:

How come that a free market, 

which consists of sinful* men 

competing against each other for filthy lucre, which is the root of all evil, 

can produce the best of all possible economic worlds?

This is the opposite of axiomatic. 

(Green economics is based on three axioms or self evident truths)

All they can do is to say that law makers who seek to influence the market may make errors also. This is true: but the law makers are working, however imperfectly, from a position of being democratically elected to serve the interests of the people, and if the interests of the people are logically worked through, they will arrive at the aforementioned three axioms. 

The fact is that Free Market Fundamentalism is a species of philosophical idealism, perhaps the last remaining in an age when most real philosophers have abandoned idealism. 

Its idealism is of a free market whose Invisible Hand will make everything right. This is clearly not the case, but when faced with this, FMFs blame the contamination of the ideal with interference by Governments. 

They overlook the tendency for market actors themselves to interfere in the free market, distorting it by forming cartels and also by bending public opinion away from reality, as in the case of AGW sceptics.

FMF is absurd, and it's continued existence is a tribute to the power of money to influence thought and opinion.   

*Tories seem to believe in original sin, but it still works without original sin, by substituting self-motivated individuals.

Green-Free Market Fundamentalist debate: On Inequality

In my debate with Mark Littlewood a free marketeer, I claimed  that Wilkinson and Pickett in the Spirit Level are showing that unequal societies suffer from all manner of social ills.

Mark contests this, saying:

ML: The Spirit Level cannot possibly be described as consisting of “sound scientific facts”. It’s now been conclusively debunked. The data used is partial, some of the data sources are questionable – and data has been omitted which does not suit their conclusions. 

RL: You're over-claiming here, Mark. "Conclusively debunked" it is not. It has been challenged by free market fundamentalists, as is to be expected, but it stands.

ML: I don’t know a single, serious economist who now believes their conclusions stack up. 

RL: Two things. For me, a "serious" economist is one who predicted the 2009 crash. All the others are just common economists, and if you get two of such economists in a room, you will have three or more opinions on any economic matter. Common Economists are not scientists, they are obscurantist ideological wranglers.

The second point is that Wilkinson and Pickett are epidemiologists, not economists. Epidemiology, unlike economics, is a proper science, and for real discussion we need to look to the community of epidemiologists. There is debate there, the consensus is not as advanced as the consensus over AGW in the climatology community, but among epidemiologists, the inequality-disorder link stands up pretty well.

There are multiple lines of enquiry, including civil servant and other animal studies. Here's an introduction to the idea that social status affects gene expression. 

ML: One analysis of their work shows  that there might just be a minor correlation between infant mortality and equality.

RL: This is Peter Saunders' Policy Exchange critique. His admission that infant mortality correlates with inequality is in itself is an important and significant fact. 

ML:  – but the rest is pretty much garbage (and if you produce enough scattergrams you’d expect to find some sort of correlation somewhere by sheer chance – for example, the rise of Manchester City football club over the last decade correlates pretty closely to a widening gap in incomes, but it certainly isn’t the cause of it). 

RL: Again, you are overclaiming. Very significant is the aggregated correlation of several indices, which shows a very tight adherence to proportionality between social dysfunction and inequality:

ML: Christopher Snowdon’s “Spirit Level Delusion” blows Wilkinson and Pickett apart http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.co.uk/

RL: Again, you are using charged, extreme language.  I have criticised Snowdon's approach here, and his methodology here. Snowdon is very far from "blowing W&P apart".

Another deconstruction of the preposterous assertions made by Wilkinson and Pickett can be found here http://www.petersaunders.org.uk/cis_presentation_on_the_spirit_level_6_june_2011.html

I’ve yet to come across any serious attempt to rebut Saunders’ or Snowdon’s devastating critique. 

RL: W&P's response to Saunders is here, and their response to Snowdon is here.

As a matter of interest, I produce an hypothesis here to try to explain why inequality should produce social stress.

So, in this debate between green and free marketeer, we come across a second instance where free market ideology comes into conflict with science - the first, of course, being the clash over climate change.

This is not unexpected, since there is a third clash - over the nature of homo "Sapiens". 


FMFs are individualists, that is, their philosophy is founded on the experience of man as an individual.
H. "sapiens" is  a social animal, plain and simple, without any shadow of doubt.

So FMF ideology is an idealism, an idea divorced from reality at its very inception. Therefore it is to be expected that it keeps clashing with the findings of science.

Green vs Free Market Fundamentalist Debate II

Yesterday's blogpost reviewed a Twitter debate over tax policy between myself and Mark Littlewood.

Today we move on to higher thing: state spending, and idealism vs reality.

Mark (MJL) is against high state spending. I am against inefficient state spending, and point to state investment in energy conservation as a highly efficient and desirable thing. Mark says "Energy conservation should be optimalised in a properly functioning free market."

I would like an expansion on this point, because it is clearly not happening.

Energy companies make more profit the more energy they sell, so at this point the market is clearly working against energy conservation. The trouble is, I tweet, that the oil & coal lobby are lobbying Govt for all they are worth, and distorting developments.

I ask Mark for his ideal small state. Is it the USA? He's not keen on the USA as a role model, because their spending is still 40% of GDP. I aver that the USA is barbaric in terms of its prisons and health policies. He thinks their health services are not so bad. We don't go into that.

 He is in favour of the "growth of Hong Kong from 1945 onwards. It is a good role model, although imperfect." Singapore scores well on having low intervention by the state on the market, but fails on other liberties.
I respond "So economic deregulation does not get linked automatically with individual liberty".
This is an important point, a fault line within the individualist ideology, because the libertarians identify individual liberty and FMF.

He says main dividing line in politics is now between statists (who favour big govt) and classical liberals who don't.

I say biggest divide is between those who accept ecological science & those who don't. Sadly, in this regard, libertarians/FMFs are worst.

MJL: " I'm pretty agnostic on AGW in terms of the science. And I don't think it's a binary issue in political terms."

I've met this one before, with Benny Peiser.
RL: "Agnosicism not scientific category. In this scientific debate, the choice is between climate science, or the sceptics' low Climate Sensitivity hypothesis.

Mark doesn't pick up on this. No AGW skeptic has, because they frankly have a threadbare argument at the core of their hypothesis. They believe only one baby will wake, when it is perfectly clear, and well substantiated,  that warming will produce positive feedbacks from other areas within the climate system.


AGW sceptics are comfortable to put 1001 nit-picking arguments against climate science, but blank the one simple question directed at their own hypothesis.

In classic form, Mark comes back with a dig at the Hockey stick - the many times replicated evidence that there is a significant warming taking place in our generation. The trouble with sceptics is that they believe their own propaganda. The hysterical and oft-repeated ad hominem attacks on Michael Mann are so prolific that they think they must be true.

In fact, the evidence still points to historic recent warmings.

I would urge everyone to read the link above, which shows that recent temperature rises are significant when set against the historic record. They have been repeated over and again. This is science properly carried out, checked, questioned and replicated.

It is a testament to the desperate need of free market fundamentalists to deny that the free market in fossil fuels could cause any conceivable external problem that they choose to believe the massed bands of sceptical journalists and bloggers against such a sound body of science.  And testament moreover to their absolute conviction that they have no need to look to defend their own hypothesis against this one clear and simple question - are there positive feedbacks in the atmospheric energy exchange system or not?

This really is the essence of the debate.

I will re-state it.

The essence is the term "Free Market". Greens have no problem with the "market". A market is a natural and enjoyable human experience. We are not statists, state capitalists, or Command Economists. We are in favour of maximising individual freedom as far as is possible within given social and environmental limits.

The Greens' position is neither a Marxist Command Economy, nor FMF, but a Guided Market - guided to better serve the needs of society and environment.

It is the idea of the FREE market - or more accurately, Free Market Fundamentalism (FMF) as George Soros puts it, which is the problem. FMF idealises and absolutises the freedom of the Market as a quasi-divine and unchallengable Invisible Hand. All that is wrong in any economy stems from inhibition of the freedom of the market, in their view.

FMF leads necessarily to AGW denial, because if the science is right, it means that international cooperation must in this regard have precedence over international competition. 

The carbon market must be regulated in some way, whether by taxation or more subtle means, to ensure a transition from finite,  "natural capital" carbon based energy to non-finite, "natural income" renewable energy. 

This intervention into the holy and inviolate Free Carbon Market is unacceptable to FMFs, and therefore climate science must be wrong. An amazingly successful worldwide propaganda blitz has ensured that this meme has run, so that a large percentage of the population, not just Daily Mail readers, but also intelligent people like Mark Littlewood, believe in the propaganda to the extent that they feel no need to examine the soundness of their One Baby hypothesis.

In short, the idealism of the Free Market believer causes him or her to overlook, question, or deny any evidence that the free market can harm society or the environment.

That is why the debate of the century is between the free marketeers and the greens.

In almost all regards, there is no agreement. Except, possibly, one: Externalities. More on this later.

Resolving a World of Trouble with Green Ideology

There is a world of trouble out there, global problems looking for global solutions.

We have:

• Dictatorships  in North Korea, China, Burma, Zimbabwe,  Syria, Egypt, Bahrein, Saudi Arabia &c
• Wars and conflicts
• Global economic problems with debt, austerity and recession.
• Rich Poor Gap within nations and between nations
• Anthropogenic Global Warming and other man caused environmental degredation
• Human Population Growth

and many other problems and difficulties.

All these problems are capable of being resolved by determined political and economic reforms based on logical  reasoning from sound starting points. 

Why are they not solved or even addressed with any realistic determination? 

Because there are two sides to human nature - the competitive side and the co-operative side.

The competitive side is based on individualistic ideology. It is self-centred, self-seeking and self-serving. 

The co-operative side is based on the knowledge that humans are a social species, and on the certainty that in many situations, collaboration to attain some common goal of benefit to all is better than a multiplicity of unrelated individual actions.

Both have evolutionary advantages, and both can be operated simultaneously in the same system.

The dominant ideology of our age is based on competition between individual persons (remember that corporations are legal persons). It is claimed that competition for profit gives people the motivation to work harder and produce more, and thereby create more wealth. That is the strength of the individualistic ideology, even though the final flourish, trickle down economics, is an illusion.

The weakness of socialist ideology is that in its fullest manifestation, after a socialist revolution or even a democratic socialist victory, there is a distinct tendency for a personality cult to form. We see this in North Korea and Robert Mugabe today, and in a long and ignoble list going back through Said Barre of Somalia, Kwame Nkruma of Ghana,  to Stalin himself. It should be noted that the Communist Party is supporting the government of Bashar Assad of Syria.

This is not to say that socialism has a monopoly of dictatorship, because it certainly does not. Any long-lived period of rule by one person or one party tends to become controlling and self serving. That is why democratic elections, even in weak and imperfect democracies like the UK, are effective in holding back dictatorship simply by preventing any one person or party from staying in power for too long. Even if the change is from one party to an almost identical party (as from Republicans to Democrats in the USA, or Tories to New Labour in the UK), it is beneficial and salutary to be able to kick someone out of office.

This is a pitifully dismal consolation in view of the magnitude of problems that the world faces. The reason is that both of the main ideologies on offer - individualism and socialism -  are both anthropocentric. Both aim to improve the lot of the class that identifies with the ideology. Individualism aligns with the plutocrats, and socialism aligns with the proletariat. Both have attained their goal when they have attained power. Power is the goal, and clinging to power by suppressing dissent and controlling thought becomes the main purpose of government.

That is why the Green approach is so transformative. It is not anthropocentric but eco-centric. It starts not by considering humans as some kind of self-existent being, whether as individuals or as societies, but by considering humans in their ecological context. We look at how the planetary environment sustains our existence, it looks at how our activities can undermine the security of our existence, and how we can change our ways so that we can achieve a sustainable global economy.

In short, instead of looking at one detail of the picture - the individual or the society - we look at the whole picture. This is a rational approach. In looking at the whole picture, we are able to resolve the differences and contradictions that arise from starting with a partial view. It is going to take both individual action and social action to achieve sustainability.

Given the strength of our intellectual position, the weakness of the Greens as a political force is somewhat surprising. True, green thinking is percolating slowly - too slowly - into mainstream thinking. True, we have been excluded from the public debate by an unholy alliance of the old philosophies. But some of it is due to our own cognitive errors.

The old Green slogan was "Think globally, act locally". This is a good slogan, but evidently not good enough. We also need to think globally and act globally.

As a global community the Green Parties of the world - and all other green and social movements - need to come together and agree the kind of reforms that need to be put in place.
We need to evolve ways and means of preventing dictatorships from forming, and of isolating and disempowering them wherever they are found.
We need to find ways of preventing Wars and conflicts, starting with the most common cause - separatism
We need to find ways of resolving global economic problem and reducing  the inequalities  within nations and between nations that cause so much misery.
We need to address Anthropogenic Global Warming and other man caused environmental degredation.
We need to address human population growth.

All of these problems are capable of resolution by rational thought, discussion, agreement and political will.

We seem a million miles from resolution because of selfishness, self interest and wilful blindness to the facts. It is the old clash between our cerebral cortex and more primitive parts of our brain. At present, the primitive part is in the ascendant. It seems that stupidity rules everywhere, and always will rule.

This is not necessarily so. Just as the political pendulum swings between Right and Left in a country's electoral history, so also the pendulum can swing between narrow self interest and enlightened rationality that looks at the whole picture.

It is easy to give way to despair and cynicism. But if we look to the greater picture, it is like looking at a map. We can see which way to start moving. And once we can see, we can start discussing and spreading the idea that mankind is not irredeemably stupid.

OccupyBristol workshop reveals Dictator-friendly Communist Position

I went to #OccupyBristol last Saturday for a workshop on the "Crisis of Capitalism".
There were about 12 people there, and it was led by a guy I think by the name of Eric, leading a group of 4-5 allies, (they were not occupiers per se) who gave a textbook old-school Communist analysis: Capitalism is totally evil, and must be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Three or four of us put forward the view that the word "capitalism" needs to be defined, and that we are against crony-capitalism, greed capitalism, and free market fundamentalism. We are not against the liberty of an individual to use his or her own money to meet a genuine need in society, and to take a fair and reasonable profit from success. For instance, we are not against the freedom of  individuals to use their redundancy money to set up a business in providing insulation for domestic property.

This was all overridden by the insistence that Capitalism itself is totally wrong and must be overthrown, by violence if necessary.

This black/white, right/wrong analysis is exactly what we find in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, which looks at the belief systems that underpin individual psychological dysfunction. People who carry these absolute distinctions end up with trouble relating to reality, because much of their psychic energy is taken up in reacting to perceived absolutes, either trying to live up to impossible standards, or in reacting to perceived absolutes found in every aspect of the established economic order.

Absolutism negates any single practical reform, or set of economic reforms. There are no policy changes to be requested; only a complete replacement of the whole system from top to bottom, and replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat, will suffice.

It emerged that Eric approved of Stalin, Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad of Syria and AhmediNajad of Iran.
Four bloodstained dictators.

It is very clear that the entire global #Ocupy movement is against dictatorship. We may in the UK have one of the weakest forms of democracy going, where participation is limited to the use of an inefficient and unrepresentative FPTP electoral system every four years, to elect a government that will be substantially in thrall to the trans-national corporations. But even this defective system is better than outright political dictatorship, because it gives us the power to turn out one set of individuals every four years, even though it means replacing them with another set of individuals with substantially the same policies.  The advantage is that if an individual or party is in power for too long, power goes to the head, distorting thinking, abolishing humility and care for anything other than the interests of the ruling party.

I know that the workshop was non-representative of the #Occupy movement as a whole, but it does show the problem posed by the designation by the media of Occupy an anti-capitalist movement, rather than an anti-inequality movement.

If we are to own the label "anti-capitalist", the term needs to be rigorously defined as free-market capitalism, neo-liberal or neo-conservative capitalism.  We are not against individual freedom to trade and create work that benefits society and environment.

In particular, I think there is a need now for the influential eco-socialist group within the Green Party to build a clear firewall between their position and the position outlined above by Eric, by insisting that they are against all dictatorships, even dictatorships that may have taken up a position antagonistic to Western Mega-Capitalism.

UN R2P action on Libya: out with Ghaddafi, and out with Kelvin MacKenzie

Today I feel both relieved and anxious.

Relieved that the UN has finally got its act together to intervene against the criminal Ghaddafi.

Anxious that the intervention may cause civilian deaths, and may be protracted.
I feel responsible, since I am among those who called for a No-Fly Zone, albeit an Arab-led NFZ. At least we have Arab League involvement and support.

The intervention is late, which means that it is more of a challenge than it would have been 2 or 3 weeks ago. The intervention is right, because if Ghaddafi crushes the freedom fighters, dictators all over the world would take Gaddafi's response as their template, and use force to crush any dissent.

Democracy throughout the world has been in retreat over the past few years, and dictatorships have been on the rise. A Ghaddafi victory could have speeded this process, bringing about a world dominated by dictatorships who stifle free speech, imprison and torture dissenters and human rights activists, and indulge their appetite for  luxury and the machinery of death.

It is devoutly to be hoped that the international action is speedily effective in bringing Ghaddafi down.

Yesterday on Question Time the loudmouth ex-Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie ranted about how Gaddafi is nothing to do with us. Yes it bloody is, Kelvin, because we supplied some of the weapons that he is using to kill civilians.  We have intervened already, in a bad way, and so we are obliged to go in and correct the imbalances that we have created. The likes of MacKenzie will be the first to complain about the wave of Libyan refugees who would come to Europe as a result of a Ghaddafi victory.

MacKenzie is blind to the fact that we live in an interconnected, mutually interdependent world. That is an unavoidable fact of political ecology.  We cannot live in our little individualised white England. We live in a dynamic, interlinked world. John Donne saw this interconnectedness four centuries ago: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee".

It is simply not possible for us to sit back and ignore the effects or our own prior actions. It is necessary for us to correct our actions, by stopping the global arms trade, and by acting in our own country in a liberal democratic way, especially with demonstrators - something else that MacKenzie would oppose - but when our actions bring significant human rights abuses from dictators that we have had trade with, the only right action is to give real physical assistance to the people who hunger and thirst for democracy.

MacKenzie isolationism is inhumane, ignorant and wrong.  The alternative - legal intervention against Ghaddafi's war machine - is problematic, difficult, but right, in that it is a blow struck not just against the Libyan tyrant, but against tyrants everywhere.

The Question Time discussion last night was worrying in the amount of ignorance that came up in the discussion, from both audience and panel speakers. Simon Hughes  was the only one who mentioned the UN stance of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which rightly places an obligation on states to intervene against regimes who commit crimes.  There was much agonising about the risk of committing our troops to Libya, whereas the UN Resolution specifically excludes this option.

The best outcome is the speedy departure of Ghaddafi from Libya, even if it is on a jet plane to retirement in Zimbabwe. It is still the case that jamming of Ghaddafi's TV and radio broadcasts could help to bring this forward sooner, by loosening his grip on the minds of his supporters.  Maybe the non-interventionists in the Green Party will eventually take up this non-violent line of action. I have emailed my MP on this matter, and have been trying for 3 days to speak to him on the phone about it. Maybe today.

So, the struggle continues. The UN has at last intervened. Let us all hope that the end of the Ghaddafi regime will come soon, and that other dictatorships world wide will give way peacefully to the tsunami of democratic aspiration that is sweeping the world.


----

Link to text of UN resolution

Restating the philosophical basis of the Green Party

Over on Bright Green  I found an interesting discussion on the dangers of diluting Green Party radicalism.  All good stuff, but  I stubbed my toe on this line:

"Our socially justice approach is what makes us unique. "

Er...no. There are several other parties, ranging from Respect, right down to the LibDems and poor old Labour who would claim (with varying degrees of justification, or not) that this is what they also are about.

The Green Party's USP lies in the fact that our political philosophy is rooted in ecology - the study of the interrelationship between an organism (in this case, humans) and its environment.

The great historical political divide has been between individualists (Hobbesians, Conservatives, neo-liberals &c) and Socialists - Communsits, Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, Labourites &c &c &c in their infinite regression of sub-divisions). The only thing they share is their anthropocentric starting point. Political ecology takes us beyond this divide.

The fact is that humans are social animals, like wolves, not solitary animals like bears. Socialists base their philosophy on this fact, which is undoubtedly better than individualist philosophy, simply because individualism has no scientific basis (all it has is a lot of money, which gives it its dominance).  Labour demonstrated the weakness of its socialism in its corrosive attack on individual civil liberties. We on the other hand have a fairly strong libertarian and anarchist tradition in our party.

We greens base our philosophy on our interdependence on the real world, that is, on ecology. We were called the Ecology Party before we changed to the Green Party. In basing our thought on ecological reality, we transcend the individual-social divide, and can reconcile the individual-social antithesis in our bigger framework. Our affinity is more with socialists, simply because of the fact that we are social animals, and because the solution to the ecological crisis depends on co-operative action. But because we are not merely social-"ists" (i.e. not religiously wedded to the idea of the primacy of society, or the interests of one group within society above all other groups) we can also promote the importance of individual liberty within the constraints of the needs of environment and society.

Our emphasis on social justice is not just based on the fact that it is ethical, but also on the fact that only an equitable society will have the strength and cohesion necessary to make the radical transition to a sustainable economy. (Spirit Level stuff)

I keep hearing this line from new(ish) Green Party members: "We must get beyond being an environmentalist party".  We never were an environmentalist party, in the sense that the LibDems would claim to be.  We sorted this one out in the 70s, but it seems that we have to sort it out again. We are an ecological party. The difference is between something that is desirable, and something that is existential.

The argument can be summarised by saying that we seek justice and equity, not just

• within our own nation (as most other parties would claim), and not just 
• between our nation and other nations (as internationalists would wish), but also 
• between our generation and future generations. 

This tripartite approach to social justice is what makes us unique.

Brighton Pavilion: an encounter with Charlotte Vere, the Conservative Candidate

< Conservative Candidate CharlotteV crossing things out

I went to Brighton yesterday, nine and a half hours on the train, but all worth it. In Brighton I had the pleasure of meeting the Conservative candidate, Charlotte Vere, at her street stall. Business was quiet for the Tories, so I introduced myself as DocRichard (we have been having an interchange of tweets), and we had a nice chat for four or five minutes, covering social breakdown, economic divergence, the philosophy of science, the question of human existence, and the ideology of individualism. I regret that we did not have an opportunity to discuss the iniquity of FPTP, though i may have mentioned it in passing.  usually do.  


I opened with the questions that I had been putting to her (@CharlotteV) on Twitter about greater social equality. Was she familiar with the Spirit Level?  No, she had not read it. Which, coming from a would-be MP in 2010, is rather like a would-be surgeon admitting that he had not looked at Gray's Anatomy. I explained that it showed on the basis of epidemiological science that the Rich Poor Gap was the root cause of all the social problems encapsulated in the phrase "Broken Britain". David Cameron on R4Today had got the direction of causality totally back to front. She countered that she doubted that there was "scientific proof". I explained that science does not do proof,  but that the Equality Trust's data, just like climate science, is well beyond reasonable denial.

Charlotte scorns the idea of stooping to using money to address poverty, which is slightly counter-intuitive. I think she thinks that Citizen's Income is just throwing money at people who would not have the faintest idea of knowing  how to invest it on the Stock Market. I explained that the basic problem is the inherent divergence implicit in the debt-interest method of creating money.

She was a little taken aback when I pointed out that Citizen's Income was already being implemented in Namibia, Alaska and Brazil, and that some Conservative thinkers (including Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) had endorsed CI.  "What", she asked, "is the rationale for CI?" I explained that each human being alive on the planet required an area of land in order to exist, that we see this as a basic human right, and that the CI is a proxy for the product of this land. Time did not permit me to develop points regarding the administrative costs of the present dysfunctional welfare system that she supports, nor its role in locking people into poverty and unemployment.

It is regrettable that the Green Wage Subsidy approach to Basic income was rejected by the conservative tendency within the Green Party, because Charlotte will doubtless persist in using the something-for-nothing canard that emboggers the discussion of CI. In fact, CI in this election is presented in our manifesto as just an aspiration, and so the GWS, far from being a diversion, is a way of bringing CI forward more quickly.
 
We touched on the philosophy of individualism, but I had no time to expand on its totally unscientific nature.

Charlotte is all right really (everyone is all right really). I would not say she was sanctimonious because I dislike personal attacks in politics, but she certainly is an old-style Tory, reminding me of every Tory councillor that I shared Woodspring District Council with - exuding from every pore the self-arrogated absolute conviction of their hereditary right to rule, instantly dismissive of any thought or view of the world apart from her own individual standpoint. In debate she relies heavily on the Straw Man fallacy, representing Greens as green on the outside, reds on the inside.  Sadly, she did not use the "watermelon" phrase that encapsulates this idea, as  I like to respond that I would rather be a watermelon than a baboon's bottom.

For the people of Brighton Pavilion, the crucial choice is between Caroline Lucas and Charlotte Vere. Labour, like the LibDems, are also-rans, although every LibLab vote carries with it the risk of letting the Tory in. It is a no-brainer: Charlotte would be just another faceless face on the Tory back-benches; Caroline will be a mould-destroying blast of fresh air in the corridors of Parliament, sweeping away the cobwebs of political decadence and old-fashioned, decrepit political ideologies by her sheer presence.

The officers on Woodspring told me that as soon as I was elected, the Tories were begging them to advise on green measures to bring in.  There is a deep ambivalence about Greens, on the part of the old LibLabCon parties; publicly, they are disdainful of us. Privately, they are terrified of us.


I met up with the local Greens, who are in good heart and fizzing with energy, leafletted Stamford Avenue, had a lovely time canvassing good people on the streets, and went home again, which was stupid, I should have stayed on for Sunday canvassing too, but I was missing my trees and my Humanure toilet construction project, and I don't like cities much even such an excellent one as Brighton.

Nigel Farage insults EU President of Council: punish him with cold debate

I see that Nigel Farage MEP may be summoned for his outrageous rudeness to Herman Van Rampuy.  Farrage will become wet with smugness that if it goes ahead. It will give him more media attention, and an opportunity to rant about  EU as a threat to free speech. To be banned from the EU Parliament would give him a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure.

Farrage's attack is a classic example of the debating style of extreme right wingers. They major in ad homs and  personal abuse.  To try to exchange insults with a free market fundamentalist would be as if to enter a crapping contest with an elephant.

Why are extreme conservatives like this? The reason is that as fundamentalists, they believe that their point of view is absolutely and completely right. They scorn any kind of relativism, and they regard anyone who differs from their POV as 100% wrong, and stupid with it. They regard the rest of humanity with contempt, and for them, society does not exist..  The EU to them is a socialist plot, a deep conspiracy dreamed up by unnamed defeated Communists who went underground in 1991.

The best punishment for Farage would be somehow to compel him to debate the philosophical basis of his faith in such a way that he was unable to use personal abuse.  His presupposition, that the individual human being is the basic building block of economic reality, if not of all reality, would be shown to be absurd. The out-workings of his philosophy, from his boorish and contemptible words in Parliament, to the monstrous, debt-based  free market economy that is predicated on his philosophy, will be exposed as the dysfunctional behaviours that they really are.

Is the Green Movement a Religion?

One of the Ethical Man's points in his provocative piece entitled "Are environmentalists bad for the planet" is the assertion that the green movement is a religion.

Now I know all about this. Well, no that's stupid, because nobody knows all about anything. I have knowledge of it. I had a traumatic childhood in the Darbyite-Taylorite branch of the Exclusive (Plymouth) Brethren, from whence I migrated in adolescence to the relative liberty of evangelicalism, from there to the more intellectually interesting realms of Dooyeweerdian Christian philosophy, which is still an integrative influence on my thinking.

Before the sceptics start throwing brickbats, I must say that I am now happy to be a dogma-free zone, a Quaker, though not a very good attender.

It was a tenet of Dooyeweerdian philosophy that faith underpins any intellectual position, whether religious or secular. Maybe D. did not invent the idea himself, but it was certainly implicit in his work, and it seems to have gained currency at least in the USA. In fact my good friend Dr Glenn Friesen traces Gooyeweerd's influences back to a mystic by the name of Franz Xavier von Baader (1765-1841) . Unsurprisingly, this has not made Glenn popular among the tightly buttoned up Calvinistic Christians who cluster around Dooyeweerd's philosophy of the Cosmonomic Law Idea.

But I digress. The point is that there is a view of man that says that everyone has a religion, even if it's not a religion. Communism is a religion, Capitalism (worship of money) is a religion, consumerism is a religion. Green is a religion.

Bob Dylan, in his brief evangelical Slow Train Comin phase, put it like this:

"But you're gonna have to serve somebody

Yes you're gonna have to serve somebody

Well it may be the Devil, it may be the Lord

But you're gonna have to serve somebody"

So Rowlatt's point about green being a religion is just a truism. Greens are humans, humans are religious, therefore greens are religious, just as free market fundamentalists have a religion, and shoppers have a religion and football fans have a religion. Religion in these terms is what you hold most dear.

Big deal. It means nothing to anyone outside of the American Right Wing Aggressive Christian tradition, where is means that all greens are going to spend eternity roasting screaming in hell because we believe that it is important to protect our life-giving planetary environment, rather than believing in the Bible.

That, is of course, a matter for them. It has no bearing on whether the ecological ideology is true or not.

As far as I am concerned, the green political ideology is soundly based on the knowledge of where our bread comes from, as opposed to alternative abstract political philosophies which are based on the idea of mankind as a self-existent individual or social being.

OK.

Now to look at the valid part of Rowlatt's criticism. There is a cultic tendency in the Green movement, as there is in free marketism, or footballism, or consumerism. I find it within the Green Party, because that is where my life experience takes place, but it probably happens within all other strands of the green movement, and indeed any other political movement.

There is a regrettable exclusivity to some Greens' thinking. To be really Green, you have to be in the Green Party. Zac Goldsmith is not really a Green, because he is in the Tory Party. &c.
This is wrong.

The Quaker-style view of it is more accurate. There is a green light within everyone, a spark of attachment to Nature, that is experienced most intensely as a child.

Thomas Traherne said it best:
"The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things" It is well worth reading the whole passage.
He concludes
"So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world".

Everyone has the impulse to love Nature, but that the impulse is covered over with "education" and with learned behaviour, for instance the patently absurd notion that perpetual economic growth is necessary and sustainable. Of course there are real greens in other political parties, no question. The difference is that the green party is seeking political ways to make implement sustainability at the outset, not as a bolt-on added extra. Note "is seeking". We are in process, not at our destination. The written record of this endeavor to develop policies that can produce a sustainable society and economy, one that works with, and not against the grain of nature, is called the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society. (MfSS).

Which gives rise to another cultic manifestation within the beloved Green Party - MfSS fundamentalism. In this view, no green party person is supposed to say anything that is not contained within the MfSS. No going beyond what is written therein.

I think that the underlying cognitive psychology for some members is this : "The world is in a horrible mess. The Green Party is a little sub-creation where we will perfect an idea of how the world should be, and that perfection, the Manifesto, will save us".

It is a strange paradox, a quirk of psychology, that the very people who has the most strict and particular emphasis on this doctrine, may also be the most vehement in attacking MfSS policies that they disagree with.

Having written this, I am a bit worried that it will cause a storm for displaying some of the inner workings of our party just before a general election. However, the subject has been brought up, by Rowlatt. Spin doctors would meet his accusations with simple denial. Since transparency is one of our core values, we should show his argument for the truism that it is, but also examine our internal religious tendencies in order to get beyond them.

So, in summary, Justin "Ethical Man" Rowlatt's provocative claim that environmentalists are bad for the planet was a typical piece of light weight angled journalism. The oft-quoted claim that green is a religion is a trivial bit of truism. But we in the Green Party do have to look to the danger of exclusivism and fundamentalism, because they will only hold us back. Our ecological political ideology is the soundest political ideology around; it is a rock on which the wave of free-market fundamentalism will break itself.

Climate science is a proxy for ideological clash

The interminable debate about the minutiae of the science - today's news is about regrettable flaws in the methods of Jones and Wang - is really a proxy for a titanic ideological struggle between free market fundamentalism and ecological economics. The free market cannot deliver sustainability any more than Communism could. If anthropogenic climate change is happening, then we must found our economics on ecology, guiding the market, not letting it run free. This is anathema to the free marketeers, therefore climate science must be proven wrong.

Haiti: Looting? Or surviving?

"Looters continue to steal over the body of a man who has just been shot and killed by police in central Port-au-Prince" [Original caption]. Interpretation: Desperate people try to feed themselves despite the danger of being shot by police acting under ill-considered orders.
Image from Los Angeles Times photographer Carolyn Cole

They are shooting "looters" in Port au Prince. . A supermarket is cracked open, there is food in there, about to rot, and starving people get shot for going in.

Why?

Because our Governments have lost sight of human reality. They have a fetish for the supremacy of private property. " What's mine is mine, and even if I am not able to use it, even if you will die if you do not have it, I will kill you if you try to lay a finger on MY PROPERTY."

Someone is responsible for this shoot-a-looter policy. He (and it probably is a he) will have the title of Security Officer. Probably the same guy that has been causing US military planes to be prioritised in the landing stack over planes carrying food and medicines.

Wait a minute! I understand now: White people find things, black people loot:
Here's a couple of photos from New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina.

That's OK then. (Thanks to Jim Jepps for the heads-up on this one)


I am not a revolutionary, I believe in radical reform. But things like this do make me wonder...
[Update: on reflection, in order to avoid any unwelcome attention from the Terrorist Thought Police, I should make it clear that I do not believe that a revolution, whether violent or non-violent, would succeed in the UK. The army and police are too well indoctrinated, and would quickly suppress it, and the most likely outcome would be a right-wing coup. Karl Marx underestimated the power of the likes of Rupert Murdoch to indoctrinate the masses.]

Here is a portal on how to help Haiti.
Link: Reconstructing Haiti

Newsnight 13/1/10 :Islam and the War on Terror; a choice

Interesting contrast on BBC Newsnight last night.

First, Islam4UK spokesman Anjem Choudary and Maajid Nawaz, from the counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation, joined Jeremy Paxman to debate the implications of a government ban on the radical Islamist group Islam4UK.

Chaos. Maajid Nawaz put two very relevant questions to Mr Choudary, the first being, "Is it not the case that if Isalm4UK succeeded in its aim of turning the UK into an Islamic state, that you would have me executed". We never heard the reply, because Maajid began talking over him, in best BBC fashion. Clearly, Choudary was not going to give a straight answer, which raises the question of how interviewers should treat non-answers. I would suggest that the interviewer should respond with a comment that the interviewee is not answering the question, and then putting it a second time in a Yes or No format. After that, proceed as if the answer is the least comfortable option, and discuss that.

Maajid Nawaz does deserve an answer, because if it is affirmative, as seems to be the case, then he is issuing a death threat, which is or should be against the law in the UK.

Islam4UK an offshoot of Al-Mahajaroon. Seven ex-members or people connected to this group, have been involved in acts of terrorism. In this respect, it could be described as a proto-terrorist organisation. Its aim is to replace democracy in the UK with Sharia law.

Alan Johnson has moved to ban it, and the ban will come into force on January 14th if Parliament agrees.

There will be hand-wringing in some quarters over this kind of ban. On one hand it is reasonable in view of the death threat against those the group considers apostate, and the violent acts that ex-members have committed. On the other hand, bans on political groups are a slippery slope.

The war on terror is a total nonsense, and there can be no doubt in the minds of reasonable persons that the military action in Iraq and Afghanistan has only created more terrorists, and more with the kind of mindset that Choudry shows. But society is right to defend itself by efficient and accurate action by police and intelligence services, and also by banning organisations that foment hatred and violence.

What was clear on Newsnight was that there was no dialogue, no meeting of minds, just polarisation of views. Listening Choudry talk was like hearing a paranoid schizophrenic talk. They can be perfectly rational in their own terms, but without any overlap with the views of anyone else.

The following piece was a pleasant contrast, a report on the reunion between former Guantanamo prison guard, Brandon Neely, and two of his former prisoners from Britain, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed. Brandon came to say sorry. There was a real human dimension to this contact, which gave grounds for hope for humanity. If there is such a thing as human spirit, it was operating here.

Strict adherence to fundamentalist ideology leads to violence and death, but the exercise of humanity gives life. They should teach that in schools.

[Update 14th Jan 2010]
In the Guardian, Deborah Orr argues that the ban allows Choudry to claim that democracy is not absolutely liberal. We know that already, Debs. He presents us with a koan, a rationally insoluble problem - neatly expressed by and Islam4UK banner reading "Freedom=Dictatorship" (see the next link).

Politicians have to make a choice, based on what is the best way to protect British citizens from attack. Military action is counter-productive, police and intelligence action is productive. Let's hope the ban is more like the latter than the former.

Also today in the Guradian, Timothy Garton Ash says "Banning these showmen is not a clever way to tackle [the real danger]". TGA believes that the ban gives Choudry a propaganda victory. How much better to ignore them until they go away, with "civic and civil intolerance" as meted out to the BNP (or indeed, media ignoral of the kind meted out to the pre-leader Green Party).

TGA writes: "But if you ­discriminate against a whole social group, you not only violate the basic principles of a free society, you may also achieve the opposite of the desired effect".

Will the ban be as counter-productive as the invasion of Iraq, or UK support for Israel?
I doubt it.

Mainstream Muslim opinion is as offended by Islam4UK as they are by the British invasion of Islamic lands.

He goes on: "A recent report by the ­Quilliam Foundation produced ­alarming ­evidence of how some people are ­actually being turned into ­violent ­Muslim extremists inside British prisons."

This is a different problem, a failure of control in prisons, which is to do with low staff-prisoner ratios, which is in turn due to mistaken use of imprisonment of offenders who pose no real threat to society, and who should be given Community Service orders.

TGA concludes that the ban is another instance of the Government's worrying and undeniable use of the terrorist threat to undermine civil liberties. I still see it as a reasonable response to a proto-terrorist groupuscule.

Is AGW "proven?"

A reader asks (in a comment below on the Is Climate Change Man Made post):

Doc - I am not a scientist, rather a regular Joe concerned that we are uprooting our entire economic system due to unsubstantiated research. If any reasonable person with an open mind should accept the argument that scientists have put forth......why are there so many credible scientists that make strong and logical arguments discounting your claim?
You really do sound like an anti-capitalism - political activist versus a pure scientist.

How do you explain all of the DRASTIC climate changes our planet has experienced before humans?

I am like many other average citizens that do not know who to believe. I just know it has not been proven that man is THE ONLY EXPLANATION for GW.

Hi Skeptical Joe

Good question.
"So many credible scientists". Well, not so many actually. There are a few. Lindzen is a skeptical climate scientist. There are a few others. There are some petitions of scientists, like the Manhattan Declaration people, but if you look at the back story, you find that the list withers away like a snowball in a warm kitchen. George Monbiot has just done this, well worth a read.

Much of the skeptical stuff is just sand thrown in the air. It is highly effective, and they are having huge success just now, so the journalists are saying "the scientists manipulated the data". The facts are otherwise.

The stock in trade of the skeptics' armoury is to pick up one point - Medieval Warm Pariod, Ice Age Lag, Hockey stick, emails, any inconsistency, and announce "This proves global warming is not man-made" - as if their one piece of data overthrows the whole mass of evidence that the community of climate scientists have been putting together over the last 30 years. It does nothing of the sort. To refute the theory, they need to show how modern temperatures can be explained without the input of anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gases. This they have not done. If they were serious scientists, they would have done so by now. They only have to input valid data into the models. There is even a model on-line that they can play with.

I just know it has not been proven that man is THE ONLY EXPLANATION for GW.

What the general public - and quite a few scientists - do not understand is that science is always in a state of amendment. That is normal for science. They take a lot of convincing. It took 20 years and 20,000 scientific papers to "prove" that smoking causes lung cancer. In fact, everyone is surprised to know that there is no "proof" in science. The best any theory can achieve is "not-yet-disproven". There comes a time when the theory is so durable, such as evolution, or smoking causes lung cancer, that there is no point in anyone, even scientists in the pay of the tobacco lobby, arguing any more. AGW is now in that position.

Your statement is not correct. Anthropogenic is the only satisfactory explanation for the temperatures that we are experiencing today.

Why then do the skeptics persist? Well, the tobacco saga is a good model. The tobacco industry did exactly that the oil industry is doing now - they put up a series of skeptics, and kept the scientist busy for years, thus delaying the political clampdown on tobacco - health warnings &c.

Which brings us onto your statement:
You really do sound like an anti-capitalism - political activist versus a pure scientist.

I am a political activist. I am trained in the science of medicine, and have an amateur (in the sense of someone who loves) interest in philosophy.

I am not anti-capitalist in the rock-throwing sense, and I am happy for people to use their capital to set up enterprises (so long as they do no harm), but the market has to be guided, not free to do as it Carter-Rucking well pleases.

What happens is this: scientists try to establish a reasonable approximation to the truth.
When the scientific community has consensus on a topic that is of importance to humanity, they brief the politicians. When the politicians are persuaded, they make policies designed to address the problem. Standard stuff.

There comes a time when decisions have to be made. That time is now.

The reason that the skeptics are so persistent is that they are driven by the ideology of the free market. They cannot accept AGW, because what flows from AGW is action of the kind that is slowly, painfully slowly, forming up at Copenhagen. Global agreements to put an environmental price on carbon. This cuts across their profound belief in the free market. They cannot abide a guided market. Therefore AGW is wrong. From this flows their obsessive critique of the science, and their claim that every detail that they can cherry pick disproves the whole body of scientific work.

So, yes, I am a glad to have a political ideology that takes as its starting point humanity within nature - the ecological world view. Although it has few official adherents in the global community of Green Parties, it is a philosophy that has many many adherents, though most do not know one end of philosophy from another - most people work on gut feelings. That's OK.

There is an ideological clash brewing behind the free market fundamentalism and the ecological world view.

Final point: even if AGW should be shown wrong, decarbonisation is still the best option, on a blind choice basis.

I could go on, but that's enough. I responded in full because you sounded as if you are genuinely seeking clarification. Please take time to click on the climate change tab below to cover all the other aspects.

Thanks for commenting.

Sympathy for the Deniers: the clash of ideologies

I have an odd feeling in the current furore over climate change.

The battle is between the scientific consensus, and a tiny minority of independent scientifically trained people who are trying to attack the bastion of consensus.

I have been in their position on three issues in the past:
on the issue of the relation of leukaemia to low level radiation and powerlines. Official science denies a causal relationship. Green scientists affirm a causal relationship. Chris Busby and the LLRC is continuing this battle, and I think that history will prove him right.

I had a clash with official science over Lowermoor incident, when illness followed the accidental dumping Aluminium Sulphate into drinking water.

In both of these cases, official scientists used the scholastic method, not the scientific method, to refute causality. They argued "The book says that the substances could not have caused the illness we observe, therefore the events are not causally connected".

The third issue was in the 2001 Foot and Mouth incident, when I was Green Party campaigner joining with a small group of independent vets and campaigners calling for vaccination rather than slaughter.

So how come that I was proud to be in a minority then, but proud to be in the majority now?

First, the climate scientists have a real scientific approach, not the scholastic approach used in leukaemia at Sellafield and Lowermoor, nor the bureaucracy-knows-best approach used in FMD2001.

Second, there is the issue of paradigm shift. The climate change "skeptics" claim that they are challenging the current paradigm, which is what happens with all big shifts in science - plate tectonics being the classic example. This does not really apply, because the AGW theory has been built up on an evidential basis over the past 30 years, although its concept goes back 200 years to Arrhenius.

The deniers characterise the IPCC as a "political" body, though its real status is as a scientific advisory body to the UN, which is a political body. Equally, they are a political lobby group, wedded to the ideal of free market fundamentalism.

There is indeed an ideological clash of historic proportions here, between the old paradigm of individualistic, free market idealism, that views the individual as a self-existent being, and the ecological ideology that views mankind in the context of our planetary life support system.

Climate change skepticism, science, logic and ideology

AGW skeptics assert that human greenhouse gases have no effect on global climate.

If it is a faith-based assertion, there is nothing that will change their mind.

If on the other hand, they view it as a factual assertion, then it it is a statement in the scientific arena, and must therefore be capable of being refuted.

They agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that is, that it traps infra red radiation, since this is a physical fact.

They agree that concentrations have risen since the Industrial Revolution, since that is an observed fact.

They accept that global temperatures are rising, since they often say that "climate change is happening, it happens all the time, due to natural variation".

So their case is that although CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and is rising, it makes no contribution to the rise in temperature. Or maybe they mean it makes a negligible contribution.

But the climate models say that it is making a significant contribution.
So they reject the use of climate models out of hand, rather than agreeing that they are, like all machines, a useful but imperfect instrument.

It is impossible accurately to study a complex system as the atmosphere without models.

Therefore there is nothing that will convince them that they are wrong.

Therefore their case is not a scientific case, because science must always be falsifiable.

What this leads to is that just as they accuse us of having an ideological agenda, so also do they have an ideological agenda.

It goes like this:

"I believe in individualism. My prime responsibility is to Me as No 1, also my family if I so choose. I will look after my own interests in my own way, and Government should get out of my face and my backyard. There is no such thing as society. I am not responsible for what happens to others, if bad things happen to them, that is there look out. Sh*t happens.


Individualism demands free market fundamentalism. Individualism means that corporations, which are individual persons in law, must not be subject to any regulation, because the Invisible Hand of the Market will produce the best of all possible worlds.


If global warming were true, it would be necessary for representatives of the people to intervene in the market to make carbon pay for the damage it does.


I reject any intervention in the market.
Therefore I reject the idea man-made global warming.
Nothing will induce me to change my mind on this point, because I am an individualist".

Health Care debate USA: the barbaric ideology of Individualism

The hysteria of the American individualist "Christian" right over Obama's health care plans is mind-boggling. By which I mean that it literally boggles the mind, overwhelming its capacity for a rational response, specifically because they dare to criticise the NHS when the USA has no health care for 46 million of its citizens - 15% of the total. This is barbaric, a scandal, and a negation of the claim of the USA to be a civilised, democratic country.

By "hysteria" I man the neurotic tendency to absolutise a debate. Sarah Palin calls the health proposals "evil". Rick Joyner, a "christian" minister, extends the necessary rationing implications in any healthcare system as being about euthanasia, and then extends this concept to a comparison with Hitler and Stalin - always ignoring the fact that the present US insurance based system condemns the uninsured to untreated illness and early death. Others describe universal healthcare plans as diabolical, that is, things of the Devil.

Is there any point in trying to reason with these people? In their totalist, black and white frame of reference, anything that does not fit in with their ideology is demonic, a threat, something to be resisted totaly. In this the American Right is at one with Osama bin Laden and his cohorts: anyone who deviates from their beliefs is absolutely anathema ("Christian" term) or Haram (Islamic term).

Individualism is the foundation of this species of thought. It is a term which is rarely used, possibly because it has seven syllables, as opposed to the four syllables of socialism, but individualism is the ideology of the Americans who are screaming at the town meetings on healthcare. The Wikipedia article is a good example of their approach, and a bad example of Wikipedia, since it is an expression of a dedicated Point of View, without the Criticism section which is normal for a Wikipedia article. Several times I have put in a line to the effect that the problem with Individualism is that humans are a social animal, and each time it has been removed bythe ideologues of individualism.

Individualists claim to be giving rights and freedom to the individual, but the healthcare debate shows that their definition of individual does not include all human beings, or even all citizens; it refers really to economically successful individuals who are able to prosper in a divergent economic system where the tendency is always for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.

I find it difficult to write about the politics of health, partly because it is myday job, and partly because I spent a year writing a book about what makes people ill, showing that about one fifth of healthcare spending is devoted to treating illness caused by unnecessary conditions caused bybad political decisions, such as unemployment, povery, poor housing and pollution. That is another undiscussed elephant in the room.

As for Daniel Hannan, MEP for South East England, arguing that the NHS should not exist, I hope that the voters in the South East feel proud that they have elected such a man. The simplest way of assessing the depth and robustness of Hannan's thought is to ruminate on his endorsement of Iceland's economy, writing in the Spectator in 2004: "Icelanders are rolling in it, says Daniel Hannan". The "it" to which he refers is not a pile of dogshit, but money, in case there is any misunderstanding. Readers with a short attention span may need to be reminded that Iceland's banks were among the first to need to be bailed out by the people.

Cameron calls Hannan "eccentric", but in fact, Hannan is mainstream, but outspoken. People should be aware that the whole underlying trend of thinking by politicians and officials in Westminter is for the NHS to be restructured along the lines of the American model.

The best way I know of to deal with the sheer magnitude of the irrationality of the so-called public "debate" about US healthcare, not to mention the banks, is to place the palms of the hand on each side of the skull, sit down and utter low moaning sounds for about five minutes or until bored, and then to go and do something practical.

Peak Oil - someone has finally noticed there is an elephant in the room.

The Independent yesterday gave its front page over to Peak Oil. Fair play to them for bringing it into public consciousness - a mere 53 years after Hubbert first raised the science of oil field depletion. As Eyore said, Give Rabbit time, and he'll always get the answer".

Or if you prefer, it is 27 years since the Club of Rome published "Limits to Growth".

Jeremy Leggett, writing in the Indie, quotes Gillian Tett, writing about how the financial experts failed to notice what was going on with the derivatives market. Elites exert "ideological domination" to maintain power, and determine what can be discussed in the public sphere, and what will be dismissed as idealistic woolly hatted conspiracy theory nonsense.

For 30 years the Green Party have been speaking sweet reason about the need to challenge the world's manic belief that it is possible to expand forever in a limited space. We have to continue with this reason, but at the same time, we have to appreciate that our target audience of opinion formers is not in fact driven by reason, but by irrational short term self interest. The thing that will bring about change is not intellectual argument, but reality. The limits to growth will only be generally appreciated when the train actually crashes into the buffers at the end of the track.

.