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Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
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The Paris atrocity has drawn many worms from the mud. Stomping over the backs of murdered civilians come the nationalists, racists, authoritarians and warmongers. Hurrying to meet violence with violence, they're quick to demonise Muslims of all stripes, blame refugees and explain that, beyond all doubt, the best solution to ISIS is to drop thousands of high-explosive bombs on an already beleaguered Syria.
Naturally these events dominated the discussion between philosopher Slavoj Žižek and former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. The evening was chaired by Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat and featured a surprise appearance by Julian Assange, appearing via videolink from the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Both Žižek and Varoufakis are fearless speakers - their arguments laid down on firm ideological bedrock. Both are quick to mourn the deaths and decry the perpetrators as "ISIS thugs", but they come with a passionate critique of mawkish sentimentalism and knee-jerk reacionts. Achingly public displays of grief - like overlaying the French flag on your Facebook pictures - is merely a trite display of vanity, an effort to prove the veracity of your liberal empathy.
Varoufakis explains how he was asked to observe a minute's silence in memory of the 129 murdered in Paris. Of course, a moment's quiet remembrance for them is appropriate, but where's the silent remembrance for the bombings in Beirut two days before that claimed 43 lives, or the suicide blasts in Baghdad that killed 26? Both men criticise a Western insularity that's assembled from race, religion, class and economics.
Žižek refers to this as Europe's glass "cupola". He argues that the Western perspective on world events is almost completely insulated. We're aware of third-world atrocities yet we experience them at extreme distance, tempered by the gloss of media interpretation. Atrocities, chaos and societal collapse are something that happens to other (usually non-white) people - who subconsciously dismiss them as the 'other'. Events like Paris shatter the cupola, rudely awakening us as to what it's like to live under the shadow of the suicide bomber and the masked gunman.
Theoretically attacks like these should encourage an empathy with those in wartorn countries. If even the briefest taste of carnage repels us to this degree, then logically we should redouble our efforts into ensuring that violence ends - whether in Beirut or Paris. Depressingly the opposite happens. All too easily the media whip up a xenophobic panic, and soon even the most milquetoast liberal thinks paranoid thoughts when they see a man with brown-skin carrying a large bag on public transport.
In one of the most cogent points of the evening, Žižek identifies the cruel irony in the blame and suspicion that was immediately heaped upon Syrian refugees. These are people who have lost almost everything to the violent theocratic fascism of ISIS, choosing to flee, often with just the clothes on their back, across oceans and along lonely rain-swept roads in the hope of finding a safe haven in Europe. They arrive and instantly the very thing they were escaping overtakes them.
Varoufakis' and Žižek's arguments are layered with internationalist universalism. At one point the argument that we should care about the Syrian refugees because "they're just like us" is bashed to smithereens by the simple retort: "Well what if they weren't like us? Would that make it okay not to care?"
Inevitably we crawl towards the thorniest issue for the modern left - what the hell do we do about this? When faced with bombs and guns its instinctive to reach for our own weapons, vowing to enact bloody retribution on those behind this. Yet, as Varoufakis explains, this is precisely what ISIS want: the organisation arises from and thrives in the chaos of military campaigns - even Tony Blair admits that the failed invasion of Iraq provided the perfect incubation chamber them.
Even if impersonal destruction from the sky didn't directly fuel their propaganda its military effectiveness is questionable at best. ISIS are a mobile force disseminated over a wide area and firmly embedded into civilian populations - how are we eliminate them from a mile up without also killing the very people we're ostensibly trying to liberate? This then feeds into their propaganda of Muslim nations being persecuted by the cruel West.
Their answer is to identify the European traditions that most strongly define us: socialism, feminism, free thought, free press and democracy and then ally ourselves with those fighting for that in their countries . This is the one area in the night where the rhetoric got a little flaky - it's all too easy to say all this - putting into practice is different kettle of fish. Personally, I don't know what the hell should be done about ISIS, but recent history teaches us that sending tens of thousands of pounds of high explosive raining down on the Middle East is going to achieve precisely fuck all.
Paris wasn't the only topic under discussion; the rangy three hour discussion encompassed European monetary policy, Israel/Palestine, TTIP, the rise of high-tech liberalism in Silicon Valley and the origins of the European Union. All three men: Varoufakis, Žižek and Assange made novel, intelligent points about contemporary Europe that help clear the mind of the gunk that accumulates after time spent inadvertently absorbing the opinions of vast corporate conglomerates.
A hell of an enjoyable night - and a much needed one.
Theoretically attacks like these should encourage an empathy with those in wartorn countries. If even the briefest taste of carnage repels us to this degree, then logically we should redouble our efforts into ensuring that violence ends - whether in Beirut or Paris. Depressingly the opposite happens. All too easily the media whip up a xenophobic panic, and soon even the most milquetoast liberal thinks paranoid thoughts when they see a man with brown-skin carrying a large bag on public transport.
In one of the most cogent points of the evening, Žižek identifies the cruel irony in the blame and suspicion that was immediately heaped upon Syrian refugees. These are people who have lost almost everything to the violent theocratic fascism of ISIS, choosing to flee, often with just the clothes on their back, across oceans and along lonely rain-swept roads in the hope of finding a safe haven in Europe. They arrive and instantly the very thing they were escaping overtakes them.
Varoufakis' and Žižek's arguments are layered with internationalist universalism. At one point the argument that we should care about the Syrian refugees because "they're just like us" is bashed to smithereens by the simple retort: "Well what if they weren't like us? Would that make it okay not to care?"
Inevitably we crawl towards the thorniest issue for the modern left - what the hell do we do about this? When faced with bombs and guns its instinctive to reach for our own weapons, vowing to enact bloody retribution on those behind this. Yet, as Varoufakis explains, this is precisely what ISIS want: the organisation arises from and thrives in the chaos of military campaigns - even Tony Blair admits that the failed invasion of Iraq provided the perfect incubation chamber them.
Even if impersonal destruction from the sky didn't directly fuel their propaganda its military effectiveness is questionable at best. ISIS are a mobile force disseminated over a wide area and firmly embedded into civilian populations - how are we eliminate them from a mile up without also killing the very people we're ostensibly trying to liberate? This then feeds into their propaganda of Muslim nations being persecuted by the cruel West.
Their answer is to identify the European traditions that most strongly define us: socialism, feminism, free thought, free press and democracy and then ally ourselves with those fighting for that in their countries . This is the one area in the night where the rhetoric got a little flaky - it's all too easy to say all this - putting into practice is different kettle of fish. Personally, I don't know what the hell should be done about ISIS, but recent history teaches us that sending tens of thousands of pounds of high explosive raining down on the Middle East is going to achieve precisely fuck all.
Paris wasn't the only topic under discussion; the rangy three hour discussion encompassed European monetary policy, Israel/Palestine, TTIP, the rise of high-tech liberalism in Silicon Valley and the origins of the European Union. All three men: Varoufakis, Žižek and Assange made novel, intelligent points about contemporary Europe that help clear the mind of the gunk that accumulates after time spent inadvertently absorbing the opinions of vast corporate conglomerates.
A hell of an enjoyable night - and a much needed one.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Monday, July 14, 2014
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The genesis of the show was a digital confessional that Blake set up; an website where people are quizzed as to their past selves. Who did you think you were in the past? What did you want to be? What were you scared of? What would you say to your past self? Nattering on about yourself is a great boost for the ego, and soon she'd amassed responses from all over the world, people of all ages outlining experiences of life. The resulting data is a soup of happiness, fear, nostalgia, embarrassment and regret - and Blake has rolled up her sleeves and pummelled this into a smooth, streamlined hour of songs, visuals and gags.
First things first - Yve Blake is an astonishingly energetic performer. She moves with a loose-limbed gangliness, every motion she makes calculated for maximum effect. Another string to her bow is an enviable comedy rubberface, which gives the impression that we're watching a person who's stepped out of a cartoon. Even better, she knows precisely how command the performance space, her stage persona at both pleasant and slightly intimidating. It feels like every single person in the audience gets a full dose of her laserbeam stare as she drags us into her world, dismantling the barriers between us.
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It's impossible to be presented with the questions Blake asks and not immediately formulate your own responses to them. There's no direct audience participation, but the core reason the show works is that you hear these stories and spot your own thoughts, fears and emotions buried within them. The upshot of that is that this is less a process of gaining new understanding and more a process of reinforcing what you already believe to be true.
It's a sick joke that the more we hear other people's unique insights into the world, the more we realise that people aren't unique at all. From childhood on up we quickly understand that while we (for example) might have thought we were the only person to believe they were literally an alien as a child, there's multitudes that thought the exact same thing. Even when we fiercely assert ourselves as individuals in adolescence we're just adopting another set of pre-worn second hand social signifiers. Then, when we reach middle-age with a couple of kids in tow everyone bleats about how kids are the most important thing ever, followed by the quick onset of depression, followed by our bodies falling apart before we finally lapsing into senile incoherence as our brains trickle out of our ears. Then we pop it.
As the show progressed these realisations gave me cold shivers. After all, the illusion of individuality is one of those things it's best not to think too much about unless you're after existential sleepless nights and being fed it full force through high energy comedy is a bit unsettling. What's worse is that Then never even tries to assign any kind of meaning to the emotions and experiences we're all but forced to experience here. Now, I don't expect Blake to present us with the Meaning of Life but I was quickly craving a bit of philosophic gristle to chew on.
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The lack of depth means the show often teeters on the edge of Saccharine Precipice. For example, an early sequence where we hear cute stories about children is eerily reminiscent of Kids Say the Darndest Things. Similarly cloying is a section where parents explain the "new heights of emotion" they feel at the birth of their children. I can't deny that these are important aspects of being human, but the lack of any real examination or reflection is a symptom of a lack of curiosity. Rather than attempted to understand why, things just are.
There's nothing wrong with a bit of sentimentality and for most of the show Blake just about successfully wobbles down the tightrope, balancing it all with touches of wry humour. Unfortunately towards the end the show goes full-on mawkish - with a straight up painful song about caring for your dying mother as she succumbs to dementia and forgets who you are. As we watch increasingly blurred video footage of a child playing on a beach there may as well have been a big flashing neon sign: "CRY NOW" - the dramatic equivalent of running through the audience holding freshly cut onions.
Ladling it on this thick is a bit much; the overt emotional manipulation curdling some of the goodwill Blake had built up. I've got no beef with a show that wants to make an audience sad, but forcing us to imagine our mothers dying horribly in an effort to wring a couple of tears out of us is misery as pornography. If it was in aid of underlining something genuinely profound about the human condition there'd maybe be an argument - but this is about as meaningful as a Hallmark condolences card.
I don't want to sound like I'm too down on this show - it's an entertaining, imaginative and concise. Yve Blake is an instantly charismatic and obviously smart as hell artist - shows like this and people like her are why I like to write. Most people will enjoy the hell out of Then, but personally, though I appreciate the skill and effort that's gone into its creation, it's not quite my cup of tea.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Sunday, October 6, 2013
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They all told me: be afraid of Slavoj Žižek, be very, very afraid. They said he eats interviewers for lunch, stalking from country to country dropping cluster bombs of harshly complex Marxist theory on terrified audiences. After reading The Sublime Object of Ideology it was easy to buy into this; while I got through the book, I felt like most of Žižek's argument as to what ideology is was whooshing right over my head. So when I bumped into him angrily griping about people leaving to go to the bathroom during the credits of this film I jumped a mile and thought he was about to bite my head off.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
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| Brian Paddick and Peter Hitchens |
‘Drug Laws in Britain – a waste of time, or an essential barrier to grave danger?”
The Tom Olsen lecture this year wasn’t a lecture at all but rather a debate between two very different men on a very contentious point. In one corner, 54 years old, born in Balham, twice the candidate for Liberal Democrat Mayor of London, former Police Commander of Lambeth and controversial instigator of a lenient policy on cannabis possession Brian Paddick! In the other, 60 years old, Mail on Sunday columnist, author and self described “brutal, sexist, racist, homophobic monster"* Peter Hitchens.
*just to be clear, he was joking
St Bride’s church was lit spectacularly for the occasional. It’s a beautiful place anyway, the dramatic purple lighting gives a certain import to the occasion that you just don't get if you're in some lecture theatre. The presence of the religious iconography (most prominent of which is a rather hunky psychedelic Jesus Christ emerging from what looks like a bit like a rainbow vulva) gives proceedings authority. Many of the arguments we hear tonight are filtered through a manichean lens; Hitchens at least has a strong sense of what is good or evil, something he applies not only to the drugs themselves, but to the moral standards of the people who take them.
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| hmm |
After brief introductions by the Vicar we're off. In his opening statement Paddick explained how his experience as a Police Commander led him to conclude that drug laws lack credibility among the public. In particular he highlighted the public's confusion of the consequences of being caught with a small amount of drugs for personal use. Much is left to the discretion of the arresting officer or custody sergeant, so it's hard to say whether you'll have the drugs confiscated and be waved on your way, or whether you'll end up with a criminal record. Underlining many of his views is the assertion that the vast majority of drug users in the UK cause minimal harm to themselves and others.
Paddick is obviously a confident man when it comes to speaking about this subject, and his years on the beat dealing with the users and dealers show. Throughout the night he sticks rigidly to examining the consequences of drugs law "in the real world". This pragmatism is perhaps best illustrated when he explains the implications and consequences of busting street dealers: inevitably they'll be replaced almost immediately, this replacement may well be someone from a rival gang thus creating a potential future violent confrontation as drug dealers vie for territory. His solution to the problem is to target the suppliers. He explains that in the late 90s there was a period after the IRA had become dormant and before the World Trade Centre Attack. During this period security services focussed on the international drugs trade, apparently successfully. It’s this top down attack on the suppliers that seems to inform his philosophy when it comes to enforcing drug laws. As Paddick sees it, targeting users only leads to distrust of the police, racial discrimination and social misery.
All of this is anathema to Peter Hitchens. He opens with a joke about him being “arrested for crimes against political correctness”. The crowd is literally silent as they try to work out whether this was a joke. Someone coughs nervously. A tumbleweed rolls past the stage. Oh dear.
Hitchens sketches for us a nightmare world. A society gone mad, where powerful forces conspire to render the public at best insensate and at worst irreversibly mentally ill. Their tool for this is cannabis, which he regards as a drug as dangerous than heroin, cocaine or any other class As. Even though this is a debate about wider drug laws, Hitchens narrows it right down to cannabis time and time again. He explains how a series of bills promoted by powerful lobbyists over the latter half of the 20th century have sought to downplay the physical and social harm of this demon weed. The very fabric of society as we know it is at stake and as he puts it "this is the last chance to change things".
The contrast to the Paddick’s pragmatism couldn’t be more pronounced. Hitchens occupies a world of unbending morality and sees certain courses of action as paths of good or evil with not much of a grey area in between. These days it's rare to hear someone espousing a philosophy like this, and to be fair to Hitchens he genuinely seems to believe that views like his will save the country and his countrymen from social ruin. This unbending certainty that he's right ends up tripping him up, particularly when he cherrypicks scientific studies based on whether they support or harm his conclusion. He repeatedly brings up medical research which proves that smoking cannabis at a young age can adversely affect brain development in children, yet simultaneously dismisses any evidence that there’s a physical component to, say, heroin addiction. He never explains the logic behind why he believes one scientific study is more worthwhile than another, and this inevitably means that when it comes to discussing data rather than morality he becomes woolly.
Hitchens sounds most convincing and passionate when he brings up Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ with its population addicted to the fictional drug Soma. Hitchens is probably right when he says that those in power would like nothing more than a dozy, malleable and doped populace. His argument is that drug use robs its users of those human qualities he holds most dear; inquisitiveness, creativity, motivation and the will to stand up for what you believe in. Whether he's right or not at least in a roundabout way he's got a good handle on what he likes about humanity.
After the two men have their say we move onto a quite extensive question and answer session. There seem to be a fair number of people in the audience who work with drug users and addicts in church groups and in prisons. By and large these people seem to side with Hitchens, and take a very negative view of recreational drug use. It seems to me pretty damn obvious why they hold such opinions: if you work in prisons or addiction groups then you’re inevitably only going to encounter those whose lives have been affected the most adversely by drugs, with the result that you end up suffering from confirmation bias. Some of these questions drift into the realm of the barmy, with one woman’s credibility plunging off a cliff when she outlines her opinions of how drug use negatively affects the crucial balance between our sober yin and our raging yang.
What I found to shed more light on the men's views were questions that address specific aspects and effects of drug policy on society. I asked a question about what would they both consider to be a suitable sentence (if any) for possession of a small amount of drugs for personal use. Hitchens explained that he’d give them one caution and then on a second offence they’d be sent to prison for six months. He made it unnecessarily clear that he wasn’t talking about 3 months in prison, and 3 months out on licence, and then launched into a pretty tired old diatribe about how prison should be entirely about punishment rather than rehabilitation, about removing flat-screen TVs from cells and so on – the usual Daily Mailesque boring prison bumph. It’s typical of his arguments that while he seemed pleased with his blood and thunder approach, he also ignores that it’s entirely unworkable and undesirable to lock up vast amounts of people for non-violent behaviour that largely impacts only upon themselves. It's a shortsighted opinion that doesn't consider the longterm impact. When people are released from prison they're economically crippled for life: who wants to employ an ex-jailbird? This inevitably creates a huge section of society reliant on welfare, trapped in a downward spiral of poverty which invariably leads to high levels of drug use. Hitchens' policy results in an recursive loop of misery, a snake gorging on it’s own tail and loving the taste.
Paddick, in my view correctly, identifies that harsh punishments for possession of amounts of drugs intended for personal use disproportionately impact upon black youths. It's a sad indictment of the Metropolitan Police that if you're young and black in London you're far, far more likely to be stopped by police and searched than if you're white. So if you're white and carrying drugs, you stand a much better chance of 'getting away with it' than if you're black. The consequences of this inevitably result in a breakdown of relations between the police and the community, and the consequences of that should be obvious to anyone on the streets of London in August 2011.
It's pretty easy to pick a winner of these two men tonight: Hitchens' arguments have holes so big you could drive a truck through them. In addition to this, he comes across as weirdly insecure. Someone asking a question of him says they think one of this statements was "stupid". Immediately he goes on the defensive, angrily asking if the person asking the question is calling him stupid. It's an oddly reflexive response, and we see similar behaviour from him later in the evening when someone asks what importance we should attach to the views of a newspaper columnist and an ex-politician, and asks as to whether a scientist might have made a better debater. Hitchens turns on the man, asking him what gives him the right to question him. Looking a little confused, the questioner replies that he's a solicitor. They're brief moments, but it feels like Hitchens' erudite, confident mask has slipped and it's disconcerting to see him lash out so readily.
It's clear who made the better case last night. Hitchens' argument suffers from the fact that as far as I can see, he's begun with the conclusion that drugs (particularly cannabis) are very bad things and worked backwards from there. He's very selective about the science he uses to back up his case, and this eventually begins to feel intellectually dishonest. Paddick on the other hand has arrived at his point of view through a career in the police service dealing hands on with the consequences of drug use and the effects of drug law. I doubt very much that a policeman of all people would come to a conclusion that drugs law as it stands is ineffective and illogical without some very careful consideration.
It was a fun evening, and even though I disagree with pretty much everything Peter Hitchens stands for at least he's not boring. Stewart Lee once accurately described Jeremy Clarkson as "someone who pretends to have opinions for money". Ill thought out and wonky as they are, I have no doubt that Hitchens sincerely believes in what he preaches and at least on some vague level I can admire him for that. In contrast Brian Paddick comes across as a practical man, someone who's confident in his conclusions because they reflect his professional experience. He may not be as rhetorically flashy as Hitchens, but he's an infinitely more substantial speaker.
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