Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The Dangerous Fantasy of Greta Thunberg

Having just seen Greta Thunberg’s address to the UN Climate Change Conference in Katowice, I felt an urgent need to get involved.  On the face of it, one could not help but to be impressed by young’s Greta’s courage and conviction.  Her point that her generation will be the ones picking up the tab for our inaction now is bang on, and could be applied to everything from government debt to the rise of nationalism, manifested especially here in the UK with Brexit.  However, her analysis of the problem is not only wrong, but itself a cause of much of the revanchist angst present in the developed world.

Of course, it’s a little harsh to hold a fifteen-year old to the standards of an adult.  Except she’s put herself up there, and many old enough to know better are hiding behind her, hoping that her infantile economics will be unchallenged out of a sense of decency when their similarly childish ramblings have long been shot down in flames.  Greta puts her finger on “the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few”, and “a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money”.    The idea that we would be sailing happily to a sustainable future were it not for a few “bosses” is nonsense.  It is not “bosses” that have a stake in the combustible present day, it’s the masses: an immediate move to more sustainable energy, for instance, would replace a climate issue in the future with an affordability disaster in the present, even for those in the developed world: it would condemn large swathes of those in the developing world to near death.

In other interviews, she talks about how she eschews air travel and only buys those things that are absolutely necessary.  This is simply anti-consumerism.  That’s fine, but  call it what it is, and do not try to enlist the threat of fire and brimstone at some point in the future as leverage in your (separate) crusade.  Another multinational movement tried that, and lost its congregation.  Of course, it is perfectly OK to be an anti-consumer: many of us get the argument and, at some level, feel it has merit.  The danger is in trying to conflate anti-consumerism with environmentalism.  Limiting consumption is near-impossible for the billions whose only consumption is the food and energy they need to stay alive, so this is not the route to a sustainable future: worse, by demanding cuts from those with nothing in the first place is likely to prompt the opposite reaction to the one you want.  The hectoring multilateral drumbeat on climate change has been a huge boon to the likes of President Trump.

Greta finishes with a dark threat: “…change is coming, whether you like it or not.  The real power belongs to the people.”  The gilets jaunes would agree, but not in a way particularly conducive to the environmental cause.

Forgive me if I sound like a seasonal, indecent humbug.  Actually, I care passionately about moving to a world where we don’t dig stuff out of the ground and burn it to survive, which is why Greta so alarmed me.  This is a complex issue, and in such circumstances it won’t be solved until we hit upon the least worst solution, not flirt with utopian fantasies.  Such a solution will have to enlist the entirety of the human spirit, even the bits we disapprove of.

The Road to …Hell

I’ve just made a belated first trip to Auschwitz. Of course, it has prompted in me what it prompts in (almost) everybody: horror, shock, and a sense of incomprehension. How could people be so evil? That incomprehension can act as a comfort blanket to those of us looking in from the outside today, as it seems inconceivable that it could happen again. I think that might not be right, for two reasons.

As ever, we tend to approach the past the wrong way round, looking at something always through the lens of what it eventually became. Thus the concentration camps are synonymous with the Final Solution, as if they were set up originally with this in mind. This isn’t right. Although no expert, I did a bit of work on the historical context before I arrived. What I discovered was a surprising chaotic and disorganised beginning to the whole system, where piecemeal attempts to imprison Polish intelligentsia morphed into more systematic brutality, with experiments in killing then leading to the vast, cold, bureaucratic machine to eradicate an entire race. What’s my point? Well, looking at things from their conclusion, it is comfortingly distant from anything likely today. However, chart the Nazi’s descent from irrational paranoid hatred of “them”, through the threshold of institutionalised harassment (Kristallnacht etc), then to individual violence, and finally, in the numbing surroundings of an industrial war, to an industrialised slaughter. Looked this way, it becomes more conceivable, particularly as some aspects of its genesis persist bizarrely today….

One of the more shocking aspects of my dip into this awful story is the extent to which SS guards still hold onto the crazy paranoia they were fed in the ’20’s – that there is a shadowy “world government” peopled by Jews, that was responsible for the German defeat in the first war and for its awful penury in the Weimar years that followed. No matter that their behaviour was hellishly brutal towards the Jews, it was justified by the crimes they believed had been visited on them. The Germans were not alone in this vengeful paranoia: some parts of Eastern Europe found it surprisingly easy to comply with Nazi requests to give up their Jewish population.

Fast forward to to now, and you would have thought that such ridiculous paranoia would have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Er, not a bit of it. Depending on the source used, a majority of people in the US (and, in my experience, closer to home) seem to believe in some form of shadowy global government – indeed, the global financial crash of 2008 seems to have acted to encourage such nonsense: why bother trying to get to grips with over leverage, the consequences of the positive supply shock from China’s accession to the global economy and the misfiring of the Collateralised Debt Obligation market when you can simply blame a conspiratorial elite?

So, when you look at the awfulness of Auschwitz, don’t focus on how it ended, but the ingredients for its start: incoherent, angry paranoia mixed with authoritarian government and a political system that institutionalised the priority of “us” over “them”. In an age where the grumps of particular tribal groups are not only tolerated but pandered to, “the road to somewhere” could lead to a very dark spot indeed.

Quantum Leaps

I have just made my first real visit to Florence, which is a bit rubbish. We have all gone as a family (minus one daughter, in Central America, having just recently spent 6 weeks at the British Institute in the City), behaving like proper tourists to see all the cultural sites.  At one level, it is all rather passé. The images you see are all so iconic I feel I know them.  However, seeing them up close is so different from the images reproduced in a textbook.  Not only are the textures and colours so much more alive, I found myself trying to put myself in the shoes of the artist to understand what they were attempting to achieve.  

Take the Ognissanti Madonna by Giotto (above): he was attempting nothing short of changing the way we saw the world. Before him most art was flat and stylistic: here he attempts perspective and a lifelike rendition of the human form. Looking back on it it all seems rather obvious to paint what you actually see, but at the time it was a proper hand brake turn. 

To put it into context, we are on the cusp of developing the first real world technologies using quantum physics, a bizarre world where things can be probable but not certain, and connected across space and time. No, I don’t understand it either but it is going to take every bit as much fortitude for us to digest this wrenching change to the way we perceive the world as it did for our forefathers on the brink of the Rennaissance and the Enlightenment. 

Whither India?

As I sit in the Departure Lounge (having completed an obligatory early morning yoga session before leaving the hotel – think ginger chopstick), it is probably time to set down a few thoughts from this relatively green India watcher about what the future holds for this great, extraordinary country.

The impression I had before arriving in India was of a sleeping giant, who, if only they could get their act together, might start to be able to compete with that other behemoth, China.  A few more rational decisions, much less corruption, considerably more “Western” organisation etc.  Funnily enough, now that I have spent some time here, that prescription still broadly stands: it is certainly what most Indians would like to see.  However, as I argued in my last post, it would be wrong to see India on some sort of singular Fukuyama-esque treadmill towards the West and the End Of History, and that many aspects of their culture and economy actually seem more suited to the digital future than our own.

Indeed, given the enchanting glimpse Karen and I have had into rural India, it would be immensely sad if the juggernaut (as it were) of globalisation crushed the joy, contentment and spirituality on such vivid display.  This is a risk many more erudite watchers of India have expressed (like Mark Tully, in his book “India’s Unending Journey“), where they have highlighted the dangers of rampant consumerism to traditional, mystical India.  From my (very inexperienced) standpoint, I am optimistic that India can modernise whilst retaining its essential identity: from almost all that I’ve read and experienced, India’s historic genius has been to absorb all that the World has thrown at them, from the Islamic rule of the Mughals to the Brits in the Raj, ingest what is useful, and plod serenely on, like one of the wonderful elephants we rode in Jodphur.

I would argue that the West’s consumerism is not the illness, but merely a symptom of a deeper malaise.  Western religion is different from the myriad of faiths found in India.  Contrast the “true path” language of Islam and Christianity with India, where the old sanskrit word “Neti”, loosely translated (I am told) as “not only this”, appears in much of their religious text, giving room for nuance, compromise and flexibility, allowing for continued relevance in times of change.  The cast iron Christian church has, by insisting on rigidity, been shattered and replaced by an equally insistent and dogmatic secularism, and the resultant “vacuum in wonder” that has appeared in developed countries has been filled (but not sated) by the impulse to buy things.  

Why Go Private?

Much is being written about the effectiveness, public-spiritedness and even the morality of sending one’s children to private school.  This old ground has been raked over by news of the Government’s supposed attempts to encourage employers to “aim off” for candidates from the state sector and give them preference over an equivalently-qualified candidate from a private school background.  This all seems a non-issue, as I suspect that most employers already do that, on the grounds that a candidate that achieves “against the odds” is more likely to exhibit the sort of character the employer is looking for.

Still, it did elicit much comment about the iniquity of private school parents unfairly giving their children a leg up. There are quite a few parts to this debate: the alleged poor quality of the state product, the private schools’ tax status, and the amazing concentration of those from the private sector in certain professions like the Law.  I want to concentrate on where I think most people are missing the point: the reasons for sending your child to a private school in the first place.  Most of the commentators (both for and against) regarded it as obvious that parents are choosing private education to allow their children to “get on” in a way that is not so possible in the state sector.  That, to me, a private sector parent, seems wrong-headed and far too narrow, and it may all hinge on what we call these schools.  I send my children to a public school, which, confusingly, I pay for, at which point most people will sigh and tell me to stop being so parochially English and use the international “private” description.  However, there is a difference, and it’s bound up with why I choose to pay for my children’s education.  Let me explain.

Public schools are called public because in the dim and distant past they were set up to educate children who could not afford to be educated at home.  The best public schools tend to exude a service ethos (which isn’t surprising, given their history of supplying the British Empire with its administrators), where the pursuit of high standards in many different areas of life is championed, giving a child self respect and not a little humility.  Thus excellence on the sports pitch is given almost as high a priority as achievement in exams.  This seems to be the opposite of the state sector, where there is a requirement to demonstrate excellence, and the grades are bent to suit. Smaller, “private” schools simply play this grade game more effectively, using smaller class sizes and fewer disruptive students.

How quaint and out of touch, I hear you say: the modern world has moved on from such Victoriana.  What really counts are the grades and who you know for the internships.  Well, I disagree, which brings me back to the first paragraph.  Employers, faced with a blizzard of top grades, are desperate to find a good level of intellectual attainment coupled with evidence of character, that difficult to define quality that hints at grit.  Given the fact that our children’s working lives will look very different to those we experienced, they need resourcefulness, self sufficiency and a positive outlook on life to solve problems.  It’s just such a shame that the public schools are so damn expensive.