Posts Tagged ‘politics’
South Korea moves leftward, with problems
I’ve avoided the debacle of the US Presidency since their election, and I’m happy to continue doing so, though I note that United Staters are still not blaming their federal system for the mess, without noting that other democratic systems, such as here in Australia, in other Westminster-based systems, and in most Western European nations, aren’t going to be subjected to “I alone can fugg it” types, due to having more effective checks and balances, leading to more collective and open administrations.
The only other democratic country that is currently having US-style problems is South Korea, and we should all know why. The answer is screamingly obvious to me. I suppose it’s because I’m so smart. Having a system in which the people vote every few years for one potential Dear Leader against another is simply idiotic – especially when you have as big a rich-poor gap and as large a population of disillusioned, left-behind and superhero-loving types as the US. But in general it’s a political system that attracts ambitious libertarian wannabe heroes more than team players.
So I’d like to look at the South Korean situation, because – it’s not the USA, and I know very little about South Korean politics other than it was surely a political system guided by the US after the Korean war – and that straight away spells trouble, but at least it’s, for me, ‘exotic’ Korean trouble rather than stale old MAGA trouble.
So here’s what the Qatar embassy in Seoul (well, why not?) says about the Republic of Korea’s political system:
The System of government in Korea is a pluralistic, democratic and presidential system, the president is elected by popular vote every five years, for one term only. The President appoints the Prime Minister and has the right to release him [sic] from his duties.
The parliament consists of 299 members, about 80% of its members are elected directly, others are elected based on a proportional representation system. Despite the fact that the presidential system is prevailing now, yet there is a call to change it to a parliamentary system in order to reduce the absolute power of the president, and to grant the rights of appointing and removing of prime minister to the parliament.
So, before going into South Korea’s political system, I should briefly address all the doom and gloom stuff about South Korea and Japan’s negative population growth. These dire predictions are based on the future being the same as the past, which is never ever ever ever ever ever the case. Ever. These two countries will need to start worrying if and when their GDP starts heading south. That’s when boosting internal reproduction rates and opening these countries to more immigration will have to be a feature of their economic policies. End of story.
Anyway, note that South Korea, which became democratic only in 1987, has both a directly elected President, like the US system, but with 5-year terms and no possibility of re-election, and a Prime Minister, appointed by the President, which sounds something like the French system (described as ‘semi-presidential’). France also has a presidential term of 5 years, but she can be re-elected for a second term.
The presidential election system also differs from that of the US in that more than two people can stand, just as many people can stand for a local electorate in Australia, with the difference that it isn’t a preferential system. Had this been the case, it’s quite possible that the leftist candidate and new President, Lee Jae-myung, who won the race decisively on first preferences, would have lost or barely scraped in, as the next biggest vote-winners were from the political Right. Lee is also, to put it mildly, a controversial figure with a murky history. The Guardian puts it this way:
Lee, who headed the opposition-led campaign to oust Yoon, is a highly divisive figure in South Korean politics. He faces criminal trials including charges of bribery and alleged involvement in a property development scandal. Courts agreed to postpone further hearings of continuing trials until after the election, allowing him to contest the presidency while the cases remained unresolved. Lee denies all charges, describing them as politically motivated persecution.
Others have gone further in their accusations or insinuations, but it seems their video has been deleted! In any case, I suspect the drama around South Korean Presidents – Lee survived an assassination attempt quite recently – will continue for some time yet. This of course is a shame as South Korea faces many problems, with declining growth and having to accommodate two economic giants, China and the USA, both bullying in different ways. And then there’s those bribery charges, etc. The next few months will be interesting…
References
https://seoul.embassy.qa/en/republic-of-korea/political-system
Parisian salon society
Thanks, Lucinda!
I don’t know if I’m a Francophile, but my first experience of any foreign language was when my older brother, who shared a bedroom with me, started teaching me French from his high school textbook before lights out, when I was about ten. I went on to do French at high school for three years, topping the class each year, which wasn’t hard. I left school at fifteen, but eventually went to university in my thirtieth year, and completed a 3-year arts degree majoring in French, I’ve no idea why. I did about half of an honours year, then dropped out due to poverty, and a realisation that my French writing was pretty shite. And that, the way things were going, I’d never get to France.
Since then I’ve managed to spend some eight days wandering cluelessly around Paris, which was great fun. And of course I’ve read a lot of French literature, including Rousseau’s Confessions and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, and such serious stuff as Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir and Marguerite Duras’ Un barrage contre le Pacifique, although my favourite French writer has long been Stendhal, who basically turned his back on France and all things French, preferring the more demonstrative Italians – interestingly, as he seems to have been the most sexually repressed of characters, though the most obviously feminist.
A shame, for Stendhal might have been brought out of his shell by the salon society that was coming to an end by his time – the post-Napoleonic era. I’m reading a lovely little book, True Pleasures: a memoir of women in Paris, by an Australian, Lucinda Holdforth, who brings to life the salonistes and salon-creators of that city, and their admirers, from Madame de Rambouillet in the early 17th century, to Nancy Mitford and Gertrude Stein in the 20th. It rather painfully reminds me of my solitary wanderings on the Rive Gauche and through the Marais during that week in 2016, hoping to find something associated with my very dissociated French readings. Will I ever get back there? Not likely.
So now, towards the end of Holdforth’s book, I’m reading about Germaine de Staël and her contretemps with Napoleon. I knew of her, of course, mainly through my reading of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, and my researches around that work, but I wasn’t quite aware of just how viciously Bonaparte had treated her. She wrote at least two novels, Delphine and Corrine, and various political and literary tracts, none of which I’ve paid the slightest attention to. In fact many of these female salon-holders were quite voluminous writers, and I’ve read none of them. I’ll try to make up for it, maybe after I’ve found out what’s going on with that possibly non-existent dark energy.
All of this makes me wonder about my take, as a man (of some kind), on female intellectualism and aesthetics through the ages, especially the last few centuries. When I was a teenager, still living in Elizabeth, I read some modern (at the time) feminist literature, including Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch, Eva Figues’ Patriarchal Attitudes and Betty Friedan’s The feminine mystique (all of these were just books around the house, thanks to my mother and elder sister), but I can’t remember much about those readings, or whether I even finished any of them, except that I’m sure I patted myself heavily on the back for being so enlightened. Since those days I’ve come to realise just how difficult it is to get out from under the worldwide control of patriarchy, in spite of having encountered many powerful women in my life, for better and worse. And I’ve tried to imagine what a ‘world turned upside down’ would look like, hence my interest in bonobos, so vastly different from us, and yet so strangely inspiring. And my interest in women of intellect, trapped in a world which has deprived them of political power. At least in a direct sense, but they have exerted insidious influences. So here’s a potted account of some of those influential women – and I’m limiting myself to the French influencers, though not all were French by birth.
Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (1588-1665): Born in Rome, daughter of a couple of nobles (the male being a marquis, whatever that is) and married at 12 to the future marquis de Rambouillet, with whom she had seven children. They lived in Paris but she was unimpressed with court life and by 1620 she had gathered a circle of intellectual/influential friends at Hôtel Pisani, later renamed Hôtel de Rambouillet, the first recognised salon, in which ‘the fine art of conversation’ was overtly cultivated. The list of visitors and habitués is long, but some of those recognised by me are the tragedian Pierre Corneille, Madame de La Fayette, author of La Princesse de Cleves, the fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, and Madame de Sévigné, letter-writer extraordinaire. So Madame de Rambouillet might be called, very simplistically, the inventor of the salon.
Ninon de L’Enclos (1620-1705): Paris born, and perhaps the most interesting of them all, as there’s no obvious sign of the aristocracy in her background, though her father was an established musician and composer who taught her to sing and play. The family was exiled from the city due her father’s duelling habits, and Ninon was forced into a convent when her mother died in 1642, but it didn’t last long, and ‘for the remainder of her life she was determined to remain unmarried and independent’. She returned to Paris, becoming a frequenter of salons, and a courtesan (lovely word), soon establishing her own ‘court’. She was a friend and patron of the young Molière. As you can see, she lived a long and fruitful life, and among her lovers was Louis II de Bourbon, aka Le Grand Condé (one of France’s greatest generals), and La Rochefoucauld of Maxims fame. Her associates included the young Saint-Simon, one of France’s most influential writers, and fascinatingly, ‘when she died she left money for the son of her notary, a nine-year-old named François-Marie Arouet, later to become known as Voltaire, so he could buy books’. But of course, being a known courtesan had its down sides, what with patriarchy and all. In 1656 she was imprisoned (in a convent) at the behest of Anne of Austria, Queen consort (and mother of Louis XIV), but was soon rescued by another, rather more interesting queen, Christina of Sweden, who interceded on her behalf through the formidable Cardinal Mazarin. She was also a noted author, writing in particular about morality without religion, and was a friend to intellectuals such as Jean Racine, and powerful women such as Mme de Maintenon, second wife to Louis XIV. Immanuel Kant and Saint-Simon wrote approvingly of her (and Saint-Simon rarely wrote approvingly of anyone else), and – well, that’s enough.
Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (1696-1780): Convent-educated in Paris, and unhappily married for a time to another of those marquis blokes, generally known as Mme du Deffand, an intellectual and skeptic, close friend of Voltaire, she established an aristocratic salon in the 1730s which attracted Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Fontenelle and Mme de Staal-Delaunay as well as Voltaire. She had become completely blind by 1754, at which time she received help from Mlle de Lespinasse (see later entry) in organising the entertainment, but they fell out due to the latter’s wit and other attractions, apparently, so Mlle de Lespinasse established another salon which drew away many of the intellectuals. In her later years she established a close relationship with the British politician and indefatigable letter-writer Horace Walpole.
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721 -64): Although not born into the aristocracy, and possibly ‘illegitimate’ (though she had many scandal-mongering enemies due to later becoming the mistress of Louis XV), Mme de Pompadour was renowned for her beauty, as well as her personal charm. From Wikipedia:
When she was married aged 20, she was already somewhat famous throughout the salons of Paris for her beauty, intelligence, and abundance of charm. Her husband, M. Le Normant d’Etioles, though initially displeased with their marriage arrangement, was said to have fallen in love with Mme Pompadour swiftly.
Let’s face it, it helps to be good-looking, even for a bloke. Her marriage produced two children, both of whom died young, sigh, but it also enabled her to attend salons, where she encountered Montesquieu, Duclos, Helvetius, Fontenelle and Voltaire, among others. Her reputation soon became known to the King, and so ended her marriage, and, presumably, her participation in salons. In latter years, her reputation as a generally civilising and humanising influence on the court has definitely increased. Never in the best of health, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 42.
Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (1732-76): An ‘illegitimate’ child of wealthy types, it was, much later, discovered that Mme de Lespinasse was the daughter of Mme du Deffand’s brother. Unhappy and neglected in childhood, she received an indifferent convent education and was largely self-taught, comme moi. Her success in that endeavour has been attested to by the many intellectuals with whom she conversed. Mme du Deffand, acting as a patron of sorts, brought her to Paris, where she quickly gained such a reputation in her aunt’s salon that a dispute arose between the two, with Mme de Lespinasse emerging as the intellectuals’ favourite. She started her own salon, which became a meeting place for the contributors to the Encyclopédie, particularly Diderot and D’Alembert. D’Alembert moved in with her, though the relationship was platonic, apparently (check that with Plato). As to her intellectual bonafides, they were later proven to the world by the publication of her letters in 1809, long after her early death, possibly from tuberculosis, but exacerbated by depression and opium dependence. These letters, largely about her relations with men, have been favourably compared, by Sainte-Beuve among others, with Heloise (the 12th century French philosopher and nun – and suggested reading for me), and later romantics such as Rousseau and L’Abbé Prevost. A sad ending, but at least she didn’t live to face the Reign of Terror…
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817): aka Germaine de Staël, who should be better known than her nemesis, wee nappy bonaparte. Mme de Staël was another saloniste who was an important writer in the romantic tradition, though today her critical and historical writings are more valued. Her mother, Suzanne Churchod, was also a saloniste and writer, and her father, Jacques Necker, was France’s controversial finance minister under Louis XVI. As aforementioned, I knew of her through Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, but I wasn’t sufficiently aware of her prominence. Always a political moderate, she went into exile during the Reign of Terror (1792-4) and was later forced into exile by wee nappy. Her marriage, at 19, to a Baron Staël von Holstein, was apparently a matter of convenience, though they tolerated each other. No doubt due to the position of her father amid the political turbulence of 18th century France, Mme de Staël wrote reflections on political theory, while wisely avoiding direct political involvement. Nevertheless, as political division and violence mounted, she was forced to flee the city. She eventually reached England, where she was unimpressed by the general voicelessness of women. She returned to Switzerland in 1793, and published a defence of Marie Antoinette, who was on trial at the time. Like Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (and guillotined for her moderation), Mme de Staël was an advocate of constitutional monarchy. It was at this time that Benjamin Constant became her lover. She returned with him to Paris in 1795, where her salon gained fame and notoriety. The rise of wee nappy, however, with his more or less fake, self-boosting misogyny, spelt big trouble for both Constant and de Staël, and – well the rest is history, and I’ve gone on too long.
I’ve described only a few interesting women of the place and period – other salonistes worth exploring are Juliette Récamier, Mme de Choiseul, Mme Roland and Sophie de Condorcet, to name a few. Vive les salons! Je veux en être un!
References
Lucinda Holdforth, True Pleasures: A memoir of women in Paris, 2004
Just about all the info on the above-mentioned women comes from their Wikipedia biographies.
slowly slowly catchy monkey
As we approach the rather significant US election on November 5 (and the fact that they hold their national elections on Tuesdays is very stupid, but one of the least stupid things about their elections in general), I’ve been indulging in absurd fantasies – though I prefer to call them thought experiments – about a future electoral system. ‘Absurd’ isn’t a term I like to use about myself, but I must admit that when I mention this thought experiment, I get a ‘please go away and stop bothering me’ response. So what do I do when nobody wants to listen? I post it on my blog and pat myself on the back.
So my idea is that, perhaps under the influence of some soma-type happy drug, or perhaps just because there’s a near world-wide irritation with male political leadership, at least in the democratic world (let’s not get too optimistic), laws are passed in quick succession banning males from standing for political office and banning males from voting (ok, let’s leave aside for now all the gender-bending categories… if you identify as female you can vote?…but what if you’re pretending to identify…?)
Anyway, in justification of such an absurdity, in the US Presidential elections, which began in 1788-9, 45 separate individuals have been elected, none of them female. Women weren’t given the right to vote until 1920, under the 19th amendment, after decades of heroic struggle. Hilary Clinton became the first woman to stand for election, in 2016, after nearly 230 years of elections! She won, of course, on the popular vote, but that don’t matter in the US of A.
So how would such an impossible scenario go? And, yes, of course I’m going to invoke bonobos.
Well of course there are fascist-style, ‘I alone can fix it’ type women, but they’re far out-numbered by the men of that type, and there are collaborative-style, non-adversarial men, but women are generally better at working together. Just look at the stats, from any country you prefer, on male versus female violence. Just look at the Palestinian and Israeli women’s peace organisations, which have been struggling together for decades, with no male alternative. Just look at the hooliganism associated with men’s soccer games, in some countries, and its absence in the women’s game. Just think of (projected) 30% rules in the various military organisations worldwide, because it’s known that female boots on the ground are more effective at winning hearts and minds, and finding collaborative solutions. Actual peace-keeping.
Of course, banning men from this or that organisation or activity is coercive and won’t happen (to men), but it’s certainly a pleasant thought experiment. An all-female military? Imagine it if you can. You certainly won’t have trouble imagining an all male one. It fact it doesn’t require any imagination whatsoever. Any more than an all-male Presidential system, an all-male Politburo, or an all-male dictatorship.
So while I’m not trying to create a new SCUM manifesto, I do think that cutting down severely on male domination, in politics, finance and every other power-making activity, something that the WEIRD world is oh so gradually doing, is pretty well essential for our long-term survival. And bonobos provide something of a template.
It’s easy to scoff and point out that we’re so vastly superior to our language-deprived, tree-climbing closest rellies. After all, look where patriarchy got us – eight billion plus people, world domination, and geniuses like Donny Trump and Vlady Putin. But today’s human aims – sustainability rather than endless increase, sharing the resources of the biosphere rather than exploiting them, peace, persuasion and preservation rather than domination and destruction, and so on, are obviously more suited to the nurturing sector of humanity than the murderers and blowhards.
So how to give power to the bonobo possibilities within our human natures? By noticing, that’s the first thing. Actually taking note. Not only of how bonobos bring up children, deal with families, and treat (bonobo) strangers with guarded friendliness and peace offerings, but of how similar behaviour in humans, led predominantly by the females, bring about a similar bonding, mutuality and trust. Think of the waste, the desolation created by Putin’s territorial nonsense, by Xi’s pretended ‘need’ to take back Taiwan, by the hapless hope of many ‘Arabs’ and ‘Israelis’ of winning and ridding their world of the other. Think how very male it all is.
Of course, I’m being very idealistic, or at least too impatient. Humanity evolves, and, I’m hoping, in a good way. Yes we’re facing, or I should say creating, huge problems – climate change, over-population, species depletion, the nuclear threat, the lure of fascism, and still, decisions are being made here and there, that are worsening the situation. I don’t quite believe in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity depiction of humanity’s future, but I do think that, overall, we’re evolving in the right direction. Patriarchy is coming under pressure, and the pressure is very gradually growing. And bonobos, those dumb primates, are putting us to shame in that department.
So – slowly slowly catchy monkey.
References
David Deutsch, The beginning of infinity, 2011
They’re our servants, remember
Onya, Ben!
Having just read the US Special Counsel’s indictment against that thing wot once was Prez, or 165 pages of it at least (I keep hearing that it’s 180-odd pages, so where’s the rest?), I must say I’m not at all surprised. I mean I keep hearing the media using phrases like ‘bombshell after bombshell’, as if old Drivelmouth has changed a jot since he was Young Drivelmouth (and before that Baby Dribblemouth). So all the lies and threats and pathetic bluster catalogued in the indictment just reinforced my disgust and astonishment that this lump of faeces was allowed to become the leader of the world’s most powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, nation on Earth.
I was, however, very much heartened by a quote that Jack Smith took from one of the USA’s most enlightened 18th century figures. But before presenting it here, some background.
I’ve written before about how politicians are public servants, not our bosses, and that they shouldn’t be put up on pedestals, and be given special powers – massive immunity, massive pardoning powers, power to shut down the government, power to keep themselves separate from the elected body (the Parliament or the Congress), power to surround themselves with their own unelected courtiers, shut up in a White Palace, power to select Judges and Justices, and Secretary of This or That, at their own whim. And this strong feeling I had about an ‘I alone can fix it’ four-year-dictatorship, and the danger it entailed, not least because of the effect such massive power has upon weak minds such as that of Old Drivelmouth, this strong feeling came rushing back to me a few years ago when I heard about France’s President Macron’s retort to a teenager who was presumably criticising some policy or other to Macron’s face – ‘call me Mr President’. Of course, this was an improvement on having the lad hung drawn and quartered in public, which would once have been the case (and that’s no joke), but still, I was white with rage at Macron’s effrontery – and immediately had him skinned alive in my mind, such is my own anti-authoritarianism.
And so, I come to the finest line in Jack Smith’s indictment, which had nothing to do with Old Drivelmouth’s specific crimes.
“In free Governments,” Benjamin Franklin explained, “the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors [and] sovereigns.”
GOVERNMENT’S MOTION FOR IMMUNITY DETERMINATIONS, p92
Thank you thank you thank you Ben. My sentiments exactly!
It’s not just about female leadership – Sheikh Hasina’s downward spiral
Muhammad Yunus
Bangladesh is in a mesh at the moment, and it’s no joke. The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, resigned today (August 5 2024) after 15.5 years in office. She’d previously been in office from 1996 to 2001, so, more than 20 years as Prime Minister. Now, the term Prime Minister has a very Westminster-type resonance, and sounds very ‘first among equals’-like, but having heard some quite disturbing things about this leader in the past, and having heard about the recent events leading up to her resignation, I’m minded to take a closer look.
Bangladesh has been an independent nation since 1971, before which it was known as East Pakistan. This wasn’t a peaceful transition, and of course the region has a history going back thousands of years, long before the present, hopefully passing, obsession with nationhood and sovereignty became a thing. That region, above the Bay of Bengal, was itself known as Bengal, or Bangla, and is covered essentially by Bangladesh and the Indian Province of West Bengal.
So, as I write Sheikh Hasina has, it seems, fled to India, and large numbers of young Bangladeshis (commentators are saying they are students) are in the streets of Dhaka, apparently carrying away loot from the Prime Ministerial residence. It seems that we’re witnessing the end of a very long dictatorship. Hasina is the daughter of the first Bangladeshi Prime Minister, which gives it all a bit of a North Korean feel (oh but I’ve just learned he was assassinated in a military coup, along with other members of Hasina’s family). So, like her father, Hasina doesn’t seem to have managed to keep control at the end, as apparently the police have chosen not to take action against the present student protesters (though many have been killed in recent times). So, given the family history, she’s chosen to decamp to India.
So of course there are now some big questions due to the power vacuum. What will be the role of the military, and can all this be succeeded by something more seriously democratic?
So, okay things are happening quickly… the nations’s military has promised to form an interim government and has promised to fulfil student demands and ‘bring peace back to the country’. Reporters are saying that over 90 people were killed the day before Hasina’s departure. The word autocracy is being used – Hasina ‘won’ an election earlier this year, after a boycott by opposition parties.
Protestors, on being interviewed, are inveighing against military rule and demanding civilian-style government. An articulate student protestor has expressed concern about the ongoing treatment of minorities in the country, and has severe reservations about an interim military government, though I suppose there has to be some peace-keeping force to fill the vacuum, at least for a short while. An important point, raised by the DW reporter, and further commented on by the student, is that Hasina fled on a military aircraft, which raises questions about the military’s neutrality. However, there are obvious questions about what would have happened if the students and protesters (hundreds of whom have been killed in recent weeks, according to reports) had gotten their hands on this former Prime Minister.
And the fact is that, despite the perhaps well-meaning promises currently being made by the military, these student-type revolutions rarely turn out well in the end. Democracy is, of course, a Euro-American import to this region, as is the concept of nationhood itself. There is so much religious and ethnic conflict – an online Indian report on the upheaval comes with a baggage of commentary, Indians (especially Hindus) worrying about an influx of refugees (especially non-Hindus), as well as weird commentary about a perfectly functioning democratic state being over-run by the military… You get the impression that the situation is being deliberately misunderstood.
So the latest news is that Muhammed Yunus, apparently a very important figure in Bangladeshi politics and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (I’m on a steep learning curve here!), has returned to the country from Paris and has been sworn in as the interim leader, much to the relief and jubilation of student protestors. Considering that hundreds of students have been killed recently, Yunus, who’s 84 years old, and has no political experience, has his work cut out for him, and the obvious key to his success will be his connections with the right people, those who are invested in democracy, human rights and poverty alleviation. He was awarded the Peace Prize for his highly successful micro-financing systems designed to help the country’s poorest. Hasina’s regime rewarded him by charging him with a vast list of crimes, presumably because he was highly critical of the government’s behaviour.
So, just listening to a student activist being interviewed about Younis and the general political situation – and she points out that the two main political parties, that of Hasina and the main opposition, have great credibility problems, being based on dynastic families who have served themselves rather than the nation, so it may be that, with popular support, Younis will be encouraged to remain until the political corruption is dealt with. At his age, that would be a big ask. The country is very polarised, with no doubt religious as well as political divisions.
So, just gathering more info – students, and the public generally, have been incensed by the former government’s quota system for jobs and benefits. They were particularly outraged by Hasina’s apparently sarcastic comments some time ago about extending the quota to the pro-Pakistan families – that’s to say those who fought against and killed Bangladeshi freedom fighters in large numbers. Protesters had also been activated by the military’s shoot-to-kill behaviour recently, which killed more than 100 students in one day.
So, peace has been restored for the time being, and the arrival of Younis will presumably mean that the Hindus of India will be less concerned about a huge refugee influx (the Indian government has sent a large military force to the border). As to Sheikh Hasina, she has sought asylum in the UK (her niece is a British Labour politician). Her US visa has been revoked, a turnaround from previous friendly relations due to her crackdown on religious extremism and her welcoming of Rohingya refugees into the country in 2007. Hasina’s family background is Moslem – and no matter what her personal beliefs, she would probably have to be seen to be practising in order to retain any credibility in the region. Anyway, it seems that Hasina is currently holed up in India, and Bangladeshi authorities (whoever they may be?) are demanding that she be handed over to them. Interestingly, she has younger relatives in relatively high places in the US, India and Finland as well as in the UK. To quote other commentators, asylum in India (a country that has refused asylum for Afghani and Sri Lankan leaders in recent times) would compromise India’s relationship with a new Bangladeshi government (there have already been requests from the Supreme Court Bar Association in Bangladesh to have Hasina sent back).
So – many issues facing a new administration. How to deal with the massive destruction of buildings and other infrastructure. How to deal with agitprop coming out of Pakistan and India. How to deal with what appears to be the collapse of the banking system, with the mass resignation of high-level staff of the Bangladesh bank, the country’s biggest bank, after protestors stormed their offices. Unsurprisingly there has been a run on bank withdrawals throughout the country.
And Sheikh Hasina has very recently stated that she wishes to return to Bangladesh ‘once democracy has returned’! Her son, who lives in the US, is blaming the Pakistani government and its spy agencies for the unrest, and he too identifies his mother as the person to restore democracy in the country. That’s family for you.
Needless to say, there wouldn’t have been many other women in Hasina’s government, if any. When I talk about ‘a world turned upside-down’ in terms of gender relations I must admit I’m talking about the world I know, the so-called ‘WEIRD world’. There are so many other factors, ethnic, religious, dynastic and so on, that make female dominance unlikely in so many parts of the world at this juncture. Even in Thatcher’s government, in the heart of the WEIRD world, there were no other women in her cabinet. Too much power in the hands of too few, that’s always a bad sign, regardless of gender. As primatologists have pointed out, the most successful alpha males/females are generally those that build alliances and trust – to keep everyone in the same tent, so to speak. Females are better at it, I think, but plenty of males are good at it too. So it isn’t just a matter of gender, it’s about how best to benefit the whole community, to recognise their rights and needs, and to always consider government in terms of help. I’ll be watching this space.
on private schools in Australia, the egalitarian nation
Geelong Grammar, Australia’s most expensive private school, apparently
When I was in my mid-twenties I shared a rented house in a small inner suburb of Adelaide called College Park. It was named after what was by far the largest piece of real estate in the area, St Peter’s College. Our street was called Harrow Road, after Eton and Harrow, get it? Other nearby street names were Oxford, Rugby, Trinity, Marlborough and Pembroke. Not a single Skank Lane or Black Boy Alley to be found.
I was reminded of this period on reading Jane Caro’s article, “Class Warfare” in The Monthly magazine for July 2024. So before tackling the article, here’s a story. Walking the streets of College Park I often crossed ‘in-roads’ leading to the high steel-mesh fence that defended St Peter’s College. On the other side of the fence was lots of green ‘sward’ as Alan Bennett would call it, with a very large mansion or palace in the distance, and a few smaller building dotted about – the servants’ quarters perhaps. It all seemed a little unAustralian to me. Anyway, some of these fences also incorporated gates that seemed not to be locked. That was a bit more Australian, and anyway the front of the College was accessible enough – it was a school, after all. So, noticing that there was a rather forlorn-looking asphalted tennis court, partly fenced and sans net, not far inside the palace grounds, I suggested to my house-mates that we might take our racquets and balls and have a few hits. This, I suppose, was an indication of how bored we were.
So we’d been knocking balls to each other for surely no more than twenty minutes (it was a long time ago) when I noticed a figure in the far distance, marching over the sward towards us, from the vicinity of the palace. Looked like trouble, but we carried on regardless. He appeared to be hailing us, but we waited to get a full view of this clearly colourfully dressed individual. By the time we could make sense of his exclamations, I was able to get a fuller picture of this slim forty-ish gentleman in check golfing trousers, grey-green cardigan, and a bright red cravatte which beautifully set off his flame of auburn hair (okay, I only clearly remember the cravatte).
“Boys, boys, you do realise this is private property?!” He may have said much more, but the words ‘private property’ and the sense of real astonishment in his voice is all I clearly remember, and the more my memory repeats to me those two words, the more Pythonesque his voice sounds. Of course we slunk off with a bad grace, but the memory, and my fantasy of hoisting the fellow with his own petard, is, for better or worse, the most persistent feature for me of that period – though I’ve since learned that a petard is a bomb, not a cravatte.
So the god of private property still looms large in ‘classless’ Australia – and the larger the property the more powerful the god.
Jane Caro’s article begins with a quote.
“We ask public schools to compete against private ones, but we do not give them the funding or resources to do so,” says the principal of a comprehensive public secondary school. “We then fill them with the most disadvantaged – and so most expensive to teach – students, including those rejected or expelled from publicly subsidised private schools. Then we blame public schools for struggling. No wonder so many of our principals and staff despair.”
Caro goes on to describe a scandalous funding situation regarding public v private schools, with remarks such as ‘no other nation funds education the way we do, yet most Australians remain blissfully ignorant of just what an outlier we are’, and ‘no other [private] schooling system anywhere enjoys such largesse for so little reciprocal cost’. Count me in as one of the blissfully ignorant, and I’ve been tsk-tsking about the USA’s underfunded public education system, and its role in letting down those who might otherwise have seen through Trump’s bullshit (but then there’s their awful public health system, their ultra-low minimum wages, their massive incarceration rates…).
Having said that, and being prepared to accept Caro’s analysis, I’m disappointed that there’s a lack of actual hard data or references in her article (or in any other of The Monthly’s articles). The magazine might employ the excuse that these are only opinion pieces – but they’re clearly not, they’re making factual claims. The Economist, another mag I read from time to time, cites references within its articles (‘according to x..’, ‘statistics from the bureau of y show…’), which might be inelegant, but useful for valiant truth-seekers like me.
So here’s a tantalising and shocking quote from The Australia Institute, a public policy think tank:
In 2024, the Commonwealth Government will spend an estimated $29.1 billion on schools in Australia. More than half of this – $17.8 billion – will go to private schools.
More than half that private money – $9.9 billion – is earmarked for Catholic schools, in a nation regarded internationally as one of the least religious in the world. How can this be happening?
According to the 2021 census census, just under 20% of our population identifies as Catholic. That number strikes me as unbelievably high (I’ve also met many who identify as Catholic but don’t ‘practise’ the religion), but it has been falling quite rapidly since the 70s.
Unsurprisingly, Independent Schools Australia – presumably an advocacy website for independent schools – claims that all this malarky about funding is just mischiefy myth-making. Here’s a quote from theirs:
FACT: On average, Independent schools receive around half the level of government funding of public schools.
Hmmm. So, one of these claims is not like the other. Clearly, one would expect independent schools to receive far less funding because they’re fee-paying schools which tend to advertise themselves as superior. And those fees can be pretty hefty – the still all-male St Peters College, with the swards and the cravattes, charges (in 2024) $17,770 per annum for Prep students (that’s pre-Reception!) up to $31,770 for year 12. And if you’re a boarder, that’s an extra $28,600 on top. I’m not sure if that includes uniforms and cravattes. So, while I’m skeptical of the above-mentioned ‘fact’, I have to wonder why independent schools receive any funding at all.
Thinking on this has dredged up another memory. The school I attended in my last three years of primary education – Elizabeth Field Primary – hit the headlines of South Australia’s principal daily paper, some years after I left the building, as the most violent school in the state, which came as a great surprise to me, as I’d noticed nothing more than the odd mumble or sneer in my time there. However I do recall, from those days, outlining to my sister a story I planned to write about a student uprising which left most of the teachers dead or dying on a field of gore. But isn’t that every schoolboy’s fantasy?
The evidence, in any case, appears to support Caro’s essay. ABC News reported late last year on an analysis by the Australian Education Union. It argues that ‘Australian private schools are overfunded by $800 million this year while there is a funding shortfall of $4.5 billion for public schools’, and finds that Tasmanian schools are particularly hard hit. Further, it finds that ‘chronic underfunding of public schools in every state and the Northern Territory is expected to worsen over the next five years’. It should be noted that centre-left Labor governments are in power in every state and territory in Australia, except for Tasmania.
So, what is to be done? Australia’s politicians, especially those in the top jobs, are mostly private school educated and reluctant to despoil their own nests – so it’s the usual situation of a politics run by elites for elites, which has long been a problem of ‘representative’ democracy as opposed to participatory democracy. So the problem won’t be solved, obviously, by voting ‘this lot’ out, as the conservatives are even more beholden to private school education. Being informed and making a fuss, a noise that can’t be ignored, is the best I can come up with, though I’m not much of a noise-maker myself. Education is so important, it’s the key to having as good, as informed an electorate as possible. And currently Australia’s education system, and its funding, makes a mockery of our claim to be an egalitarian nation.
I suppose I should send this to a politician, for what it’s worth.
References
Federal funding for private schools
DISPELLING MYTHS
On the strange world of US politics, jingoism, superheroes and the rise of social media
the mind’s new minefield
The main problem with the US Federal political system, it seems to me, is that far too many United Staters, including the nation’s political pundits, think there’s nothing much wrong with their political system. Jingoism doesn’t tend to foster a reformist agenda.
Here’s a simple example. On MSNBC, during a discussion of the two failed impeachment proceedings against then President Trump, Chuck Rosenberg, a lawyer and NBC pundit, referred to the resignation of Britain’s former PM Boris Johnson. ‘Removing a President should be hard’, he said with much gravitas, ‘we certainly don’t want to be able to dump our political leaders the way they do in Britain’. I felt a very strong urge to scream at the screen “YES YOU DO!” It should be policies and effective governance that counts, not pumped-up individuals.
It has since become clear that even a clear-cut federal election loss isn’t enough to convince some that their time of leadership has come to an end. This isn’t particularly surprising in the case of Trump, who ‘always wins’ in spite of losing the 2016 election to Hilary Clinton by almost 3 million votes. But of course he ‘won’ that year by virtue of a bizarre system known as the Electoral College. In fact he was the fifth candidate in US history to win only by virtue of this system after losing the popular vote. Even so, we have to ask how such a profoundly ignorant, lazy, corrupt, habitually duplicitous buffoon could have managed to score anything like enough votes to take over the running of the wealthiest, most heavily armed and internationally dominant country on the planet.
Well, needless to say, the problem lies with the USA’s socio-political system, not with Trump, who likely hasn’t added a single neuron to his pre-frontal cortex since the age of seven.
Firstly, that impeachment issue, and the concept of Presidential immunity. Impeachment, which either doesn’t exist or is never used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK or Ireland (and I think that’s all of the other majority-English speaking democracies), is an overly politicised weapon, best abandoned. If a President has broken a law – and he (it’s aways been a he) or she should be subject to all the laws that other citizens are subject to – then they should be tried by the courts, not by any political body. And it goes without saying that court justices and magistrates should not be appointed by political bodies but by independent authorities, insofar as this is possible.
Secondly, on immunity. The British monarch is immune from prosecution, a hangover from the days of Divine Rights. Fortunately, these monarchs today have no political power, and I’m not opposed to vestigial monarchies, such as exist in Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium, as a link to the past, an anchoring national symbol and a tourist drawcard, though I do think they should all be as subject to the nation’s laws as all other citizens. US Presidential immunity, however, is far more disturbing, as Trump’s attempts to utilise it reveals. So, in some respects, Trump is an asset, in that he’s exposed the gaping holes in the US Presidential system. Will United Staters unite to fix their system? I very much doubt it. Recall that their nation’s Attorney-General, or chief law enforcement officer, is chosen by the President himself, and recall that William Barr, realising full well that Trump was looking for a potential A-G that would protect him from the consequences of his own crimes, wrote an ‘unsolicited memo’, which some lawyers (non-Republicans of course), criticised for
its sweeping views of the president’s constitutional role and prerogatives, including the notion that the president has “absolute” and “all-encompassing” constitutional authority over actions by executive branch officers in carrying out law enforcement powers given to them by Congress, including decisions about criminal investigation and prosecution.
and so forth (this from the ACLU) . Barr went on to become Attorney-General and to suppress any action based on the Mueller report’s damning findings. Since then, Presidential immunity has been argued with immense tediousness by people who should know better. Of course there should be no immunity for politicians of any kind. Their actions can have huge effects, so it stands to reason that a whole suite of laws should regulate their behaviour, above and beyond the behaviour of others. And the greater the politician’s power, the more it should be constrained by law. But of course, much better not to give your political leader so much power in the first place. These people are public servants after all.
This brings me to the USA’s attitude to their Presidents, which strikes me as quasi-religious. They even, rather bizarrely, remember them by number.
Here’s a bit of my view on this. The USA is the land of the super-hero. Make no mistake, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wonderwoman, The Justice League of America, all these I alone can fix it guys are US-born aliens. And not only do they defeat all the bad guys, they clean up or go over the heads of all the corrupt or incompetent local officials. It’s a childish fantasy but it seems the USA’s great unwashed are full of these childish fantasists
In the USA, the President gets to choose many powerful figures apart from the A-G and the Vice President, who have never been elected by the people. Unlike in the Westminster system, none of these powerful figures have to show up in Parliament/Congress, to face opposition or questioning of their actions. They seem more like Presidential courtiers than government ministers. Here’s a quote from the White House website:
The President also appoints the heads of more than 50 independent federal commissions, such as the Federal Reserve Board or the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as federal judges, ambassadors, and other federal offices.
Of course, in Australia and other Westminster-based nations, the Prime Minister (primus inter pares) gets to select and reshuffle her cabinet, but all are elected officials who must work within the parliament and within spitting distance of the opposition. I’ve written elsewhere about my – discomfort, shall we say – with adversarial systems, and I would like to see more of a multi-party system in all of the countries of the WEIRD world. The USA has become more of an Us v Them system than most, to its detriment, I think. After all, governments usually ‘get in’ by relatively slender margins and will be ousted by slender margins in their turn, and yet we constantly see the incoming government overturning the best work of the previous government, and then having their changes overturned in their turn. Surely we can do better than this.
Under Trump, of course, the partisanship has become more extreme, and the Republican Party itself has become bewitched, bothered and bewildered by their nation’s laziest and most corrupt and deceitful leader. And surely, to understand this you have to understand his appeal, for the non-cognoscenti in particular.
Voting isn’t compulsory in the Land of Freedom, so it’s not surprising that millions don’t give a damn about their government, but many of those people must be feeling the squeeze. The USA has the largest per capita imprisonment rate in the WEIRD world (3.5 times higher than here in Australia), as well as the death penalty in many states (Australia abandoned the death penalty nationwide nearly 60 years ago). It has the lowest federal minimum wage, and a rich-poor divide much larger than ours (Australia has the highest minimum wage, federally, outside of Luxembourg). It also fares poorly in terms of basic healthcare and education, and its high levels of Christian religiosity – only about 5% of United Staters identify themselves as atheists – helps explain the current disastrous situation regarding women’s control of their bodies. And with the USA’s more or less never-ending ‘war on drugs’, the country’s poor would be ill-advised to find relief in that area.
And yet. Even with all these problems and disaffections, I find it hard to credit the public gullibility vis-a-vis Trump. Reading history helps, sort of. Hitler had millions of admirers, both inside and outside of Germany, before his downfall, and the same could be said for countless dictators of nations large and small – they’re not called populist leaders for nothing. How do we explain this? – by looking at the situation, and most notably the economic situation, of the dictator’s followers, learning about their grievances, their fears, their group dynamics, sharpened nowadays by social media….
Here’s another anecdote. A few years ago, shortly after the 2020 Presidential election, in an attempt to get out of the house and meet real people I decided to go to a meet-up (here in South Australia) with the impressive name ‘Deep Thinkers’, with decidedly mixed results. After a couple of pleasant chats I moved on to buttonhole a bloke sitting at the bar. As he looked Middle-Eastern, I asked him where he was from (I didn’t say he looked Middle-Eastern). ‘Port Pirie’, he said, naming a small industrial town about 250 kilometres north of Adelaide. I felt as if I’d made a blunder, but we went on to talk about infotech, his field of work, and computer literacy. Then, during a lull, apropos of nothing, he said, ‘I think Trump is one of the greatest Presidents the USA has ever had’. Well, needless to say, things went downhill fast after that (though on the whole, relations remained amicable), but on later reflection, I felt the effects of trepverter, a Yiddish word, supposedly meaning ‘a witty comeback you think of too late’, but which I think of more broadly, as a response I only come up with when I’m alone and my head is clear (I seem to live most of my life in this broadly defined trepverter world). So instead of rabbiting on about Trump’s ignorance and incompetence, I’d have done better to inquire how my interlocutor had arrived at this conclusion. Was he perchance a historian of the US Presidency? Would he be able to name any of the other great US Presidents? Provide me with a top ten, along with a bottom ten? The point being that it was obvious that he was not an authority on US politics, which was confirmed by other remarks he subsequently made, that he was a ‘conservative Christian’, and that he ‘never listens to the mainstream’ (a particularly telling remark). His ‘opinion’ of Trump was purely a parroting of a social media meme, and I rests my case.
This social media phenomenon is quite powerful, and it’s relatively new, and certainly has disturbing elements. To be explored in future posts.
on US jingoism and nationalist dishonesty – plus ça change…
should be billions more people in this pic
It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any nation, at least in the WEIRD world, that’s as jingoistic as the USA. Now whether nationalism is a good thing is always arguable. I take the view that, while nobody gets to choose the nation of their birth, so that it’s a matter neither of shame nor of pride, it’s more than reasonable to be interested in that nation above others (assuming that you still live in your birth nation), because you want it to be as good as can be, for yourself and your peers. Whether you call that nationalism or patriotism or whatever is of no great interest to me. And if you espouse humanist values you will be concerned also about the quality of life in other nations, any of which you could’ve been born and brought up in. But clearly we have more opportunity to improve things in our own nation than in others.
And here’s the obvious thing. Every nation can be improved, in terms of its governance, its laws, its quality of life, its fairness, its health and welfare and so on. And considering that social evolution is a never-ending story, we need our social structures and our governance systems to keep up, to evolve, if not in tandem with, at least not far behind the tides of change.
So, back to the USA. I’ve spent too much time in the past few years, really since the advent of Trump and the meaningless MAGA slogan, listening to US pundits, mostly liberal, bemoaning the fate of their country. But the fact is, I very very rarely hear talk of reform. nor do I hear much in the way of reflection as to why someone so utterly incapable of governance of any kind could have won the favour of so many United Staters, even if they’ve always been in a minority, albeit a vociferous one (and thus seeming to be more numerous than they are).
I was born in Scotland and have lived in Australia since the age of five. Scotland has long had a testy relationship with the country south of the border, with which it is united, sort of, under the UK, but it has its own government headed by a First Minister, as opposed to England’s Prime Minister. What’s the difference between a First Minister and a Prime Minister, you ask? Good question, for which I have no answer, but they’re both based on the principle of primus inter pares, as the leader of the governing party. That party has been elected by the voters, and it has decided upon its leadership by an internal vote of its elected representatives. The party can replace its leader at any time via a vote of no-confidence by those same elected representatives.
This system, which, mutatis mutandis, also pertains in Australia, bears little comparison with the US Presidential system, in which one individual, almost always male, is pitted against other, in a kind of ‘I alone can fix it’ contest of patriotic manliness. The USA, to its detriment, doesn’t have a multi-party system, so its two sole parties tend to duke it out man-o-man-like, in a profoundly adversarial way, which appears to get more block-headed over time. It’s also the case that anyone can run for President, whether or not they’ve had any political experience, or any but the most basic level of education, or know anything of their nation’s history. It certainly helps, though, to have lots and lots of money, or to know how to get it, because campaigning for President, and getting the ‘right’ backing by the ‘right’ people, is hugely about finance. And it’s highly relevant to the politics of the USA that the gap between the rich and the poor there is far greater than what we find in Australia, which of course makes it more plutocratic than it is ever likely to admit.
It’s clear that the US political system has become much more adversarial in recent times, and the advent of social media ‘bubbles’ is at least partly to blame. This has become a problem more generally in the WEIRD world and I’m not sure how to address it, though I’m sure that it needs to be addressed. The problem is greater in the USA, however, due to a number of factors. One is its sub-standard basic public education system, which, together with its comparative lack of a social welfare safety net, its abysmal minimum wage rates and inadequate healthcare provision, leaves millions feeling disenfranchised and ‘left behind’. How else can we explain the religious-style hero worship of an ignorant narcissist who did virtually nothing while holding the office of national President (an office which he ‘won’ in spite of losing the popular vote by almost 3 million).
But the original aim of this essay wasn’t to criticise its system – though while I’m at it I’ll mention that the USA has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, and the longest prison sentences, as well as huge rates of firearm deaths, as Wikipedia relates:
More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day (about 85) than in the U.K. in a year, if suicides are included.
My aim was to criticise the USA’s image of itself as some kind of model to the world. Of course, nations tend to lie about their own history, so it’s up to other nations to confront them with those lies. Just recently, I heard yet again a US political commentator claiming, in passing, that the War of Independence and the subsequent drawing up of the US Constitution were all about ‘the people’ rising up against a ‘tyrant king’. This reference to George III – a constitutional monarch who was more or less non compos mentis during this time, is risible. The colonists of that part of the ‘New World’ were rising up against a bullying and exploiting nation. Many of those colonists had recently fled that nation, for various reasons, but often related to their ‘puritan’ values. Powerful nations have bullied and exploited smaller nations, subject nations and their neighbours for thousands of years, and as the USA has become a powerful nation, it has bullied Pacific peoples in the Philippines and elsewhere, as well as the peoples of Indo-China, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also engaged in the bullying of allied nations, which again shows that there’s nothing exceptional about the USA.
Of course, the ‘New World’ wasn’t new at all, in terms of population. It was for some time understood that the Clovis culture had migrated to the Americas between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, but recent discoveries have pushed human habitation back another several thousand years. The War of Independence and the subsequent US Constitution and the election of Washington as the colony’s first President, hailed today by United Staters as marking the beginning of modern democracy, was but one of many baby steps, albeit an important one, towards full democracy anywhere in the modern world. Less than 1.8% of the population voted, and eligibility, based on property ownership, varied widely between states. So it was hardly any better than the British system of the time, upon which it was largely based. Of course women couldn’t vote, nor of course could slaves, who formed the backbone of the colony’s economy. As for the First Nation peoples, the following decades brought nothing but dispossession and devastation, and, as in Australia, they’ve received little in the way of compensation since.
So, ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ and ‘the leader of the free world’ are still terms I hear gushing from the lips of US pundits, often accompanied by those glazed expressions suggestive of having learnt a kindergarten mantra. Better to try just a bit harder to accept that there’s no ‘greatest’ and no ‘leader’, just a lot of more or less flawed nations with more or less flawed political and social systems that need regular analysis and upgrading and repair. We can all do better, and maybe that’s what we’re here for. Or at least we can imagine that’s the case.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1788–89_United_States_presidential_election
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/whats-the-earliest-evidence-of-humans-in-the-americas
a conversation about dictatorship, intellectuals, bonobos and the strange case of the USA
Francisco Lopez, one of the world’s lesser known dictators – unless you’re Paraguayan (see references)
Canto: So there’s now Putin’s macho invasion of Ukraine, Trump & co’s macho trampling of US democracy, such as it is, Hamas and its macho terrorist attack in southern Israel, and Israel’s massive macho response, Xi’s macho politburo and his assault on female empowerment, and the usual macho claptrap in Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Syria, Yemen, etc etc, etc, so how’s your bonobo world going?
Jacinta: Well, my teensy-tiny part of the world is going okay, and hopefully that tiny-teensy patch south of the Congo River is too, for now. And patches of the WEIRD world are making slow progress, from century to century.
Canto: So you’re taking the long view. How admirable. Seriously, it’s the only way we can maintain any optimism. When the internet suddenly became a big thing in everyone’s life, I was excited – so much useful knowledge at our fingertips without having to visit libraries, subscribe to science magazines, buy books and so on – I didn’t really pay much attention to the social media aspect and its dangers, which have become so overwhelming in the USA, but probably here as well for all I know. I often hear – it’s repeated so often it’s almost as if I comprehend it – that so-and-so has been ‘radicalised by social media’. But what does that really mean?
Jacinta: Well, I think it starts with the fact that people want to be with like-minded people. They like to be part of an ‘in-group’. People who really deserve the ‘intellectual’ title are actually in a tiny minority. They’re generally more independent-minded and suspicious of any in-group thinking.
Canto: And yet, bonobos are real groupies, aren’t they? Isn’t that a problem for you?
Jacinta: I’m not pretending we should be like bonobos in all ways, but, since we’ve been focussing on free will, and the lack thereof, our recognition of this lack should make us more compassionate, from an intellectual perspective. And bonobos are the compassionate, and passionate apes, presumably not coming at it from an intellectual perspective. What they’ve become ‘instinctively’, we need to become from a more knowledge-based, intellectual perspective.
Canto: Way to become more sexy, by just giving it more thought.
Jacinta: It doesn’t require that much thought, just an open-eyed – and certainly more female-centred – view of what macho violence has done and is still doing.
Canto: What about the ‘problem’ of female self-obsession, fashion-consciousness, and general ‘femininity’ – highlighting the decorative over the functional?
Jacinta: Like the ‘problem’ of male dressing tough, or business-like or sporty-casual or whatever, these are minor differences which are already changing with greater equality. Visit any Aussie pub. Anyway, looking decorative rather than functional has often to more to do with status than gender. Though there’s still a way to go.
Canto: I’ve noted that human society, at least in the WEIRD world, seems to be divided into right or left wing obsessionalism. What do you make of this?
Jacinta: Taking the long view, it’s a passing phase..
Canto: Well if you take the long view everything’s a passing phase. Nations are a passing phase, and now everyone’s obsessed with borders and the status of immigrants, as if migration hasn’t been a thing since humans came into being and before – ask any bird-dinosaur.
Jacinta: So, such terms as neo-Marxism or neo-fascism seem laughable to me. It’s largely macho stuff. We’re more about wanting to get on with people, recognising our different backgrounds and influences and trying to find common grounds rather than ideological grounds for grievance. And what are those grounds? The desire to be heard, accepted, even loved. Youse men are too interested in besting, in winning. Of course, I’m generalising – there are male-type females and vice versa.
Canto: Well, I can’t disagree. But isn’t that competitive spirit good for capitalism as well as war?
Jacinta: Ah, capitalism. There are info-wars out there about whether capitalism is good or bad. To me, it’s either, or it’s both, because it’s much more than some political ideology. Birds do it, bees do it, even the fungi in the trees do it. It’s more than just human nature.
Canto: So, you mean capitalising?
Jacinta: Yes, and you can do it in a dumb way – say, by basing much of your diet on one or two species, hunting and gathering them to extinction, then heading towards extinction yourself because you can’t change your culinary ways. Moving to an agricultural lifestyle was a smart but risky thing to do, and was best done gradually, as with any change of diet….
Canto: But this has nothing to do with capitalism as we know it.
Jacinta: Ha, I neither know nor care about the dictionary definition of capitalism. Or the political definition, I should say. I’m thinking it in the broadest sense – capitalising on food and other resources, on our smarts, our technology, our history. And we can be synergistic capitalists, or symbiotic capitalists. Isn’t that what trade is all about? And getting back to bonobos, isn’t their sexual play a kind of synergistic capitalism, especially with the females? They’re building bonds that unite the community, especially the females when the odd too-aggressive male starts to cause trouble. Social capital, they call it. We need more social capital.
Canto: Trade alliances seem to be good for maintaining the peace I suppose, but it’s all beginning to fray…
Jacinta: Idiots like Trump, as far as he has any policies, think that closing the borders and shitting on your allies will MAGA, as if isolationism has ever benefitted any nation that wants to progress. How are the Andaman Islanders going?
Canto: Trump just intuits that the idea will resonate with his base, insofar as he thinks at all.
Jacinta: Yes, being born into wealth, but without intellect, by which I mean intellectual curiosity, the kind of mind that tries to ‘rise above the self and grasp the world’, to quote our blog’s motto, he’s purely interested in self-promotion, and his instincts tell him it’s not the curious and the questioning that’ll follow him, but those impressed by his wealth and his bluster. Look at any dictator – they all project this air of extreme self-importance, it’s the first and last, the ‘must-have’ quality.
Canto: And the fact that there are always so so so many dupes for these guys, that’s what astonishes me most. Why is it so?
Jacinta: I think conditions have to be right. There has to be a substantial proportion of the population that are under-educated, but above all suffering, feeling deprived, abandoned, desperate. Smart, successful and well-heeled people seek out their own, and easily slip into the fantasy that most people are like them. They’re not, especially in places like the USA, with its rich-poor gap, its tattered social safety net, its pathetic minimum wage, its massive incarceration rate, its group-think holy rollers and the like. And surely no nation is more deluded about its own superiority than the USA, so vague but persistent appeals to patriotism, which are the sine qua non for dictators (Hitler being the prime example of that) will always play exceptionally well there.
Canto: Hmmm, quite an indictment, but the USA, to be fair, is very diverse, almost like a few countries rolled into one. New York State and the north-east coast seem to be no-go areas for Trump, and California too… that’s my uneducated guess. It’s like the civil war never ended, it’s so divided. United States indeed!
Jacinta: Haha, we should get off this obsession with the US, but indeed, I’ve often thought they’d be better off dividing the place into two, or even three. Or rather, I just wish they’d do it for our entertainment’s sake.
Canto: Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of macho ground – though it often feels like the female Trumpets blow the hardest. But they can’t help it – no free will after all, right?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but that’s not a cause for despair – determinism isn’t pre-determinism. It means working towards a world in which the determining factors are as positive as they can be. But that’s for another time…
References
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/trump-approval-rating-by-state
bonobos and capitalism?
Jacinta: The theme of capitalism has been playing in the back of my mind lately…
Canto: Really? Can you hum a few bars?
Jacinta: Well it’s a theme with many variations, so it’s hard to know where to start….
Canto: With bonobos? Are they capitalists?
Jacinta: Well, that’s the point, capitalism can be defined very broadly and inclusively, which would leave the anti-capitalists – people who define themselves as socialists or communists – with not much ground to stand on.
Canto: You mean like capitalising is what we all do to survive and thrive, like capitalising on balmy weather to spend a day at the beach?
Jacinta: Yes, but even the negative aspects of it might be inescapable, like capitalising on other living things for our food, by, uhh, eating them. Even vegetarians can’t avoid that.
Canto: But by eating the fruit of the tree, you’re not killing the tree. You’re even helping the tree to multiply, so long as you spit the seeds out, on fertile ground.
Jacinta: Yeah vegetarians always do that. But that’s sort of a good example of how hard it is to be ethical capitalists. Trees, like every other living thing, have evolved to multiply, so, in the most amazingly complex but non-sentient way, they cover their seeds, carrying their offspring, in tasty wrappings for insects and birds to peck or consume so that the seeds fall down or are blown away or shat out, and one in a few thousand ends up in the right spot to grow into another tree, just as one of a gazillion spermatozoa ends up in the right spot to grow another mammal. We humans, though, have taken capitalism to another level. Earlier states or civilisations, developments out of agricultural society, depended very much on the labour of slaves, or serfs, or villeins, in a system that more or less fossilised landed aristocracies. But it was a thoroughly capitalist system that worked, to the extent that it grew the human population, establishing us more than ever at the top of the food chain.
Canto: But surely most modern anti-capitalist thinkers have a much narrower view of capitalism. Does Marx have anything still to offer? Neo-Marxism?
Jacinta: I don’t know – but whenever I encounter a self-professed socialist or communist, and I occasionally do, I always want to ask them if they believe in democracy.
Canto: Well there are people, and parties, that call themselves social democrats. I assume that’s a kind of ‘soft socialism’, with the aim of convincing, or ‘educating’ the populace into viewing socialism, or at least a less hierarchical employer/employee system, a more distributed ownership of the means of production, a taxation system that favours the more disadvantaged, a quality education and healthcare system that favours the same, should get their vote every time, or more times than most.
Jacinta: Yes and there are political organisations like the Chinese Communist Party, which isn’t really a party at all, which give communism a bad name, if it ever had a good one. And there are thinkers who seem to define themselves as anti-capitalists, who seem to take the view that if we can only change the system, as so many young people are keen to do, and become less rapacious and more keen to care and share, the human world will be so much better.
Canto: And yet they never mention bonobos. That’s a shame. We get caught up with these ‘isms’, including conservatism and liberalism, and they box us in and make enemies of others. Bonobos have a society, but it would be silly to call it leftist or rightist, capitalist or socialist. Yes they capitalise on available resources, and they socialise with each other for fun and comfort and sex, which is also a form of capitalism, broadly speaking, but again labelling it this way seems a bit dumb.
Jacinta: Yes, to me, the key is to develop a sort of humanism which is more like bonoboism with all the big-brained human stuff thrown in. Modern science seems like that to me, I mean the practice. That community has its spats, as do bonobos, but mostly its collaborative and supportive. They need more sex perhaps, but, you know, sublimation and all that.
Canto: Yes, that’s interesting. There’s some hierarchical elements in the scientific community, with team leaders and stuff, but the focus isn’t so much on power, as it so often is in politics, the focus is on improvement – better data, better tools, better theories, better results, better connections.
Jacinta: Yes it’s generally a relief to turn to science, especially as an antidote to US-style politics, which is so absurdly divided. I think the social media world has very much exacerbated that situation. People have gotten stuck in their bubbles, and there’s so much hate talk, it’s exhausting.
Canto: So getting back to capitalism, I agree that it’s inescapable, and the key is what we call ‘mixed’ capitalism, and the disagreements are or should be about the degree of regulation, the degree of taxation, the degree of exploitation (of people, resources, land and so forth). That means coming together on boring things such as wage indexation, healthcare, education, housing, environmental protection, interest rates, crime and punishment and the like. Imagining that we can change the system in some holistic way by implementing a particular ideology just ignores ye olde crooked timber of humanity….
Jacinta: Our current federal government, cautiously centre left, seeking to be collaborative and so getting hit from both sides (but not too hard), seeking to mend fences with our neighbours, with some success, and looking to tackle a number of difficult issues re housing, global warming, our overdeveloped service economy and neglected and dying manufacturing sector – this new government has many challenges, as all governments do, but it has more women in it than any previous government, and many smart independent members. Collaboration across the political spectrum has never been more of a possibility, it seems to me, than ever. This is something that a diverse, active population needs, and will hopefully support, for a while. An opportunity worth capitalising on.