Posts Tagged ‘USA’
the little life of just another reader
Reading and writing have been my mainstays, FWIW, and worth is the word, they seem to, or seek to, plug the many holes in my ego. Reading, of course takes me away to many places, and back to many times, that I can’t access physically. I’ve always been too poor to do much extensive travelling, and too timid to actually meet and converse with interesting people, so I converse, sort of, with books. Sometimes having terrible, exhausting arguments with them, other times brought to tears.
I limit myself to six books at a time, though usually one, or maybe two, grab my attention to the detriment of others, sort of. At the moment it’s the second volume of Janet Browne’s totalling gripping biography of Charles Darwin, The power of place. What a fascinating, admirable, complex character he is, how richly brought to life by Browne’s writings and researches. At the moment I’m reading of his new-found fascination with orchids and their pollination. It seems that he developed this interest partly to take his mind off the endless controversies surrounding his Origin of species, but, not surprisingly, he soon found that their pollination by particular insects supported what came to be known as co-evolution, a whole new field of evolutionary studies.
And yet, reading about this extraordinary and complex bloke (his Descent of Man is on my six-book list, somewhat neglected at the moment), who is still vilified today, and not just by creationists, I still get annoyed at all his upper-class advantages. Not his fault of course, but connections handed him his trip on the Beagle, his marriage to a member of the super-rich Wedgewood family, his university education at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and so forth. At least his life provides a good argument against libertarianism.
So the other four books on the six-book list are Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (I have a policy of making at least one book a work of fiction) and Lost connections by Johann Hari – these two books I’m completely ignoring at present, for no good reason – and the other two books, which I’ve brought with me to my exile in the Adelaide Hills, Kingdom of fear by Hunter S Thompson (apparently the ‘S’ is necessary when referring to him) and Shattered lands by Sam Dalrymple.
I bought Shattered Lands the other day at Shakespeare’s Books here in Blackwood, because I couldn’t resist the bookshop’s name, and once inside, I’d feel guilty if I didn’t buy. I also assumed, correctly, that Sam was the son or close relative of William Dalrymple, a writer often recommended to me by a friend, but whom I’ve never read. So I was influenced but didn’t want to be too influenced. Another influence on the purchase was Anna Reid’s Borderland, so informative about a land exotic to me, Ukraine. Shattered Lands promised to tell stories about a world equally exotic, in time rather than place – the British Raj.
In speaking of this to my once-wife, Sarah, she looked up William Dalrymple, and I was shocked but not surprised. Get this, from Wikipedia:
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 20 March 1965 as the youngest son of Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet (1926–2018), Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian from 1987 to 2001, and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle; through this line of descent he is a third cousin of Queen Camilla, both being great-great-grandchildren of William Keppel, 7th Earl of Albemarle. He is a great-nephew of the writer Virginia Woolf. His brother Jock was a first-class cricketer. Dalrymple, the youngest of four brothers, grew up in North Berwick on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He has described his childhood as being old-fashioned and “almost Edwardian”. Among his forebears is a Mughal princess who married a Dalrymple ancestor.
I, too, was born in Scotland. My father was an unskilled labourer, and sometime amateur boxer, the last of a number of male children to a Dundee shipwright – a reasonably classy occupation. That’s all I know of that side of the family, and I’ve never been much interested in tracing ancestry. My mother was a Stewart, and her father, a coal-miner, was Daniel Stewart, hence I’m named Stewart Daniel Henderson. The Stewarts came over the channel with William the Bastard in 1066. They were Stewards then, but changed ‘d’ to ‘t’ when given swathes of land in Scotland for helping William to slaughter the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. Then, when one branch of the ever-branching Stewart family looked like becoming Kings of Scotland they changed their name to Stuart, further removing them from the Stench of Stewardship. And those Stuarts went on to…
To cut a long story short, with a bit of trimming and tweaking, I could’ve/should’ve/would’ve been the current monarch of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and life just isn’t fair.
So, where was I? Kingdom of fear is the first book by this author I’ve read, and likely the last. I suppose I chose it because the reading group I’m with have dealt with Ken Kesey’s One flew over the cuckoo’s nest and Kerouac’s on the road, and I though I’d continue a bit with the hobo libertarian stuff of the USA, which is sometimes entertaining, and often food for thought for a non-libertarian such as myself. At least it’s more appealing than right-wing libertarianism, which really is the pits.
Thompson’s political views chime fairly well with my own, though he’s a bit long-winded about it all, and it of course is all set in the gun-toting US of A, which I’ve just about had enough of. At the same time it’s much more familiar to me than the Burmese-Indian and Hindu-Moslem clashes of the 1930s and beyond, which have me constantly referring to maps to locate Gujarat, Rawalpindi, Kanniyakumari and the like. And the Hindu caste system is surely one of humankind’s greatest grotesqueries.
So that’s all. I’m nowhere near the end of any of these books, but I’m generally enjoying where they take me, especially the Darwin stuff. The Indian stuff too, as my history reading has generally had a western bias, understandably enough.
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The power of place, 2002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dalrymple
Sam Dalrymple, Shattered lands, 2025
Hunter S Thompson, Kingdom of fear, 2003
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
Just a few thoughts on climate change and the obstacles…
There are people in the world, in their millions or billions, who know, with as much certainty they can have about anything, that their god or gods exist. Yet, since they don’t all believe in the same gods, they cannot, as a matter of logic, all be correct, and there’s a strong possibility that none of them are. That’s my belief, but is it just a belief?
But my intention here is not to go on about religion, I’m thinking more about knowledge or what people claim as knowledge. For example, and this is my real topic here, some people claim that climate change, or anthropogenic global warming, is a myth, a mistaken belief, or a plot of some sort – a plot developed by certain people who somehow stand to gain by pedalling misinformation. And some people claim this without really believing it, while others presumably believe in it to the point of refusing to examine the science, which they strongly suspect is just indecipherable gobbledygook.
This seems to be the case for many people on ‘the extreme right’, but what exactly is the extreme right?
I tend to consider extremists as people who believe without thinking. Certainly without trying to think carefully or deeply. Another term often used is ideologue. An ideologue is someone who is, in a sense ‘previously convinced’ and ‘thinks’ from that previously convinced perspective, which is generally drawn from strong family and/or cultural influences. I don’t believe however, that they’re hopeless cases, or I don’t want to believe it.
An ideology is often something you will adhere to especially if you are treated well within and feel you’ve benefitted from that family and cultural background. For example, if your parents are both devout Christians and have treated you with kindness and devotion, and you feel strongly that you’ve benefitted from their parenting, you’re likely to feel a strong urge to continue in their tradition and to see the world through that lens.
Climate change ‘skepticism’, however is a non-belief, and it’s often, but not always, connected to a general skepticism of science (I’ve heard tell of Nobel Prize winning scientists who don’t believe in anthropogenic global warming). There are many people who are very ‘turned-off’ by science – not so much clueless as totally uninterested in looking for clues. Science just doesn’t matter to them, again due to background influences. And a lot of such people are in high-level political positions, especially in the USA. Again this is often because they are preoccupied with other things, such as power, wealth or fame – the phenomenon known as ‘getting ahead’, or ‘getting on top’. It would be interesting to ask Donald Trump, or say Nigel Farage, or Australia’s Jacinta Price, to expatiate on their favourite science. Or perhaps not.
These are three people who, I suspect, have never given any thought to finding out about climate change. I mean, doing some very basic research on the subject. And this is largely incomprehensible to people who, when they don’t know much, or enough for their sense of self-pride, about a subject, make some effort at learning more about it – like how the adaptive immune system works, or how we discovered exoplanets, or what’s this thing about birds being dinosaurs. They’ve been encouraged, perhaps even without realising it, to wonder about such things.
One of the problems of our political systems, whether democratic or otherwise, is that we generally find ourselves being led politically, not by people who want to know or learn stuff, but by people who want to control stuff. People who are ambitious for themselves. Examples of such people are too numerous and obvious to mention. And of course the opposite is generally also true – people who want to ‘find things out’ aren’t so much driven by the lure of wealth, power and control.
In the case of climate change, which is much about what we are doing with our wealth, politics and science often clash. It is a fact that our planet is warming faster than at any point in human history, and this is clearly due to greenhouse gas emissions. China is the largest emitter overall, and the USA, second in overall terms, is the largest emitter on a per capita basis, of the world’s highly populated nations (per capita emissions in some Middle Eastern countries, and in Palau, are quite a bit higher). However, China’s total emissions are between twice and three times that of the USA. Its government accepts the facts about global warming and is apparently committed to ‘achieve carbon neutrality by 2060’, though this will be extremely difficult, to put it mildly, given its plans for economic growth. As to the USA, its target will no doubt vary depending on which monarch is on the throne. And please believe me, that isn’t a joke.
We need, of course, to look to the big emitters overall – China, USA, India and Russia, in that order – because we in Australia are minnows in comparison – interestingly, we’re 16th in both overall and per capita emissions. Still, it would be great if we could set an example.
According to the Worldometer website, which I hope is reliable, and which unfortunately only has data to 2022, CO2 emissions are still rising worldwide, though in some major emitting countries, such as China and Russia, they’re reducing slightly, while in other mostly developing countries, such as Indonesia, they’re rising fast.
There are other sources which give more recent data, but the overall picture is complex. Many regions are quickly developing alternatives to fossil fuels to supply their energy needs, but global consensus on the problem, and especially from major emitters, is essential for success – success being measured by keeping global average temperatures to, if possible, 1.5 degrees, or at most 2 degrees, above a baseline (the average between 1861 and 1890). Many have given up on the 1.5 target, and a 2024 poll found that only 12% of US ‘Republicans and Republican leaners’ considered climate change to be a major government priority. This is serious considering that Republicans will probably be in power there for the next 50 years or so, given current trends.
Interesting times….
References
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
the worst of the English-speaking democracies – 2
I’ve written briefly about Australian and New Zealand politics, now to Canada, which suffers from sharing a long border with the USA, and also some of its history with regard to Britain. However it couldn’t have been too much of a head-butting experience (with Britain) as it’s still a constitutional monarchy with King Chaz as ceremonial head of state (though a recent poll showed that only about a quarter of Canadians are actually aware of this), and they have a Governor-General, like we in Australia do. They even have a House of Commons, but thankfully not of Lords (the Brits should get rid of that thing, tradition be damned). Their Upper House is the Senate, as in Australia. The head of the elected government is the Prime Minister, primus inter pares, as in Australia and New Zealand. The two dominant parties are the Conservatives and the Liberals. So the Liberals are the left party in Canada, but the right party in Australia, and ‘liberalism’, especially neoliberalism, is a right-wing ideology in Britain and Australia, though it is seen as left-wing in the US. Other confusions include ‘blue’ states being left-wing in the US but right-wing in Australia, and vice versa for ‘red’ states. Canada also has its ‘minor’ parties like Australia.
According to Wikipedia, party discipline is much stronger in Canada than in either the USA or Britain, which is probably why their political dynamics aren’t internationally newsworthy. The country’s culture is also far more liberal (in the left-wing sense) than the US. I’ll quote this lengthy piece (references removed) from Wikipedia, which captures better than I could that vas deferens:
Canada’s egalitarian approach to governance has emphasised social welfare, economic freedom, and multiculturalism, which is based on selective economic migrants, social integration, and suppression of far-right politics, that has wide public and political support. Its broad range of constituent nationalities and policies that promote a “just society” are constitutionally protected. Individual rights, equality and inclusiveness (social equality) have risen to the forefront of political and legal importance for most Canadians, as demonstrated through support for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a relatively free economy, and social liberal attitudes toward women’s rights (like pregnancy termination), divorce, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, birth control, euthanasia or cannabis use. There is also a sense of collective responsibility in Canadian political culture, as is demonstrated in general support for universal health care, multiculturalism, evolution, gun control, foreign aid, and other social programs.
Sounds almost too good to be true – is it propaganda? No wonder the USA avoids mentioning its goody two shoes neighbour – though of course Trump is intent on annexing the place, sort of (then, everything he says is ‘sort of’).
My source goes on to say it’s all pretty centrist in Canada – the Libs being centre-left and the Conservatives being centre-right, and often the twain shall meet. Members of the Cabinet, with various portfolios, are usually, but not always, members of the elected party. All very collaborative and humanistic. It almost seems as if they’ve learned from United Staters how not to run governments.
Canada has a Supreme Court, with 9 Justices, and a Constitution, initiated in 1867. Its decisions are presented bilingually – an important point to remember, Canada being effectively a bilingual nation, though its political system is largely based on that of Britain. Again, nothing controversial to see here.
In trying to comprehend the horror of the US political system in comparison to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I’ve not yet mentioned one factor – Christianity. I’ve written elsewhere about how rapidly Christianity has been abandoned in Australia, especially over the past 60 years or so. There has been a similar abandonment in Canada, though it has been slower. In Canada’s 2021 census, 53.3% reported being Christian, and 34.6% claimed no religion. Australia’s last census was also in 2021, with Christianity at 43.9% and no religion at 38.9%, and it looks certain that the 2026 census will show ‘no religion’ getting the most ‘votes’. In the USA, where it seems they don’t conduct censuses, we have to rely on private companies such as Gallup Inc., whose polling over 2020-2024 has Christian belief at around 69% and ‘religiously unaffiliated’ at 21.4%. One might imagine that Christian religiosity might result in more ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ loving-kindness, but, whodathunkit, the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the democratic world, as well as the largest rich-poor divide, and the lowest per capita spending on public health, education and welfare. Jesus wept.
So how does the USA’s political system compare with the Westminster-based systems of Canada, New Zealand and Australia? In their 2018 book How democracies die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard-based political scientists, don’t make such comparisons – instead they compare the USA’s problems with those of Venezuela, Turkey, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Hungary and other despotisms. This, I think, is a typically American bias and failure, especially when you consider how often that country’s CIA has deliberately destabilised other polities, mostly in favour of right-wing alternatives. Had they simply looked over the border in Canada, they would have found plenty of material to shame the USA by comparison.
There are so many problems with the USA’s political system that it’s hard to know where to start. But probably the best place to start is at the top. They need to scrap their Presidential system. None of the other democratic systems detailed here – in Australia, New Zealand and Canada – have ever, and will ever feel the need to have ‘no kings’ rallies (fingers crossed). They each have Prime Ministers, primus inter pares again, who can be dismissed by a no-confidence motion from their cabinet, or by a leadership ballot against a contestant, e.g when Paul Keating challenged Bob Hawke’s leadership and won in 1991 – and this has occurred from time to time, in Australia, Britain and elsewhere. There is no national vote for one person – the Prime Minister has to win her own electorate like everyone else. The USA has an impeachment process but it has proved grossly ineffective in recent times.
Prime ministers, unlike US Presidents, have no pardoning powers, no immunity from prosecution and no ‘running mate’, who can, completely unelected, become President if the incumbent dies, is incapacitated or forced to resign. They have no power to select unelected people to high office, in Treasury, Justice, Health, Foreign Affairs or any other capacity. They do not personally select members of the judiciary, and they must attend parliament to explain, along with other front-benchers, their legislative program and respond to criticism from the opposition. Governing Canada, and Australia, and New Zealand, is a collective responsibility, and hopefully always will be.
There are many other problems with the US system that are screamingly obvious to outsiders. The pardoning powers, the immunity, the gerrymandering (which happens elsewhere but to nowhere near the degree that it happens in the US), the voter suppression, the huge amounts of vote-buying money swirling around at election time, the ‘executive powers’, the politicisation of the judiciary, and so much more. The USA’s political system is, by any reasonable standards, the worst in the democratic world. But another problem which makes these major deficiencies so intractable is the myopic jingoism that has for so long been a part of the American psyche. Why do so many Americans believe, as if they’ve been hypnotised to believe, that they have the world’s greatest democracy? Is it perhaps because it has been pummelled into them from their first schooldays? I’ve heard from Americans that this is so.
So, who knows how this mess will end? I can’t see anything to hope for in the immediate future.
References
on fascism, buffoonery, criminality and a pretty crappy political system
On asking myself what fascism is, considering that it’s quite topical at present, my first answer is ‘nothing much’, by which I mean, on an intellectual level. The standard fascists of the past, Mussolini and Hitler, could never be described as intellectuals, and nor could Trump, though all might be described as clever in their extremely self-regarding ways. Good old AI describes fascism as ‘a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology characterised by a dictatorial leader, a centralised, autocratic government, militarism, and suppression of opposition’. This certainly describes much of the current Trump playbook, though it says little about the psychology of the typical ‘fascist’ leader, who, it seems to me, is always noisy, extremely thin-skinned, and has huge problems with listening to voices other than his own (though of course it needn’t be an exclusively male thing, but few women have ever been given the political power that the aforementioned men have been given).
The term didn’t exist before the 20th century, but of course the character type certainly did. It was apparently born out of the first world war – think of Hitler’s war experience; but it was Mussolini in particular who was central to the term, founding the Partito Nazionale Fascista, (PNF) in the early 1920s. It involved wholesale militarisation of the state, ultra-nationalism, and was of course molto macho. With Trump the draft dodger, however, fascism has taken on a different character. Definitely not so macho (many of his fellow-travellers are women), and focussed more on bullying his own critics, as well as a collection of ‘outsiders’ and competitors, and generally seeing the world in terms of win-lose scenarios, with a brutal edge. Whether or not this can be called fascism is no doubt an open question, and it isn’t of huge interest to me. It sure isn’t what I would call humanism (I was formerly involved with the SA Humanists), or a fair, inclusive, healthy or effective approach to politics.
So, much as I’m depressed with current US politics, and have long found their politico-social system far less impressive than most United Staters seem to think it is, I can’t help but hope it can be reformed and improved, considering the power that nation wields globally.
Firstly the US presidential system is quite obviously a bad system – obvious to most people outside the US. It gives a ridiculous degree of power to one individual, with limited checks and balances. Not only the ridiculous level of immunity, and the over-reaching pardoning powers, but the power to choose any unelected person as ‘running mate’, a person who can become President if something unforeseen happens, as has occurred in the past. This is clearly not democratic. Another problem is the influence of the almighty dollar. Campaign financing is very inadequately regulated and has been rising steadily over the past 30 to 40 years. Obviously this favours the rich in a nation with a larger rich-poor gap than any other democratic nation.
This one-man rule (it has always been a man and I can’t see that changing in the foreseeable) seems unable to be stopped even by clear evidence of criminal activity (Trump was convicted on 34 counts of felony business fraud re hush money payments in 2024; was found to have sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll in two lawsuits, in which Caroll was awarded $88.3 million dollars in damages, the case being currently under appeal; was indicted on 40 felony counts related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents related to his 2016-2020 presidency; and of course Trump’s involvement in the violent January 6 2021 insurrection in Washington DC and subsequent fraudulent attempts to claim that the election had been won by Trump, have never received proper legal treatment from the court system, due to his re-election in 2024). It’s surely obvious that no other nation in the English-speaking world, or throughout western Europe, would have allowed such an obvious reprobate to continue to play a role in their political affairs. (I must also say that the Wikipedia articles on the above-mentioned Trump ‘activities’ are impressively detailed and damning).
So what is to be done? Is there any hope for a nation that allows such a felon to be their president twice, with no doubt the hope of evading justice by buying a third term? And the way things are going over there, he might just succeed.
I have many good, and screamingly obvious, ideas about how the US polity could be overhauled, but I’m absolutely certain none of them will be implemented. In order for that to happen, the nation needs to be far more modest about itself, and to subscribe to a philosophy of constant renewal, to match the renewal of social values recognised by most other WEIRD nations, and by some progressives within the US.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned some of these ideas before in this blog, but… first, scrap the presidential system, which is beyond repair. Giving such vast powers to one person, who doesn’t even have to subscribe to the discipline of a political party and its collectively devised platform, more or less understood by the voting public, or at least there for every voter to consider, is highly problematic. Such a system is tailor-made for wannabe dictators. Nobody in Australia, where I live, or Britain, where I was born, goes into politics hoping to be a dictator – they would have to win over their local electorate, as a member of a political party (if campaigning as an independent they would’ve had to gain a local reputation through commercial or community activity), and then, if elected, would have to impress their party colleagues vis-à-vis their ideas, their communication skills, all the factors that make for a good team captain. This isn’t to say all ‘team captains’ have been effective or anything much more than disastrous -in Australia I can think of Mark Latham for Labor, or Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott for the Liberals (aka Conservatives – yes, it’s confusing: it’s about individual liberty and small government – think Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’).
So if the US scrapped its much-worshipped Presidential system, what then? It already has a functioning Congressional-Parliamentary system, elected every four years (called mid-term elections). It seems to have become increasingly partisan, whereas in Australia, cross-bench numbers (independents or ‘mini-parties’), with stops and starts, have grown. In Australia, our national elections vaguely resemble the US mid-terms, in which we elect local electorate hopefuls to the parliament (or re-elect incumbents), most of whom are members of the right or left party. The leaders of those parties are chosen, and can be dumped, by their elected peers in the party. Thus we have a Prime Minister and an Opposition Leader, working in a parliament, defending their policies and attacking the policies of the opposition, as of course occurs in the US Congress. We don’t have this extra, surely unnecessary, layer of power, an individual who sits in the White House like a king in his palace, surrounded by courtiers and flunkies, appointing various unelected ‘Secretaries’ to positions of massive power and authority (Treasury, State, Defence, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Education, etc, etc, – and also members of the judiciary – all subject at least to Congressional approval). The same king also has massive immunity and pardoning powers.
What could go wrong?
Anybody who thinks this is a good, let alone great, political system has surely to be certifiably insane, or born in the USA. Propaganda, anyone?
I’ve touched on just some of the problems of the US system. There’s also a disastrous ideology of ‘individualism’, in which you’re on your own, you’ll get very little government help in terms of education, health and general welfare, leading to a massive ‘left behind’ population susceptible to obvious charlatans like Trump. Hilary Clinton once called them ‘deplorables’, an indication of the problems they face vis-à-vis the wealthy elites on both sides of the political divide. The nation seems to have no shame about having the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world (this is always arguable, as naturally the world’s vilest nations don’t come clean about their rates), and some of the most disgusting prisons.
All in all, it’s pretty depressing, and I don’t see any change on the horizon. Yes I’m happy I wasn’t born there – if so, I would surely have been marked as another deplorable, given my background. I just hope the country doesn’t infect others with its disease. We all have enough problems…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_(election_obstruction_case)
Lies, lies, lies and democracy
what the….?
Imagine a political situation in which only women are allowed to vie for elected positions in government, whether local, state or federal. Further than that, only females over the age of eighteen are permitted to vote for these women. Certainly a delightful futuristic dream, IMHO. Surely the best form of democracy ever developed.
Some would say, however, that such a system is not democratic. And yet, I regularly read about the ancient Athenians as the ‘inventors of democracy’, and US political pundits and historians continually claim that the USA is the first modern democracy. These porkies are so unpalatable, I really should turn vegetarian.
So let’s face the facts (once again, for I’ve been here more than once before). In ancient Athens, only a small percentage of the male population had any say in the city-state’s government, as was also the case during the Roman republic, as Livy’s History of Rome relates.
The word demos means people, or the commonalty of a state. Let there be no mistake. And women are also people, if I’m not mistaken. It therefore follows, as night follows day, that no political system is democratic that does not permit women to be candidates for elected office, or to vote for candidates. Personally, though, I’d accept a political system that prohibits men from participating, as a very worthwhile experiment.
But let’s look at some facts. The USA held its first national election from December 1788 to January 1789. At the time, the new nation consisted of only 13 states, mostly hugging the Atlantic coast. I won’t get into the complex issue of state laws here, I’ll just focus on the federal scene. Only a small proportion of the adult male population was eligible to vote in 1788-9, and of course voting has never been mandatory in the US, so the number of votes counted amounted to a few tens of thousands out of a population of some three million (over half a million of whom were slaves).
But even without considering the missing female vote (which completely disqualifies the vote as democratic), the US claims about being the first modern democratic nation are complete bullshit. Modern democracy has proceeded in a series of baby steps, a step-wise widening of the franchise since Magna Carta in 1215, and did not become complete – if it ever really has – with the vote for women, native populations and ethnic minorities in the 20th century. Also, every vote must have an equal value – no gerrymandering, no ‘electoral colleges’ or any other processes which devalue the vote for some compared to others.
So, just on the women’s vote alone, leaving all the other vital issues aside, New Zealand was the first in 1893, but perversely, that nation didn’t allow women to become candidates until 1919. South Australia, where I live, was the first state anywhere in the world to give women the vote and the right to stand for election, in 1895. Australia changed its laws to allow women to vote and to stand for election in 1902, the first nation in the world to do so. However, not all women were included – indigenous women (and of course men) did not have that right until the 1960s. In fact the more we look at the history of women’s suffrage (and suffrage in general), the more complicated it becomes. The word ‘suffrage’ itself sounds odd, but etymologically it has nothing to do with suffering (never mind Olympe de Gouges). It goes back to Latin, suffragium, meaning something like a voting tablet but also the right to use it. Wikipedia is again magnificently comprehensive on the topic, letting us know that universal suffrage was experimented with in the Corsican Republic of 1755-69 and the Paris Commune of 1871. The French Jacobin constitution of 1793 sought to enact universal male suffrage (never mind Olympe de Gouges, encore) but it was scuttled in all the turbulence.
But let me return to the USA and its hollow claims. Women were given the vote there in 1920, two years after its neighbour, Canada. Voting rights for native Americans have been complexified by, for example, claims that they have their own ‘nations’ and governing systems, and by claims that their rights should be determined on a state-by-state basis, but the landmark federal legislation known as the 1965 Voting Rights Act sought to ‘prohibit racial discrimination in voting’, theoretically clearing the way for native and African Americans to vote. Of course, such racial discrimination has continued, as well as attempts, some successful, to water down the Act’s provisions, but generally it is regarded as the most successful piece of anti-discrimination legislation in US history. Even so, conservative states have constantly battled to restrict voting by minorities. So democracy in the USA has long been tenuous and incomplete, as it still is, with gerrymandering, suppression and the infamous electoral college.
Another bugbear I have with the good ole USA though, and I’ve written about it before, is their breast-beating about being the first modern democracy and their lies about gaining their freedom from ‘the British king’, as if poor sickly old George III was ruling the Old Dart and its colonies with an iron fist. In fact he was non compos mentis during the American Revolutionary War and in any case Britain was then governed by the Tory Party under Lord North, their Prime Minister, and had been a constitutional monarchy, with a Bill of Rights and a parliament, since 1689. Of course the franchise was minuscule, much like that at the ascension of George Washington a century later. Baby steps.
And then there is the lie at the very beginning of their revered Constitution. ‘We the People’ was patently dishonest – they should have written ‘We the Men’…
Democracy – a much abused term. And then came Trump…
References
https://academic.oup.com/book/6972/chapter-abstract/151255043?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/constitution.htm
Olympe de Gouges, The declaration of the rights of woman, 1791
US politics, a view from 2019
Here’s a video I made in October 2019 about Trump and US politics. It’s a bit rough and ‘amateur hour’, but it made a few valid points, methinks. I’m thinking about doing a bit more on the video side of things…
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