The Palestinian/Israeli War: from Top to Bottom.

This is a longer post than previous ones, but this topic is a complex and difficult one and it deserves a thorough discussion.

There are two ways of thinking about most military conflicts, including the Israel/Palestine one, and I don’t mean the partisan approach of backing one horse or the other then swearing at the jockey riding the one you don’t like. From the evolutionary perspective I take, there is what I’m going to call a top-down and a bottom-up way of looking at them. But, as far as I know, no one – and I mean no one – ever considers the bottom-up method. So, reader, what do you think I’m going to do?

But as blogs are a kind of personal account. There is something I need to say first. The images on our television screens over past months have been some of the worst I have ever seen, and uniquely for me, I have been unable to watch much of it. I usually keep a close eye on the news but at the beginning of the conflict the monstrous atrocities we were confronted with left me turning away from the news, reeling in disgust and exasperation, but most of all with a tremendous sense of concern, and empathy with those who are suffering.

To provide a thorough account of this conflict, we need to be both a ladder climber for the bottom-up method and a snake slider to use the top-down perspective. And, in the best traditions of snake sliding, I am going to start by getting the traditional sociological/historical/religious approach out of the way, with the caveat that I’m not a historian, theologian or sociologist and this must be seen in that context, but here’s how I see it:

I used to take the simplistic view that Zionism, the idea that Jews belong in Palestine and should return there, was wrong because, as a humanist, I don’t believe in God, so from my perspective there could be no biblical “Promised Land”, and the Jews had no religiously inspired justification to claim territory in what used to be Judea and Israel before the Romans evicted them two thousand years ago. But as I learned more about it, I realised that there was more to it than that. The Jews, as I now understand it, have always had a presence there, and in the early days of the conflict, Jews legitimately bought land from Palestinian people. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, which suggested that the Jews should be able to return to what they consider their ancestral homeland, was not made by Jews, but for Jews. The Declaration was made partly for political reasons during the First World War by the British and, sadly, in full conformance with the arrogant colonialist attitudes of the time, the wishes and interests of the Palestinian people, who already lived there were barely considered.

Both sides claim the capital of their territory to be Jerusalem, and this is a significant complicating factor. The city was the site of the Tenth Century BCE temple built by King Solomon: the son of the renowned and revered leader of the Jews, King David, before it was demolished by the Babylonians, then rebuilt, and finally demolished again by the Romans, but the site where it was built: the Temple Mount, remains a core part of Jewish identity. However, the Muslims claim the Temple Mount for themselves because, of some connections with their prophet, Mohammed, and for the fact that two of their most sacred buildings, The Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa Mosque have been built on the ancient site, giving them, they believe, grounds for claiming the site and they consider it to be the third holiest site in the Islamic world.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that the Jews have been a stateless people for two thousand years and, because they had no safe homeland, they have experienced the most appalling cruelty, oppression and discrimination throughout much of that time culminating, in the 1940s, of course in the most monstrous crime of all time: the holocaust. It would be the most hard-hearted of all political ideologies to deny them the right to a homeland after all they have endured.

But it isn’t that simple either is it? Where should the homeland be? I once spoke to an American Jewish lady at a scientific conference (I am not a scientist but have been known to attend them) and she suggested that there had been a proposal to have a Jewish state in the US, which sounds OK, but what would the people living in that part of the world have to say about it? Although, I suppose that problem might have been overcome with the right political will and appropriate compensation deals. But from the Jewish people’s perspective, after the Second World war, it is perhaps understandable that Zionism, the return to Jerusalem and the former “Promised Land”, would probably be the only solution they would find acceptable.

The original UN resolution that set up the state of Israel in 1947, and provisionally defined its borders, was never fully accepted by the Arab peoples who it principally affected, and setting up a Jewish homeland on what they considered their territory was obviously going to be a difficult ask for the Palestinian people. How would the British feel about someone telling them, because of some historical “accident” they’ll have to give up London and Birmingham, but they can have Liverpool and Manchester? Or the Americans being told they can have Los Angeles and San Francisco but they’ll have to give up New York and Washington DC?

It is true, as I understand it, that the Palestinian leadership has never accepted a negotiated settlement that involves a two-state solution, although there have been peacemakers, and genuine attempts to find a solution, such as those by then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, (who was murdered for his efforts), and worthy attempts by the Americans, particularly during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, when the Israeli leader, Ehud Barak worked for a deal with the then Palestinian Leader, Yasser Arafat, but this failed principally, it is claimed, on Arafat’s  intransigence, and also by the actions of extremists on both sides who seem often to have timed their attacks at delicate diplomatic moments in order to thwart peace efforts.

When these initiatives failed, it was perhaps understandable that Barak lost the next election. Unfortunately, for hopes of peace, this was to the right winger, Ariel Sharon, and it is now led by his successor from the same political party, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has moved the country even further to the political right. These leaders forced a sharp turn in Israeli Government policy away from the search for peace. Although Israel did withdraw all its citizens from the tiny territory of Gaza, the Israeli Government consistently manoeuvred to achieve what now seems to be their long-term aim of incorporating the much larger territories in the West Bank, which it has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War, into Israel. On occasion this involved bulldozing Palestinian people’s homes in the occupied territories so their own settlers could take their land in breach of international law.

Over many decades, the Israeli governments’ retaliatory responses to Hamas’ attacks have often looked like “punishment” incursions into Palestinian territories, which seems, accurately or not, only to be resolved to Israeli satisfaction when the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) had killed at least ten Palestinians for each dead Israeli. This seems to be replicated in the current “bent gun barrel” military tactics in the present war: the IDF and their political overlords – exhibiting the typical political posturing and platitudes most people around the world have become used to from their leaders – tell us that they are aiming at Hamas terrorists, when their bullets, shells and bombs often seem instead to be finding innocent people, including children, to the extent that these suspiciously errant bullets, shells and warheads repeatedly obliterate entire civilian neighbourhoods. All this seems to bear out what my father thought: He served with the forces supporting the British Mandate, when the British ran Palestine prior to the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948, and his view was that the Israeli Jews were “warmongers”.

But this is far from the one-sided conflict that it might be supposed from the above remarks.

Hamas is an extreme Islamist organisation, and if allowed would probably create a hard-line Islamic state in Palestine, similar to the one in Afghanistan. It is ironic then that some women and LGBT people have recently come out in support of Hamas, when, if they had to live in the society Hamas would want to create, women would have rights denied and be forced to wear Islamic dress, while LGBT people would be discriminated against, cruelly oppressed or even killed. Would pro-Palestinian left-wing demonstrators have come out in support of ISIS, the Taliban or Al-Qaeda? Elements of the hard-line Islamists like the Hamas leadership are very unlikely to enter meaningful peace negotiations with their hated Western, and Zionist, “oppressors”. Although, in 2017 Hamas seemed to accept that they might consider a Palestinian State set up in line with the borders established after the 1967 Israeli/Palestine war, which roughly match the ones originally set up in the UN Resolution, in which Gaza and the West Bank should remain Palestinian while the rest of the territory should be controlled by Israel. Although, it must be said that Hamas has never accepted the right of the Jews to have their own state on, what they think of as, Palestinian land. And the character of these people can be measured by the fact that they actively teach the children in their schools to hate Jews from an early age, and if any further evidence were needed, we only need to consider their repeated mindless and indiscriminate missile attacks on Israeli and Western interests, and most tellingly of all their brutal tactics on the 7^th of October. Hamas deliberately, and illegally site their weapons, and forces, in places where there are civilians, and especially, children so that if the Israelis retaliate, they can point to the deaths of children and other innocent people and blame the Israelis, knowing that the international community is likely to hold Israel responsible for such action. While Hamas is at a massive military disadvantage, they have for years put Israel in an impossible position and, as I have already implied, have been intermittently firing rockets at Israeli targets for decades. No state could be expected to stand by while this is happening to them, and it seems unarguable that the Israeli Government should have a right to defend its people against such attacks.

I have mentioned the situation regarding the dispute over the Temple Mount, but more needs to be said about the role of religion, and its possible place in underpinning the different sociological dispositions of the two peoples engaged in this sickening war. I have mentioned that the Jewish understanding is that the biblical lands of Israel and Judea were promised to them by God. Both Judaism and Islam, like Christianity, belong to the monotheistic, Abrahamic tradition, which is to say that they all have, what Christians call, the Old Testament as their foundational doctrinal text. The Old Testament has a different character from the newer, Christian texts as they exclude the gospels which record Jesus’s alleged life and teachings. The Old Testament God is the final arbiter of good and evil and, although it contains the Ten Commandments which do have clear moral teachings such as “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not bear false witness…” (tell lies). It often sees women as men’s property and does not explicitly condemn slavery nor genocide, indeed it seems to support a “might is right”, “winner takes all” mentality, in contrast to the Christian Gospels which include “kinder” texts such as Jesus’s injunction to “turn the other cheek” and “love thy neighbour” so there is a noticeable shift towards love, humility and kindness in the more recent texts and away from, force, mastery and domination.

It is interesting to speculate whether, because the Jews deny that Christ was the Messiah and their religion is not influenced by New Testament values, this is reflected in the way Israel’s leaders approach this dispute. They certainly seem to want to use their military advantage to impose their will on the situation, hoping – falsely, as it turned out – that their massive military superiority would contain the Palestinians in the regions where the Israeli Government want them to live, so that they would gradually achieve their Zionist ambitions by a combination of military containment of their “enemy” and stealthy encroachment of settlers into the occupied territories. In the present war, they also denied humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza. Do they, perhaps, hope that eventually the Palestinian people will eventually succumb to their domination, lose spirit, and accept the inevitable? Netanyahu has been clear that he has no interest in a two-state solution.

From the Muslim perspective, of course, while they see Jesus as an important prophet, they do not ascribe the same weight to his teachings, as do the Christians. The ayatollahs, mullahs and imams, as in the case of the more extreme elements on the other side such as the ultra-orthodox Jews, treat themselves to the unwarranted certainty, not only that there is a god, but their particular interpretation of God is the right one.

In the Christian West, while Christians have also gifted themselves with their own “absolutes” in respect of their own “God” ideology, there was a scientific revolution which led to the enlightenment. In Britain, this was embodied in the ideas of thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume and John Stewart Mill. And in America Founding Fathers, like Thomas Paine, put aside religious considerations when they set up their constitution and legal structures. And while the Muslims did have their own scientific revolution, between the eighth and fifteenth centuries this did not seem to work its way through to the kind of enlightenment values of human rights and respect for the individual that developed in the West. It might be reasonable then to suppose that the hard-line Old Testament values may be embodied in Hamas’s casual disregard for the lives of not only the Jews but their own people, and that this does contrast with the Jews, who although they may, on this interpretation, share some of the “hard man” Old Testament values, many, if not most Israeli Jews are immigrants from Western countries, where they will have inculcated some western values. Although their government has committed, what some might feel to be egregious violations of human rights, they are generally more committed to them than their adversaries. For example, in their attacks against Hamas they do not, they argue, deliberately target civilians, and they certainly don’t video themselves decapitating people, despoiling dead bodies or stabbing babies then posting the footage online, as the Hamas killers did on October 7^th. As far as has been reported, the IDF do not indulge in mass rape and mutilation of their prisoners.

So, who’s to blame for this dispute? Well, let’s consider one possible answer: let us suppose that the leadership on both sides are at fault. From the top-down perspective, it seems relatively easy to accuse these people, of treachery. One of the principal roles of a governing authority is to ensure the welfare of its people. The Hamas leadership would have known that the attacks on October 7^th, and indeed their previous and continuing missile attacks on Israel would inevitably trigger a response causing the wounding and death of many thousands of innocent Palestinian people. And on the other side, as I understand it, despite their protestations that they are only trying to provide security for their people, the Israeli Government have Illegally allowed 700,000 Israeli immigrants to live in settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. If such deliberate actions were perpetrated by any other nation on earth, it would almost certainly be defined as: “ethnic cleansing” which is the forced replacement of one ethnic group with another, and in normal circumstances, an international coalition might be being gathered together to oppose, or stop, this abuse of power, such as happened, successfully in the Balkans in the 1990s. The only reason, it seems, that it isn’t happening now is that the principal world superpower of the moment, the United States, see Israel as their ally, even though they are as frustrated as the rest of the world, by what many think is Netanyahu’s dangerous militaristic opportunism. From the perspective of a peacemaker, this all looks like the Israeli Government have created 700,000 obstacles to peace. And, in this interpretation, recent Israeli Governments have not just betrayed their own population. Television reports, over decades showing the repeated and unequal contests between Israeli bulldozers and the humble homes of innocent Palestinians, as well as the denial of rights and humanitarian aid in Gaza and the occupied territories, have led many westerners, to falsely conflate the aims of the Israeli Government with Jewish people in general, leading to an increase in anti-Semitism around the world.

The goal of leadership, it seems, on both sides in this dispute seems not to achieve peace and protect their own citizens from attack but to be dedicated to their partisan cause. And while some of these leaders might argue that they are ready to lay their own lives down in pursuit of their “cause”, it begs the question as to whether they have the right to put at risk the lives of those who are not so inclined, and who just want to live out their lives in peace. Or to put this another way, these leaders look like single-minded, ideological boneheads committed to winning the game, whatever the cost in innocent life. A game I might add, neither side can win. The Palestinians, faced with overwhelming military odds from a powerful nuclear armed state like Israel will never be able to prosecute anything more than a guerrilla war against them. While the Israelis might be able to destroy their leadership and dismantle and degrade Hamas’s fighting capabilities, Palestinian resistance is an idea, not an army, and you cannot defeat an idea, without killing everyone who has that idea, which would involve the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people – this would the crime of genocide, and one which the Jewish people are history’s most well-known victims. Even if the Israelis do manage to defeat Hamas in Gaza, it seems inevitable that an Arab armed resistance movement will continue in some form or other.

If you think my language, in calling the leaders on both sides “traitors” or “boneheads” is unduly hyperbolic, or unnecessarily emotive, you just need to look at the haunted faces of the brutalised, probably gang-raped, and likely doomed, innocent Israeli young women being dragged into captivity by cruel Hamas “fighters”, or the grime-streaked faces of poor mangled Palestinian kids pulled out from under rubble, to know why issues like this demand more than dry academic analysis.

But is it fair to put the blame on the respective leaderships of the two warring peoples? Both Hamas and the current right-wing Israeli coalition government were elected by their people, and recent polls in the West Bank, appear to show massively increased support for Hamas, and although Hamas is less popular in Gaza, most people there support the October attack on Israel. Looked at from this perspective it seems that the people themselves have some culpability in this matter so that this many-layered dispute might be seen to have yet another layer of complexity, and one that cannot be easily explained from the top-down perspective. If the people living in Israel/Palestine really do just want to live reasonably in peace with each other, why would they elect leaders who want to extend and escalate the dispute? Isn’t this turkeys voting for Christmas?

The top-down view, as I’ve outlined it above, explores this dispute, from a historical and sociological perspective, but I think we should all want a better explanation than that; The top-down view gives only a superficial explanation and fails to answer some fundamental questions regarding the rationality of the behaviour of not only the leaders, but the populations of the peoples involved. This is why we need a deeper, more fundamental, bottom-up scientific/philosophical explanation, and now that our playing pieces have slid down to the bottom of the Snakes and Ladders’ gameboard it is time to start climbing back up.

Here I need to flag up the consideration that, because we will be exploring the fundamentals of human nature, the inferences we will be drawing, will be relevant not just to the Israel/Palestine dispute, but to warfare in general. (I have published a series of eight ad-free podcasts called “Not 42, The Real Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything” which expands on some of the ideas I am going to explore here. I will add links to relevant episodes in case anyone wants to know more.)

Let’s start with the fundamentals: First, we need to accept that we know that we evolved, and that it follows necessarily from this that we are animals. (This fact does not in any way imply that, as feeling beings, we are diminished or lessened in any sense at all by this revelation. But that is for another blog post, or alternatively, listen to Episode Three in my podcast series: “The Nova Point”. And those who doubt that I can say I “know” evolution happened could listen to Episode One of my podcast series, “The Absolute Truth”, and Episode Two, “What You Didn’t know You Knew”, where I explain what I mean by what it is to “know” something, and how we know that life on earth evolved.)

If we are animals, it seems reasonable to look at other closely related animals, to give us some perspective about the kind of animal we are. When we do this, we find that they behave in different ways from each other, and from the human animal. Each species has its own way of feeling, thinking about, and responding to the world in which they live. In other words, each kind of animal has their own “Deep Nature”. (Episodes Six: “Diving into Deep Nature” and Seven: “Putin, Patriotism and Peacocks” refer.) At the species level, physical and behavioural properties are entirely governed by genes. This contrasts with the individual animal, where the kind of personality and behavioural attributes that an individual animal or human expresses, are not just properties of their genes but are strongly influenced by their environment, experience and development.

It follows necessarily that because we are animals, we also will have a deep nature. For example, chimpanzees, are much more volatile, aggressive and argumentative, than human beings, and are known to indulge in warlike behaviour, a trait they share with human beings, but not with their closest evolutionary relatives, bonobos, who are much more peaceable and appear not to have inter-group warfare, although they have been known, on occasion, to engage in extremely brutal sexist violence. Their sexism does not, however, work in way you might think: The only violent attacks I know about are ones perpetrated by females against males who, in bonobo society are of very low status. Like bonobos, humans are generally very placid; almost all human interactions are respectful, civil and polite. Violence in humans, at least compared to that in chimpanzee society, is relatively rare.

So how do we explain aggressive behaviour of belligerents, the support of the general population, and the, often unconscionable, atrocities that frequently take place during wars like the one in Gaza? One element seems to be that it is part of our species’ deep nature, again like chimpanzees, but unlike bonobos, that we are predisposed towards tribalism. This does not, in itself, generate violent behaviour in the general population, which, simply put, is made up of distinct identity groups that mostly rub along reasonable amicably, playing football, golf and cricket with each other. But tribalism seems obviously relevant to the dispute between the Israeli and Palestinian “tribes”. Tribalism obviously engenders extremely powerful feelings both positive in respect of feelings of belonging and within-tribe cohesion, but also negative ones as it can act as a trigger for violence when a tribal unit, such as a nation state, ethnic or racial identity group, feels threatened. At such times it seems that our species lapses into what I’ve called an “Emergency Mode” (Episode Seven) when conventional rules of social engagement are suspended, leading to the breakdown of stable societal interaction, suspension of human rights, inter-“tribal” tension, and war along with its associated atrocities.

The role of religion needs also to be factored into this explanation. It seems to be part of our deep nature that we have spiritual feelings, which usually manifest themselves into some kind of belief system, which is often expressed as a kind of tribal identity marker. It might be possible to hold up Christianity as a more respectful, kinder and more innocent religious tradition, but that would be to miss the point. People raised in the Christian tradition have been responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history including the worst of all in terms of number of victims affected: the holocaust. It is not the character of the religion that is of predominant importance, in this sense, it is the role of religion, and faith systems themselves, as an underlying bulwark of the tribal identity system.

Part of our deep nature seems to want to command the kind of animal we are to create an in-group to which we belong and to be ready to defend it against those in any out-group if it ever comes under threat. And we seem to be predisposed to adhere to a set of belief systems, of whatever character, that helps define ourselves in shared relationship to members of our own kind and distinct from those in any out-group.

While it is easy to see that feelings of love, kindness, respect and fairness should be the basis for human rights, because that is part of the central aim of making the world a better place, the tribal instincts I described in the previous paragraph frequently do the opposite.

So, the blame for the war in Palestine, and for that matter, those currently taking place in Ukraine, Sudan and Yemen, are, on the bottom-up analysis, genes. Species are defined by their genes, they programme our deep nature, and it is part of our deep nature to establish tribal identities, and if we didn’t have those genetic predispositions, there would be no one against whom we could go to war: there would be no nation states, no national boundaries or ethnic, religious or cultural groupings to set us apart one from another. We would all just be people. To this way of thinking, powerful feelings of belonging, nationalism and even, profoundly felt, “noble”, ones like patriotism just look like inappropriate, ancient, dangerous, genetically motivated, hangover behaviours from our distant tribal ancestors.

So, why tribalism? Our species evolved in what scientists call an “environment of evolutionary adaptiveness” (an EEA). All this means is that when we evolved, we would have become adapted to the world in which we found ourselves then. And in the natural world it would have been advantageous for people to form themselves into groups in order to exploit the food and water resources in one area, while peacefully trading with other groups. However, it would also have been advantageous for a tribe to wipe out a neighbouring one if its own territory was not providing enough resources for them, or if there was perceived injustice towards them from another tribe. Nature has no moral dimension – and here we have reached the core of the philosophical system I’m proposing, where I argue that we need to draw a distinction between the world of feeling above what I call the “Awareness Horizon” and the mechanistic world of nature below it (Please listen to Episode Three). And in such circumstances it would be “better” – in the very narrow and completely amoral evolutionary sense in the world below the Horizon – for one group to wipe out another. Because, while we were living in the EEA, the groups would have been very small this would easily have been possible, and once the war was over life could continue as normal. (This is a simplification of what would have really happened during our evolutionary history, because tribes would have been interconnected in complex ways and it is likely that there would have been alliances between tribes, just as there are alliances, say, between individual chimps.) The point here is that warfare could have been a useful strategy allowing a tribe to “succeed” in the completely arbitrary, and amoral, sense that it would be able to get its genes into the next generation. The important thing to note here is that we no longer live in that EEA, and now, those tiny tribes largely do not exist. For either side to “win” in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute would involve the unacceptable killing of millions of people. That is why, if we understood who we are and where we came from, we would understand why dialogue and peaceful compromise in disputes like this are the only possible solution.

Tribal feelings of patriotism, nationalism and ethnic partisanship fuelled the abominations of the 20^th Century: the trenches of the First World War; Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, during the Second and – although many people will not know this – if it had not been for a remarkable series of happy coincidences during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, there would have been a Third World War, except, this time, in all likelihood, a full scale nuclear confrontation. (All this lead me to ask, in the final episode of my podcasts, Episode Eight, “The Road’s end – Or the End of the Road?”, whether our species might be “terminally ill with the genetic disease of patriotism”.)

One thing we might consider here is that, from an evolutionary perspective, selection appears to be everywhere, and it does not always apply to genes. As I understand it, the population of Israel is made up mainly of immigrants, this population is therefore self-selected, and Jewish people from around the world, who most strongly identify with their Jewish identity, and might be more attracted to Zionism are the ones who would have been more likely to have moved to Israel. The people who currently live in Israel, we might then reasonably expect, will be more militant and more dedicated to their “tribe” than the Jewish population as a whole, whether this is because they have a more strongly than average genetic predisposition to tribalism or whether they have been influenced by education, family, friends or by social media interaction. I suspect that this movement of population effect, which I think of as “Demographic selection” is far more widespread and important than people realise, and this may partly explain the Israeli public’s support for their current leaders. There is more I could say about demographic selection, but it wouldn’t be relevant here.

From a top-down perspective, the approach of recent Israeli Governments to the Israeli/Palestinian dispute looks naïve and frankly bizarre; from the bottom-up it becomes explicable, although not justifiable. The emergency mode makes the bizarre look normal, the unreasonable, reasonable and makes intellect redundant, and it is a massive failure of intellect, on the Israeli Government’s part, not to realise that Palestinian People are a people: While it might be possible to torture and beat an individual human being into submission, even if only temporarily, if the Israeli Government’s real intention is to subdue and demoralise a tribal people, like the Palestinians to extent that they lose their spirit, then this is doomed to failure. If you push people too hard, they will push back – that is just human nature. Equally Hamas’s repeated missile attacks, and the barbaric attack on October 7th against what amounts to a regional superpower was never going to result in anything but one-sided, overwhelming retaliation, which was inevitably going to have a massive impact on children and innocent members of their population. They can never hope to win against such overwhelming odds and would be well advised to find another way to reach some kind of acceptable compromise if only their patriotic, and extremist religious instincts will let them.

The only way for peace to come about in this dispute was going to be the empowerment of moderates and the marginalisation of extremism on both sides, so that a growing, lasting and sustainable respect might emerge, which involves a proper consideration for their respective points of view. Other, seemingly intractable, disputes, like the one in Northern Ireland have been if not solved, at least significantly mitigated, with the right political will on both sides, allowing both sides to roll themselves back out of their emergency mode.

We seem to have arrived at the penultimate square at the top of our Snakes and Ladders game, but there is one further step we can take.

If the prospects for peace in Israel and Palestine look bleak, I would have to agree. But, for hundreds of years, on the wider, historical, world stage things seem to have been moving firmly in the right direction. We no longer enjoy watching people disembowel each other as they used to do in the Roman Colosseum, we don’t burn witches, we’ve abolished slavery and outlawed racism, homophobia and sexism. And, interestingly, the levels of violence and murder rates across all societies seem to be falling markedly and consistently. There is, what some have called, a shifting moral zeitgeist, a kind of cultural evolution to a kinder and more equitable society, not just in the west, but all around the world. Although there have been recent and very significant steps backward in progress towards a peaceful world, especially during the 20^th Century, the overall trend seems to be strongly positive.

Astute readers of this post, will have noticed that I have switched back into top-down mode, expressing this movement towards peace, justice and non-violence from a historical/sociological perspective. A zeitgeist, after all, is an expression of the public mood at one particular time, and it usually expresses itself as a kind of tidal phenomenon: over time, divorce and abortion rates go up and down like tides, as do the hemlines of women’s skirts. The murder rate however doesn’t seem to follow this pattern, it seems to have been going downwards consistently over a long period of time, suggesting that something deeper might be happening. But, if we switch back to bottom-up mode, gradual change over long periods of time is something we expect of Darwinian evolutionary processes. We are animals and animals evolve, don’t they? Might we be evolving to be less violent, less warlike? Well, it turns out that most animals are not evolving. Almost all animals are well adapted to their own respective EEAs, and so for most of the time any selection pressure will be about keeping the animals as they are (technically this is called stabilising selection). Think about a great white shark: often described as a perfect killing machine, how could such an animal evolve further if it is already “perfect” and there is nowhere for it to evolve to? Any selective effect on their genes is just going to preserve their “perfection” and any shark that does not meet sufficient high standards in respect of survival and reproductive qualities is going to be less likely to survive.

What is really interesting about our species, is that the human animal did not evolve in the environment in which we are now living, we are a new species and may not be well fitted to the new world we have created for ourselves. If we are evolving in biological as opposed to cultural terms it would mean that the genes that make us warlike, would be visible to selection, and would be getting weeded out: that’s what evolution does – that’s what it is.

In terms of our general morphology (our basic body size, shape etc), any selection currently in play is unlikely to be significant. Being, tall or short or being able to run fast is unlikely to make a difference in a world where we have eliminated our predators and most threats to our survival, and where we can simply jump in the car and go to the supermarket if we are hungry or turn the heating up if we are cold. If we are evolving, the selection would be less likely to be influencing morphology, and more likely to be acting on genes that influence any behaviour that might stop us surviving or reproducing.

Here’s something Charles Darwin said in a book in 1874:

“The bravest men, who were always willing to come to the front in war, and who freely risked their lives for others, would on an average perish in larger numbers than other men. Therefore it hardly seem probable, that the number of men gifted with such virtues, or that the standard of their excellence, could be increased through natural selection, that is, by the survival of the fittest; for we are not here speaking of one tribe being victorious over another.”

What Darwin is saying here is that natural selection (the force that is principally responsible for making evolution work) could be acting on human beings in real time now. Could it be that in time, humans will, as Darwin suggests, become more selfish and self-protective, becoming less brave and virtuous perhaps, because (using modern terminology – genes hadn’t been discovered in Darwin’s time) those with genes that predispose them to be ready to surrender their lives for their country are less likely to return from a war? Or is it that our species will evolve to be less warlike because the influence that incites someone to go to war is a genetically mediated tribal instinct that expresses itself as nationalism? This obviously turns on the motivation driving someone to fight; is the motivation to go to war a noble, brave and selfless impulse, or a base tribal instinct that conceals its selfish nationalistic character behind a mask of noble patriotism? If it is happening, is it making people better, or making them worse? This paradox illustrates a difficult dilemma: Identifying what selective effects might be real is a bit like staring into – to steal a phrase from T S Eliot – a “wilderness of mirrors”; for every selective effect you can propose you can often see an opposite effect staring right back at you.

Darwin died before the horrors of the Twentieth Century, and before the invention of nuclear weapons, and may have modified his opinion about the brave selflessness of people who decide to become combatants, but that’s a question we’ll never get to ask him.

Any suggestion that we can currently guess where human evolution might be taking us has to be seen as extremely speculative. Even if our society doesn’t change – and the relatively speedy advances in science, culture and technology could change our societies beyond recognition, which might involve cancelling or reversing any selective effect – we cannot rule out the possibility that the very real reduction in murder rates and the general reduction in violence that we seem to be seeing in our societies might at least in part, have a genetic origin, although the selective effect Darwin suggested would not, in itself, explain changes in, for example, murder rates: this question must remain outside of the scope of this discussion.

So, we are at our final square at the top of our snakes and ladders board, and perhaps the suggestion left to us from our journey down and back up again is that the Two State Solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict looks a long way away, as does any suggestion of a One State multi-ethnic peaceful coexistence between the two groups. Maybe one message though is that we should think of people who strongly embody and express tribal/nationalistic, or extreme religious impulses, like Netanyahu, the Hamas leaders and Putin as chest-beating, alpha-male’ silverbacks who have no place in the modern world, and no one, regardless of their political persuasion, should ever vote for them.

But this analysis suggests that it isn’t really leaders that are at fault, our species, like all others, is defined by its genes, and it seems likely that it is the influence of ancient and inappropriate genes that make us occasionally behave in such appalling ways towards each other. And it is only from this, bottom-up perspective that this becomes evident. It is our genes that define us as the kind of species that goes to war, and it is those genes that we need to confront, subvert and challenge, because our very survival as a species might depend on it. (Again, this idea is expanded in “Episode Eight”.)

If our species really is evolving, where might our evolution eventually take us if we manage to dodge the two great threats to our species’ survival: climate change and nuclear war, over the next couple of thousand years or so?

One phrase keeps forcing itself in my mind although I’m reluctant to give it voice because it is a quote from someone, although he was highly regarded by many and had very advanced ideas for his time, was also rather misguided. He was a Jewish cult leader from the First Century, called Yeshua, who told his followers to leave their wives, husbands, children and families and to follow him. This was because the Jews were being severely oppressed by the Romans at the time, leading him to think he was living through the end times, and that God would be returning imminently to protect His “Chosen People”, and if God was coming in the next couple of weeks or months they wouldn’t need to worry about their families. The quote I’m thinking of was: “the meek shall inherit the earth”. And, as you’ve probably guessed, Yeshua is better known today as Jesus Christ.

If I’m right about this, and the meek really will inherit the earth, a “meek” world won’t look to them like the boring dispiriting and uninspiring place it might to us. We are engaged, excited and sometimes amused by disputation and conflict in a way they would not be, or at least not to the same extent, because, of course, meekness would be the new norm. It is interesting to speculate, though, that they might well read their history with astonished, and appalled, wonderment at our failure to properly understand who we are and where we came from despite the massive evidence that we are a species of animal. And, perhaps, from their perspective in their kinder, more respectful and peaceful world, they might reflect with great sadness and empathy towards us: we the poor “modern” people condemned by our genes to be embroiled in the madness, cruelty and destruction wrought during, what they might see as, the violent dawn of our species.

What Kind of Animal are You?

You are an animal!

This might sound like an insulting way to open a blog post.  But before you decide to turn off your phone/computer, let’s just explore this question further.  Why, according to cultural orthodoxy is being accused of being an animal considered insulting or derogatory? 

The traditional answer to this question is to say that we are intelligent, reasoning beings.  We are products of our culture, upbringing and other environmental influences.  To associate human beings with their allegedly base origins is to undermine human status and dignity.  We seem to know intuitively that there is much more to humanity than the fact that we are animals, and to deny that is to miss something essential about it.   

What is it about the human condition that leads us to the intuitive assumption that we have transcended our animal nature?  And for that matter, what are intuitive assumptions and where do they come from?  In order to be clearer about what an intuitive assumption is I want to tell you about something strange that happened to me this morning when I was out walking the dog:  a lady passed me with her dog and I said good morning to her.  There was absolutely no reason to say that.  It is not likely that I will see her again, and even if we do find ourselves crossing each other’s paths again neither of us will remember that we had spoken this morning.  In fact she has probably already forgotten the incident.  So what was the point of saying good morning?  And the strangest thing of all about this event was that it did not feel a bit strange.  In fact it felt rather proper to say good morning to her.  It gave me a pleasant, almost genteel feeling, a sense that a casual greeting was somehow a part of the natural order.  If we were of a different species, our greeting would have been different.  For example, if we had been members of that famously sexy species of ape, bonobos, we would probably have indulged in their typical method of greeting (It is probably true that most people have never heard of bonobos even though they are, with common chimpanzees, our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom:  which itself tells us something about the nature of being human.)  If you did not already know, or had not worked it out, the bonobo’s mode of greeting consists in having full sex.  Which I suspect may well engender similar feelings of propriety, pleasance and gentility in them.  And their greetings might just as readily be forgotten as we forget our casual greetings…  Moving swiftly on… 

It seems that human beings have an underlying pattern of behaviour, a hidden Deep Nature unique to our species which is so obvious that we are almost never aware of it, let alone think to question it.

This position seems to me to be the only one that fits with the naturalistic view of humankind to which I am committed.  We evolved, we are therefore animals, and it would be absurd to think that we lack a Deep Nature when every other complex animal species on the planet has one.  The view that we are stand-alone entities, or culturally constructed beings, is inconsistent with an evolutionary story of human origins.  Evolutionary biologists tell us that evolution works by addition, not subtraction.  Evolution modifies pre-existing anatomical features and behaviours via adaptive pressure, moulding them into new ones.  Evolution has no reverse gear by which we could have returned to the blank slate view of human nature in which our individual nature is written by experience as favoured by the 17^th Century philosopher, John Locke.

There is a school of thought which vehemently opposes this version of the naturalistic view.  Their position is that there is something undefinable about a human being that cannot be reduced to the cold mechanisms of nature and natural selection.  As Mary Midgley put it: “The forms of thought that we need for difficult social dilemmas are distinct from those that we need for chemistry and those again for historical thinking because the questions that we must ask in these areas are of different kinds.”  The schism between the scientific worldview and that of philosophy and the humanities generally has at times been vexatious and vitriolic.  Scientists have been accused of the sin of reductionism, and of inventing a new quasi-religion opponents disparagingly dismiss as scientism.  The scientists in turn seem to cast doubt on the efficacy of philosophy:  Steven Pinker argues that “In areas where philosophy seems to have gone round in circles for thousands of years in which every possible solution seems deeply unsatisfying yet all the phenomena remain accounted for, there we might be running up against the limitations of what our own minds find intuitive”.  So in this view, it might be implicit in humanity’s Deep Nature that we generate profound, real and powerful feelings about the primacy of human experience, but we have reason to be sceptical about such intuitions because this might be just one aspect of the way we have been programmed by nature to think.

I want to argue here that a synthesis between science and philosophy is urgently needed.  And the reason that it is so important will become clear when we consider the ichneumon wasp.  This tiny wasp stings caterpillars paralysing them then they lay their eggs on them.  When the maggoty offspring emerge they set about eating their way through the still living flesh of their host.  This is just one of the innumerable examples of the cruelty of nature.  It is a cruelty of which we are all aware, and yet our Deep nature leads us to be impressed by the wholesome goodness of nature enthusiastically extolled by romantic poets, health-food shops and exploited by advertising executives the world over.  In 1903 G E Moore proposed that to claim that anything at all in nature was good was to commit what he called the Naturalistic Fallacy.  The point is that the ichneumon wasp example reveals that Moore’s underlying point is a good one.  Nothing is good, bad or even indifferent in nature.  Nature is simply what is.  It cannot even be claimed that survival itself is good because if it is good for the ichneumon wasp to survive it cannot at the same time be good for the caterpillar to survive.  It is a simple logical expedient that those animals that have the wherewithal to get their genes into the next generation are still here, and those that haven’t aren’t.  

Given the nihilistic nature of nature, we have very good reason to question whether all aspects of the human Deep Nature can be thought of as good for us, especially so given that our Deep Nature evolved in the African Savannah in the Pleistocene in a world unrecognisable to most modern humans.

(Find out more about our Deep Nature in Episode Six of my podcast series Not 42, The Real Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything.)

A Radical New Government? An update.

This morning, I listened to The Laura Kuenssberg Show, featuring Labour leader, Kier Starmer, and I have slightly moderated the views I outlined in my last blogpost. In that post I attacked the Tories for their ideological stance on the NHS and Brexit. The opposite position to ideological dogma is pragmatism, which is the idea that we don’t impose ideas onto reality but respond to the world as it really appears to be.

In his interview, Starmer said that his values, in respect of the NHS, were to oppose further privatisation, but that the practical reality he is likely to have to engage with, if he became Prime Minister, would be that he would have to reduce hospital and doctors’ patient waiting times, and that would mean having to use private health services. I can’t criticise the Tories for their idealism and lack of pragmatism, while at the same time insisting that Starmer stick to his principles. So perhaps I should give him more of a chance.

Not sure that his pragmatic approach to Brexit was quite so convincing though. When the British people voted for Brexit, they weren’t given the option of whether they thought we should leave the Single Market, the Custom’s Union or whether they thought we should allow free movement. Yet we left all of these, which were driven through by the Tory ideological zealots with, a kind of, winner takes all mentality, regardless of the impact they might have on ordinary peoples’ lives or on the economy. Why did Brexit happen? The only possible driver for Brexit could have been the intuitive drive to promote British sovereignty and its perceived status in the world, underpinned by feelings of patriotism, but what is patriotism and why is it there?

As human beings we seem to have an instinct for what scientists call in-group/out-group behaviour, and patriotism is a manifestation of that fundamental human instinct. We divide us, Britain, from them, the EU and all those other funny foreigners. The problem is that the instincts that underpin our behaviour evolved during the emergence of our species, when we were living in tribal units in a world very different to the one we live in today, and under the auspices of the mechanistic forces of nature, like Darwinian natural selection, and selfish genes, that have no moral dimension nor any bearing whatever on what we want, or should want for ourselves. The consequences of the behaviour of the simple-minded ideologs, like Brexiteers, could have even more profound and dangerous consequences:

We evolved; we are a species of social primate with a suite of behavioural attributes. If we are to understand what it is to be human, we must learn what these instincts are, the context in which they evolved and to confront them where necessary. This has important implications for philosophy, our view of ourselves, and by extension politics.

In the final episode of my series of podcasts, I pose the question “Could our species be terminally ill with the genetic disease of patriotism?” In a world bristling with nuclear weapons, it may turn out that Brexit is the least of our worries.

Find out more by listening to my podcasts: https://podcast.peterdfisher.com/share

A radical new government to deal with radical problems?

We are indeed living in strange times. The National Health Service is on its knees, or as in the words of Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer, “it’s not just on its knees, it’s on its face”. People are dying on hospital corridors, or in their homes waiting for ambulances that don’t arrive on time, or sometimes not at all, while all the main stories in the press, on the BBC and news channels is what Harry said about Wills. What is going on? Don’t ordinary people matter anymore? When did we lose perspective? Has human life somehow been sneakily devalued?

The undermining of the NHS, and by extension the value of human life itself, seems to have happened directly as a result of the failure of successive British governments to understand what is important.

When the Tories were elected twelve years ago, they had a clear vision of how things should be run. No one doubts that they had a plan, a clear and simple ideology, that they “knew” would provide the answer to the problems of the British economy. Simple minded ideologies are wonderful things, and they have special appeal to the simple minded. In the clear-cut Tory doctrine, if they focussed on creating economic growth, they would be better able to fund public services, and they claimed, paradoxically, that by cutting back spending on public services with swinging austerity measures, that the economy would be freed from the cost burdens creating a boom time, and that these “jam tomorrow” policies would eventually produce benefits for all. A less kind interpretation of their aims, given that all during the austerity period they cut taxes for the better off, was that they and their supporters had an antipathy about paying their fair share of tax, and just wanted a better income for themselves. Why put their hard-earned income into the pockets of ordinary folk, and especially the subset of the “poor” who they deemed workshy benefit scroungers?

Now, I am not an economist, and the following comments must be seen in that light, but as I understand it, economies are driven by supply and demand. And what the Tories wanted to do was to support the supply side of the economy: the small businesses, the producers, entrepreneurs and multinationals (their people), who, in their mind, produced the wealth. Unfortunately, the deficits of poor ideologies, whether clear-minded or not, are soon revealed. As soon as simplicity collides with the complexity of reality things start to go wrong. As I see it, there are two problems with the Tory approach, one is that if the better off do well they tend to filter much of their money into offshore tax havens so that tax revenues are reduced, and this money is effectively lost to the economy, reducing the effectiveness of their policy. The second is that for a supply/demand economy to work effectively there has to be a balance between the two parts, and by imposing pay restraint on vast sectors of the working population, this necessarily reduces demand. The supply side cannot make big profits, grow the economy, and pay their taxes if no one can afford to buy their products, which is where the impoverishing of the majority in an austerity driven economy inevitably leads.

Most people in Britain were clever enough to be suspicious about the Tory’s wonderfully clear vision for the future, despite the Tory “friends in high places” right-wing press propaganda. And in election after election the majority of voters voted against them, unfortunately the corrupt first-past-the-post electoral system meant that they won time after time, and in one case with a massive majority.

However, no one can deny that the British public voted for the Tory policy of Brexit however narrowly the result was, even if the suggested benefits of it were grossly exaggerated, and even lied about, and the hard-line extreme Brexit that was eventually implemented seriously damaged the economy, and meant that one part of Britain, Northern Ireland, was left without any government at all.

While the Labour Party have much to be proud of for creating the NHS in the first place, the half-way-house policies of Tony Blair introduced an internal market in the NHS, and we now see the results of that policy as contractors are now creaming off NHS funding for their own private profit, at the expense of the taxpayer, and robbing funding from the cash starved hospital trusts who desperately need the money.

If, as expected, the Labour Party win the next election, they will be faced with a massive task to rebuild the country and repair its devastated economy. Radical action will be necessary. A new EU referendum would obviously be a necessary step, and a recent poll found that two thirds of the British public would favour a second referendum. And, in the massive NHS crisis, where innocent people are dying all over the country, what is the cornerstone of Sir Keir’s message? While he is right to want to increase taxes for non-doms and those who can oppose it, his key policy seems to be… Wait for it… More devolution. Let’s move decision making from Westminster out to the regions. What! Who cares? People want their loved ones to have ambulances available for them. They want to know that if they become ill, they will have the treatment they have a right to expect, they want to know that their wages will be enough to cover their monthly costs. At a time like this, who among the general population is interested in devolution? As for a second EU referendum this also seems to have been ruled out.

Will we get a Labour government the country needs? The signs do not look good.

Episode One of my new series of podcasts is out now.

Episode One of my new series of podcasts “The Absolute Truth” is available now.
The series of eight episodes is called “Not 42, The Real Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything.”

Watch the trailer here:

Or listen now here

In Douglas Adam’s wickedly funny book, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. The answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything is… 42. In this series of podcasts, we are going to discover the real meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything.

The podcasts will take you on a fascinating (It is to me!) journey that uses evidence, reason and science to find the best possible explanation for what is true. It might take you to places you don’t want to go, and where, maybe, I don’t want to go. But it always follows the evidence, and could perhaps take us towards a new enlightenment, where we discover that, in contemporary society, we have fundamentally misunderstood what it is to be human. But you the listener can be the judge of that.

But before we can set off on our journey, we need to know what is true. How can we find Truth, and how would we know it if we found it? Episode One will consider that question. Because we all know something must exist – we wouldn’t be here otherwise, and there are some things we can say about it: it has a description. I’ve called that description the Omnitruth: the true and complete explanation of everything that exists, has existed and ever will exist. But how do we know what it is? Answer…: we don’t! All we can say about it is that there are some general facts about it that are indisputable, such as that the Omnitruth is complex, organised and the part of the universe where I am is dynamic. For reasons that are a bit involved for this blog entry, we know that we can’t really know anything, at least with absolute certainty than the, very general, comments I’ve already made. But if we make certain assumptions, such as the world around us is real and not some kind of dream or hallucination, then we can still know some things are true. The claim I’m making here, is that if we use evidence, reason and science, a method I’m calling “Best Guess Reasoning” we will find the most likely explanation for what is true.

In the rest of the podcasts, we will use best guess reasoning to the most likely truths, about what matters in the universe, what is wonderful – and dangerous – about being human, and what the future of our species might look like.

All the episodes that are currently live are available on the podcast page of my website at www.peterdfisher.com/podcasts, and also all the most popular platforms, links can be found on the podcast website at https://podcast.peterdfisher.com

Passionate about the “Compassion Culture”?

Is there a rise in sloppy sentimentalism, and a “compassion culture”, growing in this country? The former editor of The Telegraph and the Evening Standard, seventy-something historian, Sir Max Hastings, seems to think so. He spoke said about the pandemic recently on the BBC Radio 4 “World at One” programme:

“We mustn’t, as the older folks, worry about the consequence, the ideas, of our getting ill or even dying for our own sakes because we have had so much that we have no grounds to complain. What we must worry about is not becoming a dead weight on the NHS. Where compassion culture has taken hold. We don’t face the fact that all these stupendous sums of spending that are coming up, they’ve got to be paid for by somebody. And I for one, when I pop my clogs, I hate the idea that my children, my grandchildren are going to be the ones who pay.”

In one sense this might be thought of as a selfless, perhaps even noble, sentiment. I have no way of knowing what his children and grandchildren think of him making this statement, one would hope he has. Would his children be ready to sacrifice a few more years with their loved one in exchange for a few pounds off their future tax bills, I wonder? 

It would be easy at this point to dismiss Hastings as an insensitive, compassionless individual who has somehow failed to connect with his emotions, or at least those of his family. But, it seems this is not so. After the Death of Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh he appeared on “Any Questions”, another BBC Radio 4 programme, here is part of what he said:

 “We took the Queen and Prince Philip for granted.

The dreadful loneliness that must afflict the Queen, because to be royal, it is almost impossible, you can’t really have friends. Yes you can have people with whom you spend time, but one of the things about being royal is that royals almost without exception feel that nobody else could possibly share their experience, their lives, and they’ve nobody to talk to, they’ve nobody to confide in, but of course the Queen has councillors and the Queen has friends of whom she spends time with […] all our thoughts go out to the Queen, but who has she got to talk to now about her unique predicament?  And Prince Philip was the only person with whom she could discuss the situation. And that poor woman, to whom we owe so much, her loneliness in this circumstance and it is something that’s one of many, many reasons that most of us, thank goodness, that we are lucky enough not to be royal is because the dreadful loneliness of being royal in general and especially of being the Queen. […] by gosh, I will be praying for the Queen’s welfare more fervently than I have for years.”

It would be hard to disagree with him in his heartfelt and quite moving response to, “that poor woman”, the Queen’s predicament. I am going to resist the temptation to make a cheap jibe about hypocrisy, because this raises a fascinating question about feelings. Which feelings should we value and which not?

Should we empathise more with a high-status individual whom, because of their media prominence, we feel we know rather than some ordinary anonymous person who we’ve never heard of? Hastings might point to the Queen’s commitment to her role of monarch, her quiet dignity and the public service to which she has dedicated her life. But many other people might well have admirable qualities having dedicated their lives to their respective trade or profession, and to their families. While the Queen might certainly suffer dreadful loneliness so will tens of thousands of people bereaved by the pandemic who are now forced to live on their own. Isn’t this the very time that we should be promoting a “compassion culture”?

Should there really be a hierarchy of feeling? Is the compassion we feel for a fluffy puppy of a lower “status” than the feelings we have for our most exalted leaders? Feelings are just feelings aren’t they? Perhaps people like Hastings miss the point when they denigrate the so called “compassion culture”. Here it seems they are revealing an interesting aspect of human nature. We don’t just have feelings about real people, whether they are still living or not, we also have feelings about feelings themselves. Perhaps Hastings and those who share his views should realise that feelings about other people’s feelings should count for less than feelings for real actual beings, whether they are victims of the pandemic, their loved ones, or other people in distress for whatever reason.

This is why we must value the rights and feelings of all human beings, indeed those of all other sentient beings. To lose contact with our compassion is a step towards the failure of empathy that has characterised all the human generated evils, like war and genocide, that have so profoundly destroyed life and soured the quality of life of millions around the world. Perhaps this is something on which the historian in Hastings should reflect.

This is a RACIST post

From the evolutionary/Humanist perspective of what it means to be a human being – the perspective I support – people belong to just one species of sentient animal. Differences between beings that share the capacity for love, empathy, pain, humour, distress and compassion are much less important than what divides them. And the evidence is strong that our closest evolutionary cousins, like the great apes, experience these feelings in the same way we do. Indeed, with the possible exception of guilt, they experience all the emotions that used to be thought of as uniquely human. Racial difference within one species is therefore negligible, insignificant and unworthy of comment. Naïve as it may seem to say it: even to say that someone is black, or that someone is white, is in this view racist, because race, to the extent it exists at all, is irrelevant. So to be clear, in this view, every reference to black or white is racist.

It is in this context that I am saying that the post you are reading is racist because the case I want to argue demands that I falsely have to accept that there are different kinds of human being: and that there is such a thing as black, white or mixed race.

Unfortunately, it seems, our species is infected with a genetic curse that predisposes us to define ourselves as one tribe or another, and flags of perceived racial characteristics are often waved enthusiastically by those who inappropriately express these genetic influences more strongly than others. And it is for this reason that the “black lives matter” campaign is necessary, even though, in the terms of the case I’m making here the very fact that they are claiming there is a difference between black and white people is itself racist. But in the world in which we live, this kind of racism is necessary and benign.

Watching last week’s interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, I was utterly shocked and appalled by the racism in the programme; racism that had nothing to do with the benign racism I have just considered. Here are a few examples:

“BBC’s Danny Baker on comparing royal baby Archie to a chimp”

“Petitioners Demand that “Monkey Faced **** Whore” Meghan Markle Not be Given a Royal Title”

“rich and exotic DNA. Miss Markle’s mother is a dreadlocked African-American lady from the wrong side of the trac ks…”

“BBC comedy portrays Meghan Markle as ‘trailer trash’ American who threatens to knife Kate Middleton”

‘Meghan’s seed will taint our Royal Family’

Recognise them? They were not the words of members of the royal family, of course, but instead were headlines reprinted on the programme from the British tabloids. It is, wise, of course to be cautious about drawing conclusions from headlines without reading the articles attached to them, and for reasons which I have elaborated in earlier posts on this blog, I do not read newspapers. However, the tone of the newspaper articles seems to be clear enough. Why are we not disgusted and ashamed of the people who write and promote such appalling statements. Perhaps the answer is that people start to buy newspapers when they are young, and before they develop critical acumen, and then soon become inured to think that the cruelty the editors espouse is acceptable.

The fact that Archie’s skin colour seems to have been discussed within the Royal Family sounds like it was insensitive and inappropriate, but without knowing the context it is hard to judge quite what was meant and just how egregious an offence it was. Yet it was this event, rather than the cruel and monstrous tabloid headlines, that get all the attention.

Any tabloid editor knows, as do all writers, that conflict sells. If you can set a goody against a baddy, so much the better. So who to choose… Hmm! We have the white, home-grown, future queen, Kate, or the American, mixed-race, divorcee Meghan? The choice for the media seems obvious. Unfortunately for them, when a minor quibble about flower-girl dresses between leaves the wrong duchess in tears, what should they do? The press must have known that it was Kate that made Meghan cry, but it would have been so easy to swap names, wouldn’t it? I mean it wouldn’t really matter: in the editor’s minds they were only women after all. And as members of the Royal Family, they were rich and privileged and other, not real people with real feelings and the very real capacity for distress and the possibility for damage to their mental health. In fact would it be right to think that this brand of journalists view members of the Royal Family in the way we used to think of chimpanzees?

Playing the race card, as the press seems to do, is not just irresponsible. In a world where racism kills people, it is downright dangerous. I can’t wait to hear what Diana will say…! Oh, wait a minute, she’s dead isn’t she? Ermm, just remind me, how did she die again?

Why is it that the unelected, unrepresentative bigots that run the British press are able to get away with it? This is the easiest question of all to answer: the politicians, and the Royal establishment are frightened of them. The government had the chance to put proper regulation in place by approving the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry, that was started after the phone hacking scandal but they chose to abandon it. And it is obvious that other, more respectable, branches of the media are not going to turn on their own, so editors can act with impunity, and the antiquated, misogynistic, white British establishment imperialists have won again – as they were always going to do.

So here I am waiting with baited breath for the latest developments in the Meghan/Harry saga. Sorry but I’ll have to stop here: I need to go out and buy a newspaper to find out what happens next!

The Hour has come! Where’s the Man?

“Cometh the hour cometh the man.”

I’m not much given to quoting from the bible, it is prone to contradicting itself, and, in any case, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to suppose that just because some emergency arises there is any mechanism by which “the man” should automatically, miraculously and serendipitously appear. Today, with the arrival of a deadly pandemic that has infected the entire inhabited world “the Hour” is definitely here, so where’s “the Man”? Is “the Man” Boris Johnson?

If you, as a non-aviation specialist, get on a plane, go up to the cockpit and tell the pilot to “pull that lever”, “press that button” and  “flip that switch”, the likelihood is that you and everyone else on the plane will crash and burn. We all have to defer to specialists when we do not have the expertise ourselves, but during the coronavirus crisis, it seems that Johnson’s hands were pulling the levers. Political correspondent Mikey Smith on the Daily Mirror website claims that Johnson and his ministers:

“…were told in July that the worst case was avoidable – if their advice was followed. They urged ministers not to rush to reopen schools and universities, not to plan a relaxation over Christmas and to keep people working from home wherever possible. But in each case, Mr Johnson’s government ignored the advice – and in each case had to perform u-turns as transmission rates rose.”

What was driving this policy of science denial? In the sitcom, Only Fools and horses, Derek Trotter’s misplaced “This time next year we’ll be millionaires” optimism is a source of one of the series most effective comic tropes. Unfortunately, Boris Johnson’s famous “Dell Boy” optimism is rather less funny, when the figures show that this country has the worst death rate in Europe, and one of the worst in the entire world. Johnson’s lever pulling may well have cost the lives of tens of thousands of British people.

It may, however, be too simplistic to claim that that the failure is down to the individual peccadillos of one person. It could be argued that there is a more sinister underlying mentality infecting the cabal of failure that is currently running our country. Johnson might well have been restrained by the good and sensible advice of more restrained and wiser colleagues. He wasn’t, so why not?

The political system in this country is founded on the concept of winners and losers. The fact that this government sees itself as the winners of the last election, in their minds, gives them complete entitlement. They have the right to fly the plane and to hell with anyone who tries to tell them which way to go. And the “right” direction for them is set out in Conservative Party ideology that favours free market economics, individual freedom and most of all serving the god of the economy.

Politics is not a game. The primary role of political parties ought to be to serve the country, not to win the political equivalent of the FA Cup, especially when we are presented with a corrupt political system that, in the last election, gave the winning party a grotesquely large majority when it only won 47% of the vote. To put this another way, most people in the country did not vote for the Tories but ended up with them in charge anyway. One can only hope that the public will finally see sense, and agree to get rid of competitive elitism and reform a voting system that is geared towards political medal winning instead of what is best for the county.

Totalitarianism by Stealth?

Some of the most disturbing words I’ve heard for a long time came from the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood. In a recent interview on BBC Newsnight she said: “You know what the playbook for an impending dictatorship is, and when the boxes start getting checked off you get quite nervous”. Atwood was talking about the situation in the United States, but she could just as easily have been speaking about the United Kingdom.

Right-wing media figures are fond of saying that democracy is impossible without a free press. I have no argument with this. Without independent investigative journalism, government cannot be held accountable, and corruption, mismanagement and government misinformation could run without check. This gives the media enormous power, but with power comes responsibility. That responsibility requires that the public are fully and properly informed about the issues, because if the electorate are influenced in one direction or another then democracy becomes skewed, and a skewed democracy is no democracy at all. Of course, advocates of press freedom will say that the British people are not stupid and they are clever enough to see through the unarguable bias in parts of the media, especially that in the print media. The question of why they should bother pushing their agenda, is rather telling: if it has no effect why do they bother?

During the migrant crisis the Daily Mail, then edited by Paul Dacre ran front-page headline after headline about how the crisis was getting worse and worse. I am not in a position to know whether this was true, but if it wasn’t, the media panic created was bound to make a non-crisis into a real one, influencing both public opinion and, potentially, government policy. Without people like Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, it seems unlikely that the Europe Question which opinion polls showed was effectively a non-issue to most voters was elevated to a national crisis demanding the nuclear option of Brexit. The point here is that the only interface people have with reality is the media. It is not about whether the British public is stupid, there is simply no other way, apart from a deeply unreliably social media, for them to know what is going on in the world.

I should put up my hand here and make it clear that I do not read national newspapers for reasons which by now will be clear. While there are newspapers that have a left-wing leaning like “The Guardian” there would be valid arguments about pots and kettles being called black if I was to subscribe to this newspaper. I will continue to boycott all newspapers until they get their acts in order.

We all need to know what is happening in the world, and for me the least biased media outlet is the BBC. While it too is subject to editorial choices of its un-elected management, at least, under its charter, and to the chagrin of Murdoch and others in his clique, are obliged to present both sides of any argument. How disturbing to hear this morning that Paul Dacre has reportedly been offered the directorship of the media regulator Ofcom, and that another right-wing enemy of balanced reporting, Lord Moore, has been proposed as Director General of The BBC.

How else should we think of this except as another of Atwood’s check-boxes: one more step along the road towards what the headline of this blog suggests is happening: Totalitarianism by Stealth.

Jeremy Corbyn and the BBC.

The BBC TV News main story on 1^st April highlighted a Sunday Times report in which it claimed that more than two thousand abusive or threatening anti-Semitic posts had been found by undercover reporters on  twenty Facebook groups supportive of Jeremy Corbyn.  These groups it was claimed had some 400,000 members.

So what proportion of the people had posted vile or hateful emails? Let us suppose that – quite conservatively – each group member made an average of five posts.  That would mean that in all the groups there would be something like two million posts.  If there were two thousand vile posts that would mean that only one post in a thousand would have been hateful or anti-Semitic, or to put it another way 0.1% of the total number of posts.

I am not a member of any of these groups and I have not seen the posts referred to. But I can imagine the appalling nature of them.  In any large group of people there are bound to be a small proportion of people with extreme views.  It seems to me that if only one in a thousand posts were hateful that the membership of the groups is in general quite restrained, balanced and sensible.  I would have expected far more unpleasant posts in such a large group of members.

It is right that people that post racist and violent material be called out and, where necessary have their membership cancelled. But given that The Labour Party did not set these groups up and were not responsible for them, what did this have to do with Corbyn, or the Labour Party?

Jeremy Corbyn may be soft on anti-Semitism and may be too weak to become leader of this country, or he may not. Either way, the BBC article has no bearing on the issue.  To have run this story in the way it was is to risk seriously biasing people’s opinions.  This story should not have been run, or if it had it should have been given lower prominence and the context should have been made clearer.