Salisbury and the spell of patriotism.

How dare they? This is our country.  No nation can allow thugs free reign to roam at will, killing our citizens at a whim.  If, as it seems, this was the Russians, who do they think they are?  We have cruise missiles; can’t we blow up the Moscow headquarters of the KGB/GRU/FSB? (Delete ridiculous acronym as appropriate.)  This was my reaction to the appalling attack in Salisbury.  I was incensed by the Litvinenko attack too.  Although I hasten to add, my instinct for retaliation was held only briefly and not in any sense seriously.  The dangers of escalation would be unthinkable:  a point that I suspect Putin well understands and trades on, to his advantage.

 

And yet my rational humanist mind tells me that countries do not exist. They are abstract entities created by minds under the spell of genetically mediated tribal instincts. We create countries because we have a biological need to belong.  I well remember the massive lump in my throat during the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations when I reflected on the fact that no other country in the world could put on such spectacular military displays.  The attachment to my country might feel strong, but people with other allegiances like the French, Russians and every other kind of people are not different in any meaningful sense, they are just ordinary folk trying to get on with their lives like me and everyone else.  People are just people.

 

It is as if human beings are under a spell worthy of the great Dumbledore himself. It is taken as a given that human beings need a sense of identity which extends beyond the only one I believe to be valid:  our identity as a member of a family of sentient beings (all humanity and all other feeling animals).  My genes were hexing me, telling me how to think, and imposing a sense of justified rage about what happened to the Skripals.  Patriotism is a strong emotion, but to be a good emotion we have to accept that what Putin is doing is s gallant expression of patriotism, that Nazi promulgation of their Fatherland cult in the 1930s and 40s was entirely right and proper, and even that ISIS’s love of their Caliphate is noble, justified and honourable.

 

For me, in an apparently empty and soulless universe, the only thing that matters is our very feeling that things matter. That is where meaning comes from.   The love of my wife and family matters.  Such feelings are fundamental to all of us.  It is the very sense of mattering that matters and rescues me, and all of us, from an empty soulless, nihilistic universe.  Because identity not only matters to us it matters profoundly, there is a real dilemma, and there is no easy answer.  So it is for all of us to find reconciliation between the bewitchment of our emotional connections and our rational understanding.  Most people don’t bother.  They let their emotions trump the obvious irrationality – and danger – of dividing human from human.

 

I won’t let my genes tell me how to think. For me, I see my patriotism as a curse.  Even if I allow myself the fleeting pleasure of seeing the flashing sabres and proud red-tunics of the guardsmen at British military parades, I understand the context and won’t let myself get carried away.  I have the magic key to patriotism’s dreadful spell book.  Our survival as a species might depend on all finding our own keys.

Where Lord Lamont gets it wrong.

Here is my response to Lord Lamont’s glorification of patriotism in his recent article in Prospect Magazine: (also posted on the Prospect website)

Lamont’s argument is intellectually impoverished. It depends on an emotional attachment to the in-group.  While it is true that human beings are tribal animals and we evolved to form ourselves into distinct entities defined by commonalities such as national, religious and cultural allegiances, it is a mistake to think that this is an reasoned intellectual argument as opposed to an emotional one. Given the devastating consequences of human division throughout human history, it is worth asking whether proper critical analysis of our evolutionary history should be urgently undertaken.  Such an analysis might well reveal the tribal instinct is anachronistic hangover behaviour.  “Noble” instincts like Patriotism are hugely powerful emotions and it might seem intuitively obvious that one should respect and value them, but because something feels good, it does not mean that it is good.    Intuitively we want to feel we belong, and this underpins patriotism, and more questionable instincts like nationalism and its decidedly negative manifestations such as discrimination and nationalistic extremism.  It is this inner emotional connection to our group which may incline people to inadvertent intellectual dishonesty.  If it is patriotic, and therefore desirable, to care about our own people, then it is hard to see why 1930s German Nationalism with its intrinsic emotional attachment to the Fatherland can in any way be distinct from what we today think of as patriotism.

If this view is the correct one, whatever its faults, the EU project, by subverting these deep and dangerous instincts into multiple identities is doing the world a great service. A point understood by its founders who were arguably better placed, in the aftermath of the Second World War, to be aware of the dreadful consequences of the dangers of nationalism.

It may seem intuitively obvious that it is right to love your country, but these are compound instincts. Sitting on top of base nationalism is an emotional spin that glorifies and ennobles it.  It is perhaps time to question the grandiose elevation of extremely dangerous instincts into something they are not, and to confront the blind commitment to misplaced emotionalism that underpins Brexit.

The Direction of British Politics

This is an excerpt from a post I’ve just made on the Prospect Magazine website:

Since the 1970s this country has been subject to a creeping, vicious right-wing radicalism. And the so called centre-ground of British politics represented by New Labour was intrinsic to this movement. Underpinning this ideology is the myth that the British National interest is paramount, and the interests of the people who actually live in the country are secondary. Fortunately, the almost daily news items about the underfunding of the National Health Service, the educational system, police and prison cutbacks, the obvious suffering of the poor and the inequality in society are enthusing a movement towards fairness and social justice, which is perfectly encapsulated by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. This new movement is under-recognised by the media and the establishment, and this is why they keep getting caught out by the electoral results. If the Labour movement stops responding to this movement, and is seen as being part of the establishment the electorate will move away from it.

Where can I buy a Quran?

That’s it! This is all too scary.  I’m off to buy a Quran and a ticket to Syria.  I’ve got some white bed sheets I can tear up and some garden canes to make my white flag.

I know the politicians are telling us that we shouldn’t be cowed, and that parliament and the British way of life are not under threat, but the fact that they are saying this tells us that we should be scared because otherwise they wouldn’t be saying it, right?

Yes, I know there are sixty five million people in Britain, and we have tanks and warships and nuclear weapons, but the Westminster Bridge killer had a knife for God’s sake: a big knife.  And he got through the gates of parliament, so we’ve all had it.

Some will think this is not the time for jokes, and they would be right.  Here is what is important:  This criminal took the lives of four innocent people, and severely damaged the lives of many more, and he did this in one of the most barbaric, brutal and cruel ways possible.  His behaviour was monstrous and unforgivable.  My heart and my best wishes go out to the victims, but to pretend that Britain or our way of life is under threat is absurd.  The threat to me or my family is tiny.  Terrorists will only frighten me in the vanishingly unlikely event that I see one coming towards me.  Sensible people know to be frightened of things that really might damage their lives like cancer, dementia, heart disease and Trump’s nuclear war (see previous post).

There have been times when Britain’s way of life has genuinely been under threat. In 1940 for instance, and the beginning of the nineteenth century when Napoleon had his designs on us, and before that in the late 16^th Century when Philip of Spain sent his Armada. But the greatest of all threats – not just to our way of life but to our very survival – was the potential nuclear annihilation during the Cold War.  Please let’s be sensible.  The idea that a few half-baked extremists are any threat to Britain is ridiculous.  To pretend that they are a threat to our country is to empower these otherwise impotent no hopers.  Maybe there will have to be minor changes to our way of life in order to protect our security, but any changes we make will be at our discretion, not theirs.  Their doomed so-called caliphate is destined for the dustbin of historical footnotes.  To make this into something it isn’t, is to fall into the trap Bush/Blair fell into when they miss described the 9/11 attack as an act of war instead of what it really was, a crime.  The result of their miscalculation was the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens.

Moorside

So far my posts have just been general commentary on current affairs, and there has not been anything to illustrate the distinctive point of view I alluded to in the introduction to my blog. This post will give a clearer insight into what I think.

I’ve just watched the BBC drama Moorside, which was a dramatized account of the real disappearance and reappearance of nine year old Shannon Mathews from her home on a council estate in Yorkshire in 2008.  Shannon was missing for twenty four days.  There was a massive, extensive and expensive search, and a huge local and national campaign to find her.  It subsequently transpired that Shannon was being held by a friend of her mother’s, and that her mother Karen knew all along where she was.

I do not know Shannon or Karen Mathews. I have not read the court transcripts and it is not appropriate for me to rush to judgement in respect of the real people involved in this case. But in this excellent drama/documentary a particular view emerged of the character of Karen Mathews, and it is this hypothetical Karen – let’s call her KM – that I’m going to discuss, because it gives an insight in the way we think about what it is to be human.

KM was portrayed as a weak, inadequate, unintelligent, immature, damaged and childlike woman. It is suggested that KM was trying to escape the relationship she had with her live-in boyfriend, whom she hated and who may or may not have been abusing her children and had intended to take her other children and go and live with Shannon’s “abductor”, but unfortunately this plan went wrong when her boyfriend failed to go to work as expected.  Terrified of him she was persuaded to phone 999 and declare Shannon missing.  Once this had happened KM felt obliged to carry on with the deception and did not have the strength of character to tell the truth and stop the hunt for Shannon.

In astronomy, stars in the sky fall on what is called the “main sequence”: where they light up, shine then die. But not all stars.  Some are different and do not follow this usual path.  It is not often understood is that there is a parallel in human beings.  Most people fall within a “normal” range of difference on the scatter graph of all possible human beings.  Some, however fall outside of the main sequence, and have behaviour that we do not usually think of as being “normal”.  Our hypothetical KM is clearly an outlier on this graph.  She is quite a long way from the main sequence.  So how did she get to be so different?  To switch metaphors:  Every time nature makes a new human being it pulls the handle of the fruit machine and the person is stuck with the line of symbols they get.  There will certainly be big jackpot winners, but also those who get the worst possible arrangement in the game of genetic chance.  (It is this genetic variation that Darwinian natural selection acts on and allows evolution to happen.)  There has to be variation in behaviour in all animal species otherwise they could not evolve and adapt their behaviour to changing environments.  We are each the product of our genes and our environment.  Someone who is weak, stupid and incapable clearly did not get like that by choice.  Some people do not mature fully and retain some childlike features as adults (there is a technical term for this in Biology: neoteny, but we don’t need to go there) and there is known to be a genetic component in intelligence.  But it would be wrong to think that genetic influence is all there is.  People are also products of their environment, but even if the primary factors that made KM what she was were environmental it is hard to see how it could be her fault that she is the kind of person she is.  She couldn’t have chosen her upbringing or environment any more than she could her genes.

So if KM had no input into the kind of person she became, she cannot reasonably be held responsible for being the kind of person she is. This makes the claims society makes about her culpability for the crime look tenuous indeed.

There was a claim in the drama that Shannon’s abduction was all a big scam to claim and split the reward for finding Shannon, but the programme was ambiguous on this point. It also claimed that the main culprits KM and the man who “looked after” Shannon were far too stupid to have planned such a sophisticated plot.  No evidence was offered for this claim except for the intuitive assumptions of police officers involved that something more sinister was going on behind the scenes.  It seems clear to me that such a claim had to be made otherwise KM was not bad, but sad.  We have to protect the myth that Britain does not imprison, and take the children away from vulnerable people merely on the basis of their vulnerability.  If any such plot happened in the real Shannon Mathews’ case then it certainly would change the dynamic of the story, but that should not concern us here.  That’s because it is my case that there is a possibility that someone very like our hypothetical KM could exist, and the real question is how society is supposed to deal with them.

In the drama, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron absurdly described the incident as being an example of “Broken Britain”. Unfortunately politicians often let their tribal genes do their thinking for them.  The Shannon Mathews incident, as it was described in the drama, had nothing to do with Britain, it was about the nature of human beings.  British people are not taught to be weak and feckless.  Any influences KM had absorbed from the British culture in which she lived had little, if anything, to do with the person she had become. KM’s problems were about human interaction and development, not about the state of the nation.

Should KM have been helped, rather than – as she ultimately was – imprisoned. It is not clear that help would have worked.  KM was not intelligent enough to understand that the only thing that might have helped her was the truth, she repeatedly changed her story, and it is not clear that she was able to let anyone close enough to her to help, and any help offered might not have been understood by her as being genuinely in her interest.  It might not be possible to help KM, and this illustrates the point that these kinds of problems are not easy to resolve.

On the other hand what purpose was there in jailing her? There are four reasons for taking away someone’s liberty: 1) An act of retribution: the offender needs to be made aware of the gravity of the crime they have been committed, and they need to feel that they have been appropriately punished.  2) Society needs to protect itself against dangerous individuals who might cause harm, and such people need to be kept away from the general population.  3) To rehabilitate offenders and 4) to send a message to society at large that “bad” behaviour has consequences.

Only the first of these would seem to apply to KM. It does not seem likely that she would have caused a continuing danger to society, and the idea that she would have come out of jail as a mature, intelligent and capable adult, or in any way improved, seems risible.  The idea that people like KM would be deterred from bad behaviour also looks, at the very least, questionable.  “Main sequence people” would certainly know the consequences, but it is not clear that people whose personalities are so simplistic and underdeveloped as KM would understand the message.  While the rule of law must apply to everyone – main sequence or outlier, if as I’ve already claimed KM is more of a victim of nature than a criminal, it is not clear that the first reason applies either.  The point is that the system must take account of the great variation in the ways of being human, and it would be wrong to lump weak outliers like KM with dangerous outliers like, say moors murderer, Ian Brady or Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper.

KM got eight years in jail, and in an act at least as horrific and monstrous as KM’s “crime” they tore her innocent children away from her and put them into care, away from their friends, schools and perhaps their siblings, probably condemning them to a lifetime of incarceration in the care system and quite possibly damaging their lives irreparably. Thus traumatising them at least as much as KM did Shannon when she left her neglected in a stranger’s house.  Here it is important to point out that I am fully capable of producing dispassionate academic writing. The language I’m using is highly emotive and some will say unprofessional, but I am writing this way intentionally.  If we fail to emote we fail to engage with reality of the damage that is likely to have occurred to Shannon and KM’s other children by their forced removal from a parent who seems to have loved them (KM showed great distress when her children were taken from her) even if it is doubtful that she had the necessary human faculties to put their interests first.  The act of tearing any child who is over about six months of age, and has the capacity of love for its parent, out of its family is always an act of evil.  The only question is whether there is a greater evil in leaving the child where it is.

Society had to be seen to punish the real Karen Mathews. She had been vilified by the press and portrayed as being pure evil, so they had no choice.  The authorities, and the local community, stamped their primate feet, beat their gorilla chest and pointed an accusative orang-utan finger at her.  Should we think more deeply about the culpability of people who, through no fault of their own, might be weak and inadequate? Or is this just another instance of society’s gross discrimination against people who turn out to be different?  The BBC is to be applauded for giving “Main Sequence” people the chance to consider the question.

Is it just me?

Is it just me that is ashamed of being British? What happened to our compassion, tolerance and respect for others?  When the hell did we start thinking that we should close our country to desperate refugees, and turn our backs on drowning kids?  After Brexit the number of hate crimes has soared.  Or is it that Britain has always been a nasty, unpleasant nation and I just hadn’t noticed?

There is a simple question that was at the heart of the Brexit debate and it was this:

Is it better to bring nations together or to divide them?  

What else was there to say?

After the Second World War politicians, who all had direct experience of war, decided that it would be better for Europe to be brought together in closer economic and political ties.  What is it with us now that we think that we are so clever that we can disregard all that wisdom and experience?  Even the briefest look at our history shows us that we have been at war with one country or other in Europe throughout during most of the last thousand years.  Very few of us can remember the war now.  It is just a shame we lack the imagination to realise just how bad things could get.  We all have bloody families for God’s sake.   Maybe we don’t even care about them now.

I have become disgusted at what my country has become.  Just me then?

(Readers with overdeveloped tribal instincts may send their death threats to  Peter D Fisher at my usual email address.)

The fitness for office equation.

If:

Donald J. Trump = The President of the United States.

Then:

Jeremy Clarkson = The Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Newsnight interview revisited.

My last post was – perhaps forgivably – emotional in tone. Since writing it, I’ve been thinking about the  Newsnight interview.  As someone who wants to promote scientific rationalism, I feel the need to provide a more considered response.  Is the interview with Tony Schwartz important?  I think it is.  I think we can take it that he has had an opportunity of observing Donald Trump while working closely with him, and this can effectively give us an inner eye to the way Trump thinks and operates.

There are two questions here. First, is what Schwartz said reliable?  And if it is, to what extent does it matter?

Can we take everything Schwartz says at face value? In a word, no.  Having written Trump’s autobiography he has done well out of Trump, and therefore his testimony cannot be sour grapes, but he could have a political agenda, he said he was supporting Clinton, and we do not know whether he has chosen this path because might have always have been Democrat, or because his experiences of working with Trump have led to him opposing him.

We need to question what he is saying and see whether it fits with what we already understand from interviews we know Trump has given. So what does Schwartz say?  Some of his claims are that Trump:

• has an incredibly short attention span.
• gets irritated with questions.
• is a bully.
• regards truth as secondary to what he believes.
• has no conscience and he is a classic sociopath.
• lacks normal social graces.

The idea that he has a short attention span rings true. When he was asked about his alleged sexual misconduct during the Presidential debate he began to answer, then said he was going to crush ISIS.  As if he was unable to keep his mind on the question he was being asked.

He certainly gets irritated with questions. “Such a nasty woman”.  The way he hovered behind Hillary Clinton during the debates strongly suggests a bullying nature.  Trump is on record as having claimed Obama was not born in the US, and that global warming is a hoax (Global warming is real – we have thermometers we can tell).  This suggests that he is more interested in what he believes to be true, than what the evidence says, again this seems to lend credence to what Schwartz is saying.  So I think provisionally at least we can take cognisance of what he is saying.

So does it matter? I have a deep personal antipathy towards bullying under any circumstances, but some would argue that if Trump, in his position as President, was to bully his staff, for example, that would not matter so much, if in the process of doing so he was achieving what millions of voters had asked him to do.  Bullying however relies on the powerlessness of its victims.  If Trump tries to bully world leaders it might rebound on him in a way he, and the world, might not expect.  If he fails in the charm department and does not engage in appropriate social graces this might not be a problem except that it is part of the President’s role to build relationships with other leaders.  One can only hope that world leaders dealing with him will use professionalism and restraint where necessary.

His failure to respect truth is, for me, a much greater problem. Any nutcase can believe that: the Americans faked the moon landings, the universe was created in six days about six thousand years ago, the world is flat, and heavy things fall upwards.  (Ok not even nutcases believe that a dropped coin will fall up and land on the moon because this would defy the laws of physics but so does the flat earth myth, the creationism nonsense and the global-warming-is-a-hoax hoax, and they are all just as ridiculous.)  There is no problem about a nutcase believing what they want, unless the nutcase gets a job as the most powerful person on earth.  If US policy gets its “truth” from dodgy extreme-right websites, and redneck shock-jocks we all need to be deeply worried.

The most worrying problem though is Trump’s alleged sociopathy. There is another word for sociopathy, it is psychopathy, and it is far more common than people think. As I understand the situation, sociopathy means that people with the condition have an inability to empathise with other people.  Sufferers are self-absorbed and do not understand the feelings of others.  Neurologically it is represented by missing, damaged or undeveloped nerve pathways in the brain.  Contrary to what many people might think.  Very, very few psychopaths are serial killers.  According to what I’ve read, a serial killer might rationalise the fact that what they’ve done was wrong, and will tell you that it was wrong.  The problem is that they won’t feel that it was wrong.  I recently heard about a study someone has done about sociopathy in industry, and as I remember, it seems that the condition is much more common in high-flying executives, than in the general population.  Such people have no conscience about pushing their way to the top.  One of the interesting conclusions of the study was that when they measured the effectiveness of sociopaths as managers they found that they were far less efficient at their jobs than their peers without the condition.  I am not a psychiatrist nor, as far as I’m aware is Schwartz.  This blog is dedicated to a scientific understanding of the world.  Trump has not been diagnosed with sociopathy and we are not in a position to know whether he has, or hasn’t got the condition but a worry obviously remains.

In a meeting about defence strategy, Trump was alleged to repeatedly ask why, if we have nuclear weapons, we don’t use them. If he is a sociopath he might very well not know why we shouldn’t.

Watch this and get worried… very worried.

Here is a BBC Newsnight interview with the guy who wrote Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Deal.

Trump, from the other side.

I might sound a bit smug here, but from a British perspective, it would be easy to look down on the Trump phenomenon, and say it couldn’t happen here. The British, I suspect, would be unlikely to be impressed by a fake-tanned, gleamy toothed, supermodel-on-arm celebrity as potential leader.  A British candidate styled that way would not get anywhere.  But then maybe there would be a way!  Any candidate for the British premiership who happened to be, say, a sociopathic, narcissistic oddball could easily put on a politically correct turn of phrase and a sober suit.  It is not often that we get to know who our leaders really are ­- at least not until it is too late.  At least the American electorate know what they are getting.

It just shows the difference between the two cultures when an electoral candidate who claims that he is too smart to pay tax is still in the running. Brits get a bit uppity about coffee shops like Starbucks using corporate wizardry to avoid paying UK taxes, while local coffee shops in the same street have to pay theirs.  Maybe it is the famed British sense of fair play, but a boast like Trump’s in the UK would mean automatic electoral defeat.  And that is without going anywhere near the alleged sexual misbehaviour.

And what is so wrong with Hillary? From this side of the pond, it is hard to see what all the fuss is about.  OK, she doesn’t come over as being very warm, cuddly and media friendly, and she was a bit incautious about which email server she used, but that sounds like a bit of a misdemeanour, in the way that shoving your hand up women’s dresses isn’t.

Whatever happens on November 8^th America will have made history.  They will either have the first woman president, or the first orange one.