Sleeping while London’s Burning
This piece of street art is called London’s Burning and put up by the End of the Line. It is part of the trend or fad if you will --- street art that takes up an entire wall. The sleeper was optional.
This commentary was published recently on the Guardian.
The Guardian: The new authoritarianism
More and more of us are willing to trade freedom for wealth or security
John Kampfner
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday July 1, 2008
Why is it that a growing number of highly educated and well-travelled people are willing to hand over several of their freedoms in return for prosperity or security? This question has been exercising me for months as I work on a book about what I call the "pact".
The model for this is Singapore, where repression is highly selective. It is confined to those who take a conscious decision openly to challenge the authorities. If you do not, you enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as you wish, and – perhaps most important – to make money. Under Lee Kuan Yew, this city-state built on a swamp has flourished economically.
I was born in Singapore and have over the years been fascinated by my Chinese Singaporean friends. Doctors, financiers and lawyers, they have studied in London, Oxford, Harvard and Sydney. They have travelled across all continents; they are well versed in international politics, but are perfectly content with the situation back home. I used to reassure myself with the old certainty that this model was not applicable to larger, more diverse states. I now believe this to be incorrect.
Provincial governments in China send their brightest officials to Singapore to learn the secrets of its "success". For Russian politicians it too provides a useful model. These countries, and others in Asia and the Middle East are proving that the free markets does not require a free society in which to thrive, and that in any battle between politics and economics, it is the latter that will win out.
It is too easy to believe that this debate does not apply to us. Across western Europe, the US and in other so-called democracies, liberty is similarly losing out to both the post-9/11 security agenda and the power of global finance. Different countries hand over different freedoms; in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi (who makes no secret of his admiration for Vladimir Putin), brazenly attacks the judiciary, having effectively censored the broadcast media.
In Britain, we draw comfort from what we believe to be a robust public realm, with strong freedom of speech (although our journalists are far better at shouting than at digging out information). And yet, as David Davis so theatrically has reminded us, we are sleepwalking into a level of state surveillance that will not be reversed.
Many countries, including our own, are entering into new pacts with their rulers. Resurgent autocrats draw strength from the many weaknesses of western leaderships, not just their mistakes in foreign policy, but their failure to rejuvenate their own political systems, or to deal with a business culture that had lost touch with the needs of society.
It was Oswald Spengler who at the turn of the last century predicted that "the masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them".
A modern form of authoritarianism, quite distinct from Soviet Communism, Maoism or Fascism, is being born. It is providing a modicum of a good life, and a quiet life, the ultimate anaesthetic for the brain.
What’s even more fascinating are the comments that came with this story. It is a sad reflection on British society (can I even make that sort of assertion when this article appeared online and anyone in the world can post comments?) that there are more comments to a guardian story about rumours of Cristiano Ronaldo’s departure to Madrid than to a thought-provoking article like this. But the comments make up for their lack of quantity with some good insights. I reproduce just one of these comments :-
Jul 02 08, 01:07pm (about 19 hours ago)
haliborange wrote:
A good article (if a little short) but I think it's truer to say that people are happy to give up other people's freedoms, and not necessarily for prosperity or security. Nobody wants to give up their own freedoms but other people's are fair game.
Absolutely spot on. The insidious element in what's happening is that the potential loss of freedom resulting from authoritarian measures is always presented as something that happens to other people.
Over on Guy Herbert's thread I argue (at length... sorry) that New Labour can best be understood as a post-millenial government. Not post-modern, post-ideology, but post-millenial. The best way to understand them is not in political terms, but in terms of Christian eschatology (which was taken over by the revolutionary Left). The Last Judgment has already happened, time and progress have ceased.
This is why the threat of loss of liberty is always only a threat to "someone else". Because evil, in this post-1997 Labour heaven, is always somewhere, someone else. Good and Evil have been revived, as terms that everyone just unnerstans instinctively. And only the Bad people will have their liberty curtailed or removed.
Very interesting comments, kije - I don't fully understand the concept of "negative liberty", but I think you're getting at a similar point, which I'm trying to explain in theological terms. Talking of the death of God and his revival in technological form, nice Nietzsche quote weatherprophet!
Kampfner's account of Singapore is fascinating, and exactly to the point. Because, we're told, you'll only be in trouble from the Government if you're "bad". Choose not to be "bad" - geld yourself - and you'll be fine. The book sounds well worth waiting for.
I wonder whether liberty hasn't always been wrung out of the powers that be by those who have "nothing to lose" - and whether having nothing to lose has been subsumed, in the Government discourse, into notions of suicide-bombers and criminals. This would mean that the Good are constituted as those who have something to lose; consequently, there is no way to have nothing lose, and fight for liberty, without being Bad = criminal, terrorist.
I think that in most countries in the world, whether Western liberal democracies or so-called authoritarian states like Singapore, there is just that dulling of the mind, the anaesthetic for the brain that Kampfner writes about, that is slowly taking over the masses. In Britain, more journalistic inches are devoted to whether Amy Winehouse will turn up for Glastonbury than on David Davies forcing a by-election to protest against the extension of detention limits. Or the pages set aside for the McCann baby disappearance in Portugal and subsequent investigation, while everyday there are stabbings in places such as Peckham.
If I could make a gross generalisation, the British system is one where the people regard politicians as stupid and not to be trusted, and there is some semblance of a political system that puts power to the people on the assumption that people are smart and can decide on their own. Hence, you have projects such as rail expansion that take years because the people have the power. But this assumption is false because most people are not as smart as they think they are. And the system is not so slanted towards the people as they think --- why else would Britain have gone to war in Iraq when millions were opposed to it?
On the other hand, the Singapore system is based on a smarter government presiding over not so smart people (why else would we have pre-qualifying criteria for the President?). And this is a system that has delivered what it says on the tin :- economic growth. The challenge comes when we enter what I would call scaleable growth (to borrow a term from Nassim Taleb). Where a small group of people earn astronomical sums for the same amount of effort as others (and in most cases are just plain lucky) and the people ask what they are getting out of all this economic growth. It is almost inevitable because the finance industry is scaleable, whereas most of the other professions such as medicine or industries such as manufacturing are not.
It is one of the tragedies of the human existence that most of us are cursed with the bias that we are only happy is we move up relative to others, even if we have moved up in an absolute sense over time. Hence it becomes more and more difficult to “keep the people happy”.
Thursday, 03 July 2008
