A vote for the Liberal Democrats?

As what many would term a ‘leftist’ (a sort of liberal anarcho-Marxist to be precise) I’ve usually voted Labour, but the Greens are my party of choice. However, the Green party is skewered by the electoral system. What about the Liberal Democrats? Although they have received my vote in the past, I doubted they ever would again. But politics changes rapidly and I wouldn’t use the past, even the recent past, as too much of a guide either to present choices or to the future. We’re currently in the greatest crisis for nearly a century and anything can happen: Brexit and Trump make everything unpredictable. The Liberal Democrats currently seem to be a potentially far more viable political force than Labour. 

Labour are finished, for the foreseeable future at least. They’re fundamentally confused in the Brexit debate (the issue that is likely to dominate politics for a long time to come), and they are unable to cope with the sort of social, cultural and demographic changes that are occurring. Their demise in Scotland foreshadows what is likely to be their demise throughout many formerly ‘traditional’ Labour areas in England and Wales. Beset by endless internal turmoil and lacking a coherent vision of how to meet the current challenges, they will fail to capture the essential centre ground.

The centre ground is this: it’s that social and cultural area inhabited by those who are outward-looking, progressive, tolerant and liberal. It’s the area that stands most firmly within the tradition of the Enlightenment. Around the centre ground is the unholy alliance of the inward-looking, reactionary, intolerant and illiberal mob and a self-serving portion of the wealthy. Trump’s presidency perfectly captures this alliance: a cabinet of millionaires elected in large part on the back of an angry, narrow-minded, poorly educated, white, male precariat. It’s a fundamental divide between the centre and the illiberal (and unenlightened) perimeter that won’t be solved for a generation—we’ll probably have to wait for today’s young generation to sort out the mess. Among the few hopeful signs in the current situation is the energy, humour and youthfulness of the protests against Trump and Brexit. That needs to be retained and nurtured, for it will be the basis for creative solutions and a new politics in the future. 

Meanwhile there’s going to be ongoing cultural war, social instability, and furious battles (the current battle between Trump and the US constitution is a taste of what’s to come; similarly the tabloid and populist response to the legal case over Article 50). Actual war is not inconceivable: authoritarian and populist regimes have often resorted to war to bolster their credibility, legitimacy and support. The priority (and about the best those of us who are progressive can hope for) is to keep alive the tradition of liberalism, tolerance and rationalism, and to ensure that there is something to leave behind to the next generation.

As for party politics: I suspect there will be a seismic shift to reflect the new realities of our times. The Liberal Democrats are best placed as a focal point for the centre ground. If they can overcome their poor electoral shape, and build a broader centre-left support, then they’ll have a chance of being a major factor. When it comes to voting, I’m all for whoever can most advance the liberal, progressive agenda. The Liberal Democrats are currently the best bet. I’d love to think that the Greens may be a factor too.

The Tories appear well placed. But it’s an illusion. Brexit causes them as many problems as it does Labour. (Only the Liberal Democrats and Greens have a coherent and relatively united position on Brexit.) Theresa May is threatened on the right and left, and I can’t see any way that she’ll be able to reconcile all the competing views in her party once negotiations begin. So far her strategy has been to throw a few bones for the right to chew on in order to keep them quiet. But in the long run, she knows that either the hard right are going to be disappointed, or, if they are not, everyone else will be disappointed. Her position could collapse quite rapidly. 

Brexit is a nightmare, and my guess is that it will rip apart party politics as we know it over the next few years. It’s not the same political game that it was even just two or three years ago. In this new game, the Liberal Democrats are likely to play a key role.

Donald Trump and locker-room banter

I reckon this portrait comes close...

Given that Donald Trump has tiny hands, it is possible that most women would be unaware if he had tried his pussy-grabbing romantic technique on them. One suspects that Trump has persistently been bothered by under-endowment. How else to explain Trump Tower, or his steady stream of misogynistic ranting? Does a man secure in himself and his attributes stay up through the night to launch a sexist Twitter assault on a woman who dared to criticize him? We may still look forward to the day when, in a furious insomnia, he publishes a litany of tweets full of sexual aggression in response to a minor criticism from Angela Merkel or Theresa May.

Give the poor man some laxatives...

On the other hand, maybe he should be cut some slack. Bullies are usually pitiful once one sees beneath the surface aggression. As well as the lack of man-size hands, he’s evidently cursed with a limited intellect, he would seem to be afflicted by narcissistic paranoia, he’s chubby, he invariably looks constipated (or maybe that’s just him smiling), his hair is one of God’s better jokes, and he has a personality more suited to the violent sex offenders’ wing of a prison than to normal society. Not that I like to dwell on this too much, but one imagines he makes for a revoltingly grunty, gassy, sweaty, thoughtless and fumbling sexual partner. So it is perhaps no wonder that Trump has an enthusiasm for hatred, violence and sexual assault, given his countless intellectual, emotional, physical and pyschological shortcomings.

...maybe it's just him smiling...

But really I’m just bantering here. And banter, or ‘locker-room talk’ as our American friends call it, has been the standard defence of Trump’s comments. Nigel Farage, an experienced apologist for most things reprehensible (notably racism and sexism), has excused Trump’s pussy-grabbing boasts on those grounds. Because, it is thought by some, these things are obviously funny, and it would be political correctness gone mad if we weren’t able to excuse men a few laughs about rape and sexual assault. After all, how else can women be kept in their rightfully subordinate place other than by creating a rapey culture of sexual objectification and threatened sexual aggression? As the United States is about to do the unthinkable and elect a woman to the highest political office in the land, for many simple-minded men, and even some simpler-minded women, it makes sense to wheel out a caveman wielding a giant club (notwithstanding the tiny hands) to put all women back in their place.

There is no doubt that many men, unfortunately, seem to think misogyny is acceptable. A wave of laddish culture, complete with rape jokes and the sexually objectifying banter, has, for example, infected many university campuses. Universities are actively trying to confront the problem, for example by providing classes that explain the notion of consent to men, thereby undermining the sophisticated semantic and pyschological research of the aptly-named Robin Thicke, the thesis of which is that a woman’s ‘no’ is invariably a subtle form of code for ‘yes’.

I am all for this re-education of men inclined towards locker-room banter. But I suggest, as a more persuasive means of enlightening the Trumps of this world, Malcolm Tucker’s carrot-and-stick approach be used: ‘you take the carrot and you stick it up his fucking arse, followed by the stick, followed by an even bigger, rougher carrot’. But, hey, I’m just bantering, I’m not really suggesting that Trump should be buggered with a couple of carrots and a stick.

...no, the laxatives are working at last.

Still, we ought to do something about the imbecilic teenagers and young men who think joking about (and possibly even committing) sexual assault is okay, who respond to criticism with poorly-spelled Twitter tirades of abuse against women, who threaten violence to all and sundry, who are hyper-sensitive to jokes made at their expense, who have little understanding of the world but are prepared to announce all sorts of solutions to global problems (usually involving violence), who are inclined to tantrums, rudeness and aggression, who like to bully and lie and exaggerate and boast. Their attitudes contribute to the normalization of rape, violence and aggression. But they are still just kids, and so the more traditional carrot-and-stick approach would be more appropriate than the Malcolm Tucker variant.

Trump, on the other hand, is in his seventies (and was in his sixties when he made the locker-room remarks). There is still a chance that the next president of the United States will be an out-of-control, emotionally immature, psychologically insecure, intellectually moronic teenager frustratingly trapped inside the flabby, wrinkly body of an old man. He’s well beyond the point where suggesting that he grow up is going to make any difference. Maybe a couple of carrots and a stick are required after all.

The charmlessness of Utopia: Channel Four's Naked Attraction

Once, on a first date, I had an interesting exchange along the following lines: my date mentioned in passing a spreadsheet that she was using to track and rate her dates. I assumed she was joking, and said as much. But no, she insisted, she was being serious: she had an entire spreadsheet on which she calculated according to various categories how attractive a man was. I laughed. ‘Why are you laughing?’ Ms. Spreadsheet asked. ‘Because that’s not how attraction works’, I replied, ‘it’s not something that can be reduced to numbers. It’s not a science that can measure things; it’s a mystery, like the way the best poetry or the best art is a mystery.’ But she responded by telling me (a) that I was wrong, attraction is a science, no more, no less, and (b) that I was scoring quite well according to her Excel calculations. Ms. Spreadsheet was an enjoyable date.

Naked Attraction, Channel 4’s new dating show, purports to take this scientific approach to dating and reduce it right down to its basic, logical extreme; spreadsheets aren’t involved, but if they were they would contain categories such as ‘legs’, ‘penis’, ‘vagina’, ‘bottom’, ‘breasts’ and ‘face’. By dissecting humans down to their constituent and naked physical parts, it suggests that we can get closer to finding the real basis of attraction. The programme is rooted in two ideas: first, that attraction is a (literally) nakedly physical matter; second, that there is a core person or self beneath all the clothing, jewellery, small talk and movement we are socially obliged to display, that these are just so many ways of concealing who we essentially are. Both these ideas are fundamentally wrong.

The concept of the show is remarkably simple: six naked participants are gradually revealed before one clothed participant; the latter whittles the six down to two based on their physical attractiveness before joining the remaining two in full nudity and selecting which of the two to go on a date with. It sounds dull; in reality it is duller than it sounds. When the most exciting moments consist of brief bits of rubbish pop science (‘some scientists think that men with symmetrical faces have healthier sperm’—that sort of profundity) then you know that the concept is terrible. Many viewers will doubtless watch Naked Attraction in the hope that it is mildly sexy or erotic. All bar teenage boys will likely be disappointed; they will find more sexiness and eroticism if they turn over to BBC2 half way through to watch Newsnight (and no, I do not have a fetish about Newsnight).

The participants in Naked Attraction gamely try to justify the programme by using words such as ‘empowering’ or ‘new-found confidence’, and offer Twitter-size arguments that the show delves to the deeper core of dating. On the evidence of the first episode a rather different conclusion can be drawn. Naked Attraction is tedious, dispiriting superficiality. This is dating for the empty-headed consumer generation who think they are being edgy, bright and liberal but are in fact being boring, stupid and constrained. It is dating for those who do not understand sexuality and the erotic, who think that the dismal mechanics of pornography amount to erotica. At one point a participant is described as having a body like a figure from Botticelli—I suspect the person offering this comment was confused about her artists, since the body was nothing like a Botticellian figure but a lot like a Rubens nude—but the gulf between the eroticism of Botticelli (and Rubens) and Naked Attraction is immense. Tellingly, the Rubenesque/Botticellian participant was the first of the six to be rejected.

We can, however, find in the Renaissance an interesting historical and philosophical ancestor to Naked Attraction. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) there is the following account of a social custom among prospective brides and grooms on the fictional island:

When they’re thinking of getting married, they do something that seemed to us quite absurd, though they take it very seriously. The prospective bride, no matter whether she’s a spinster or a widow, is exhibited stark naked to the prospective bridegroom by a respectable married woman, and a suitable male chaperon shows the bridegroom naked to the bride. When we implied by our laughter that we thought it a silly system, they promptly turned the joke against us.

            ‘What we find so odd,’ they said, ‘is the silly way these things are arranged in other parts of the world. When you’re buying a horse, and there’s nothing at stake but a small sum of money, you take every possible precaution. The animal’s practically naked already, but you firmly refuse to buy until you’ve whipped off the saddle and all the rest of the harness, to make sure there aren’t any sores underneath. But when you’re choosing a wife, an article that for better or worse has got to last you a lifetime, you’re unbelievably careless. You don’t even bother to take it out of its wrappings. You judge the whole woman from a few square inches of face, which is all you can see of her, and then proceed to marry her—at the risk of finding her most disagreeable, when you see what she’s really like. (Thomas More, Utopia, trans. by Paul Turner (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 84)

Utopia is a description of an ideal society. If it really existed it would be the dullest and most oppressive place on earth. The Utopians have reduced everything to worthiness and reason; they set no store by gold and jewels; they see no point in fashion; they do not gamble; their leisure consists of improving pursuits such as mental games and study. Everyone is equal and no-one is idle: ‘There’s never any excuse for idleness. There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no secret meeting-places. Everyone has his eye on you, so you’re practically forced to get on with your job, and make some proper use of your spare time.’ (p. 65) North Korea is probably the country that has come closest to realizing More’s utopian fantasy.

Naked Attraction is not, of course, the first step on the way to a nightmarish North Korean future. Judging from its first outing, my guess is that the only place Naked Attraction is heading towards is the long list of programmes that are so dire they never get a second series. I am confidently hopeful that this is the case. If I am wrong, if Naked Attraction actually resonates with viewers as a telling and zeitgeisty shows that reflects their own thoughts about dating, attraction and romance, then there may be grounds for some despair. For, if the show really does tap into our sexual and human values, what would it be telling us?

It would be telling us that imagination, subtlety, mystery, complexity and the erotic are on the way out. It reduces attraction to dreary talk about the shape of someone’s penis, the amount of body hair they have, or whether their nipples are good for flicking. (I guarantee that it is more exciting reading the previous sentence than watching these things being said on the programme.) It would be telling us that those keen on metrics—things that are measurable and quantifiable—are triumphing over those who prefer immeasurable qualities. But I’m confident that not even Ms. Spreadsheet, my former date, would have taken metrics to these extremes.

Above all, Naked Attraction would be telling us that many people have a fundamentally misconceived notion of the self. In normal dating, when clothes are worn and movements are observed and conversation is exchanged, we are telling interesting stories about ourselves. Naked Attraction is obsessed with the idea that all these things—clothes, movement, social interaction—are just so many ways of concealing who we really are, that beneath all the layers can be found the pure, true self. In fact, it is the other way round. The self is something we put on. We reveal ourselves through what we wear, the way we move, the things we talk about. There is no self beyond that; there is just an invariably quite dull lump of uninteresting physical matter.

Naked Attraction unwittingly confirms this truth: what makes the show so unsexy and unerotic is its fixation on nothing more than the naked body. It demonstrates that the truly erotic is to be found in the way we transform our dull bodies through movement and clothes, adornment and conversation. Sexiness is the way we all tell stories about ourselves through what we wear, do and say. Attraction is to charm each other through these stories. It is the absence of that which makes the unadorned nakedness of Naked Attraction so unattractive and charmless.

A Forest Tragedy

A Forest Tragedy; or, How Nigel had a bad idea, Michael shafted Boris who shafted David, and Theresa swooped; or, A total fuck up
by O.M.G. Brexit and U.R. Fucked

A Pictorial History of Brexit England

In the year 2046 post-Brexit England finally publishes a book. Here it is:

A Pictorial History of Brexit England, by Lord Boris of Farage

On the Paris attacks and Facebook 'solidarity'

The Paris attacks are unquestionably horrific and terrible. Nothing can justify them; they deserve unqualified condemnation.

Does this mean I should be plastering the French flag over my Facebook profile to show ‘solidarity’ with Paris and France? A lot of people I know and respect highly have done just that—and I do not question their reasons for doing so.

But I’m curious where the ‘Facebook solidarity’ is when Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Egyptians, and many, many others are massacred. Is it because these massacres happen so frequently that we ignore them? Is it because they happen a long way away, to people that we care little about? Are westerners more deserving of ‘solidarity’ than anyone else?

And why is there the sudden need to wave national flags around as a response? In an escalating conflict which is conducted to a large extent according to the dismal politics of nation states, I worry that flag-waving just entrenches the divisions. National identity has always been divisive: it is forged as much in what a country isn’t as in what it is (Christian and therefore not Jewish or Muslim; Protestant and therefore not Catholic; and so on).

France does not have an admirable record when it comes to fostering multiculturalism. It also has one of the largest and most popular parties of the far right in Europe; the Front National has serious and not unrealistic ambitions to win power at the next presidential election.

It is too early to say how France may respond to the attacks. But it would not be surprising if there is a spike in far right support; if there is increased hostility and persecution towards Muslims and ethnic minorities; if more bombs are directed at Syria leading to the deaths of more innocent victims. And if any or all of that happens, one can be sure it will all be closely associated with the tricolor.

Of course, it might be argued that it is important for moderates and liberals to associate themselves with the French flag precisely to stop the far right from hijacking it. I can understand that reasoning. But I’m not persuaded. I think we’re in trouble when moderates and liberals believe their only option is to rally around national flags.

Standing behind a national flag hardly seems the best way of addressing the global problems that are in part caused by conflicts between rival nation states. The innocent life violently lost in Syria is of equal worth to that lost in France, and equally deserving of solidarity. It is with humanity that solidarity should be shown—solidarity with everyone everywhere who is a victim of injustice, poverty, violence and inhumanity. National flags make it less likely that this supranational solidarity with humanity will flourish. For that reason I have no interest in the Facebook ‘solidarity’ campaign. 

Idiocy, entertainment and capitalism

Take a bunch of youngish men and women, divide them into groups, set them a task, and then watch them fuck it up in various implausible and hilarious ways. This is not of course a description of the seminar groups I used to teach (since all my students were brilliant), but of The Apprentice.

I am an ashamed Apprentice viewer. It does not make me proud that I enjoy the sight people who think they are clever being revealed to be the idiots they in fact are. Thankfully the show helps us along by portraying most of the participant as so obnoxious that they fully deserve their public humiliation. Unhelpfully there is also the subsequent discovery that a fired candidate turns out to be personable and clever, indeed a normal human being. Then it is my turn as a viewer to feel obnoxious, as well as an idiot for being duped by the clever editing into thinking that this perfectly likeable person was a contemptible fool. Watching light entertainment can be so complex…

I usually try to justify watching The Apprentice on two grounds. First, the programme’s format, editing and presentation are impressive. The Apprentice is simple and compelling, very funny, and superbly manages to package its narrative and story each week. It is smart, expertly structured entertainment—a model in fact of how one might organize and unfold a story over the course of an hour of television. Moreover, all the regular members of the show play their parts well, notably Alan Sugar who, as all powerful and extremely wealthy idiot-in-chief, entertainingly comes across as cringeworthily stupid, embarrassingly avuncular and mildly psychotic.

Second, The Apprentice gives us more insight into the soulless, ugly nature of modern capitalism than any other mainstream television programme. In this respect it is almost certainly a show in the image of Sugar himself. The footballer Jürgen Klinsmann, commenting on his dealings with Sugar when the latter was chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, considered Sugar to be ‘a man without honour’ who ‘only ever talks about money’. Money and the making of it are not merely the central values promoted by the show, but pretty much the only values. Qualities, such as the creation of a good and useful product or the provision of fine customer service, are regarded only with respect to their contribution to profit: if profit can be increased by reducing the quality of the product or the standard of customer service, then so much the better.

The typical philosophy of an Apprentice candidate

People are objectified as customers and consumers, as sources of profit; candidates are expected to push hard sells, with a focus solely on extracting money. This is why the token ‘nice’ candidates never get very far: it is considered a disastrous weakness politely to desist from the rapacious attempt to prize open the wallets and purses of reluctant, uncomfortable strangers. In effect, The Apprentice cheerfully endorses the irritating methods typical of telemarketers. And it celebrates the idea that money and personal riches are an end, not a means to something else. From Sugar at the top to the performing monkeys with their ludicrous egos at the bottom who try to please him each week, never is there a sign that any of them have given even a moment’s reflection to the role and function of business in its larger context, of how business may sometimes contribute to and sometimes damage wider society. Instead, the goal, often explicitly stated, is simple: personal enrichment.

Defenders of capitalism will protest, of course, that this is precisely how the economic system should work, and they will argue that we all benefit from such values. Their mantra in this regard would be the famous quotation from Adam Smith: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ So when a candidate readily admits to an interest exclusively in his or her own personal profits, the defender of capitalism would say that we should approve, for there are supposedly happy spin-offs for us all from this pursuit of naked self-interest.

Still, we might wonder from watching The Apprentice whether this is quite the outcome of unbridled capitalism. The most typical way of judging tasks is by size of profit: the team that makes the most money wins. That has the virtue of simplicity in fulfilling the show’s guiding philosophy of money-making, but does not obviously have much else going for it. The roadmap to success drawn by The Apprentice is to make cheap rubbish, price it high and sell it hard. Or, as we might more commonly say, to rip off customers.

For example, the task in week one of the current series involved the teams buying fish from wholesalers which they were to turn into lunch products. One approach to this might be to buy decent quality fish, create lunch items of a high standard, and then to price them as reasonably as possible to ensure that a small profit by ensuring that as many people benefit from the good product. Another approach is to buy the lowest quality fish, to turn that into inevitably horrible products, to hoodwink the consumer into thinking that these products are better quality than they in fact are, and to price them at levels that are tantamount to customer exploitation. The first approach would have the potential not only of making a viable business but also of delivering something valuable to consumers; the latter approach is the only one that would succeed on The Apprentice. And so, the creators and producers of the show hope, we are being schooled on the virtues of profit over quality—and, consequently, asked to admire the worst aspects of modern capitalism.

It is possible, of course, that The Apprentice is actually an extremely clever critique of modern capitalism. After all, the candidates are generally set up to look ridiculous and to fail, all for the sake of entertainment. Yet while we laugh at their idiocy (and, of course, it is only the idiotic bits which make it to the final edit), in reality we might be at least mildly impressed at what they manage to achieve. Take a bunch of strangers, some of whom loathe one another, and present them cold with a fairly sophisticated project in a field in which most of them have no experience and that has to be completed in 48 hours, and it’s actually a fair achievement that something even vaguely looking like a product/advertising campaign/acceptable sales emerges. ‘Desert Secret’ (one of the shampoo campaigns in episode two) may have been rubbish, but in the circumstances it was the sort of rubbish one might have expected even from a highly competent team of inexperienced strangers in a desperately short period of time.

But on the whole I’m inclined to think that The Apprentice is really a clever celebration of capitalism. For the candidates are also firmly set up to succeed. The ‘fish’ task is a good illustration of this. In a mere two days one of the teams, starting out with limited capital, made a profit of £200. We might marvel at the miracle of capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit: even a bunch of idiots can turn over a quick, tidy profit in hardly any time at all! But consider this ‘profit’ and consider some of the awkward realities of business that are never admitted in the world of The Apprentice. Once the costs of paying for a kitchen and transport, the rental of vending spots and the price of overheads such as electricity and phone bills are factored in, most of that £200 would be wiped out. Then subtract the salaries for nine employees, as well as some money to cover marketing. Normally tax would also have to be paid, but since we’ve now discovered that what appeared to be profit-making fish business would in reality have made a huge loss, then (much like Amazon, Starbucks, etc., although for different reasons) there is no need to bother with tax.

The Apprentice presents an absurd business fantasy. It is a fantasy of a world in which hard work and an entrepreneurial spirit will always succeed, and in which business, as long as it is encouraged, will always make money. At the same time as pouring scorn on the low calibre of the contestants, many viewers are no doubt also impressed by the apparently easy way in which a new business can succeed and quick money is made. At no point does the show invite us to doubt whether it is a fair reflection of the reality of business. The Apprentice feeds the ludicrously unsound idea that private enterprise and profit-making are the supreme economic virtues, that they always work, and that somehow they deliver an unqualified benefit to society as a whole.

In numerous ways, therefore, The Apprentice is a horrible show, embodying some of the most hideous features of modern economic life. Yet I watch it with something like enjoyment—which may go to prove that I am as much of an idiot as the very people I am watching.