Pavlos's Thoughts

The first observation about the riots is that they’re a failure of government. Any government whose people revolt has failed in some way. It hasn’t failed totally or everywhere but it is responsible for a failure – a significant one in this case. The first thing that Cameron has to do is bow down to Britain and admit failure. That’s true from any political perspective. Whether you’re a fluffy nurturing liberal or a tough personal responsibility conservative, Cameron’s government has failed to govern effectively.

Calling the looters criminals is self-serving hypocrisy to avoid admitting failure. All kinds of people commit crimes, but the category “criminal” is rarely helpful for the purpose of explanation. A “criminal” is someone who has freedom of choice and chooses to do something harmful for self-serving reasons. Say Bernie Maddoff, he was a “criminal”. A madman, terrorist, or rioter cannot be explained away as a “criminal”. You may wish to treat them harshly, but you have to ask further questions if you want to explain their behaviour. You should ask these questions so that you can reach and stop other people who may be on the same path. We don’t analyse “criminals” because we’ve accepted that greed, materialism, and selfishness are normal – we just expect people to control them. We do analyse abusers, extremists, and rioters because there may be something useful society could do to change their motives.

To dismiss rioters as “criminals” is to assume that their motivation has been to acquire trainers or PlayStations without paying, and that there has been a remarkably unlikely concentration of these “criminals” in poor UK suburbs over a particular week. Or else it is to assume that the anger, or whatever, they were feeling is normal, that it’s normal they would want to burn stores and break things, but they should just control themselves like normal people. These are not helpful explanations, so let’s please not call them criminals.

So, after admitting and apologising for failure, Cameron needs to start failing less. Then the question opens, what kind of failure was this?

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Racism is seen as a violation of minorities. Allegedly, it has defined perpetrators and victims. Two categories. That people are rigidly divided into categories is taken as given, and fighting racism is supposed to be about limiting and maybe one day reversing one category’s depredations on the other. It’s not supposed to be about universal rights but about protecting black people and other minorities from whites.

That’s wrong. It’s an unhelpful and misleading conception of racial conflict. Seeing it as a category conflict serves the wrong agendas. In fact, the crime of racism is about denying rights that are universal. That white people are the perpetrators and blacks usually the victims is of no bearing on the nature of the injustice. The correct formulation of racism is that people form groups based on arbitrary identifying traits, the groups fight, and it happens that certain groups become habitually victimized. The correct course of action is to frown upon loyalty to arbitrary groups and instead embrace all people as moral beings. The response to racism is to be universal.

Feminism is supposed to be a violation of universal human rights. Respectable formulations of feminism are not gendered. In law, rape is about people forcing sex upon other people. It could be two men, and from that viewpoint the crime could only be defined in terms of fuzzy universal rights. Emancipation of women is uncool. Equal opportunity is polite. Equality is supposed to mean the same access to some abstract rights that no-one is going to get too worked up about.

That’s also wrong. It is a massive appropriation and dilution of the movement. Feminism is not about universal good behaviour. It’s brutally gendered. Violence is being perpetrated by men upon women, because of the different reproductive biology that defines the categories “men” and “women”. Men wish to claim control and extract reproductive benefits from women while dumping reproductive costs on them, or rather evading their share. Everything about feminism is about redressing this gendered crime. Visions of the solution are not symmetric, and to say that they are is complicit. Credible feminism isn’t about defining universal abstract rights. It’s about rebalancing the benefits and costs of reproduction to be more just, specifically between men and women.

Property means several things to people. It has at least three meanings:

• Personal safety and dignity: My clothes, my house, my money, my computer. These are mine in the sense that I need them to go through life and I need reassurance nobody will take them away from me. Actually I don’t own my house, I prefer to focus on my skills. But it’s the same idea.
• Control over resources: My project, my team, my blog, my plan. I want to control these things. If I had a business it could be my business in this sense of controlling what the business does. These things are controlled by me and I want them free from interference so that I can pursue my goals.
• The right to exploit: My shares, my invention, my song, my contract, my land. These are artificial rights that let me exploit resources, or the activities of others. If the thing is mine I can take any profit I can extract from it as mine to keep. This type of property is an exemption from the duty to share.

Only the first two are natural. The first is needed to have a society with human rights, although the boundary could vary. For example some people feel a strong need to own their house, and some don’t. But a desire for security of your immediate needs is universal.

The second right, right to control resources and keep them free from interference, is needed to form an advanced economy. You can’t build any kind of elaborate production or a complex technological product like a plane if you can’t control the resources and the activities that bring it about. This type of property is the necessary foundation for firms. Even things that appear to be free are based on property as control. Google services are free, but they control the site and it’s designed so that you depend on it every day. Linux is free in the sense that someone could copy the bits and start a rival project, but the actual Linux project is well controlled.

Property as the right to exploit is different. There’s nothing intuitive or natural about it, except perhaps that it formalizes feelings like “survival of the fittest”. Normally, if you have an idea that is successful or as a group you produce valuable things, you share. When nature yields oil or fish again the normal thing is to share. Perhaps in these cases we have yet to discover how to do so in a controlled and equitable way. To these productive activities, property is an overlord. Property claims what would otherwise be shared among the people directly involved, for one or a few people who are distant. It’s no accident that most property of this type is indeed derived from lordship over land.

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I don’t believe this idea that a firm exists to maximize shareholder returns. If the entire economy was structured on that principle, the world would be dominated by exploitative, rent-seeking organizations even more than it is.

The reason for a firm to exist, primarily and sufficiently, is to produce goods and services that are needed or desirable in the world. There are several ways of judging and directing the firm according to this principle.

• The market is a very good indicator of what the world needs or wants, especially when it comes to the detailed and diverse wishes of individuals. It’s not sufficient, and certainly not right by definition, because the market is prone to manipulation, irrationality, and social injustice making the difference between true wishes and buying power.
• Critical opinion, commentary, or goodwill towards a firm and its activities. It’s no accident that quality consumer goods firms are held in higher regard than most banks.
• An objective analysis of the firm’s product and activities with respect to life, well-being, human fulfillment, and the environment.
• Policy. Companies need to be comissioned to create large-scale infrastructure where the market would yield lower-investment, higher use cost solutions

A second reason for a firm to exist is to provide comfortable and fulfilling employment to the people directly involved in the firm. Balance is the measure here. The firm is not a vehicle to get rich, nor is crushing, subsistence-level employment a goal.

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The way that the state of Israel conducts itself would be perfectly reasonable, for the year 1910.

Israel was formed by people who shared enough of a language, culture, and religion to see themselves as a nation even though they were a diaspora, or an ethnic group living in imperial lands. They revived or manufactured a national ideal on dubious claims of historical continuity. They created their state through sheer determination and no small amount of treachery and underground support. They defended and grew their state against destruction using ardent, incontestable violence.

That’s how every other nation state in the old world came to be. Greece did exactly the same things in the 1820s, as did the Balkan countries. The nation states of Europe had formed in similarly violent ways, justified on similarly new and artificial national identities, only a century earlier. This behaviour was thought normal of nations until the 1920s. If Israel had been formed in the 1840s, say, and it was still extinguishing its Arab minority in 1910 by interning them and blockading their supplies, no-one would protest. That’s what nations did, back then.

Unfortunately the world’s experiments with ethically pure nation states are over. This idea burned with the houses of Dresden and Tokyo, and in two large explosions over Japan. By the time the war was over it was clear to all technically advanced societies that another round of tribal warfare between nation states would negate them, if not all life on the planet. In a world of six billion people, half of them commanding nuclear arms, the unfettered nation state is practically untenable.

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You may have heard that there were huge protests in Greece over the financial measures, basically pay cuts, that the government put in place to get its finances under control. A minority of the protesters were violent. Someone set fire to a bank, there were staff inside, and three people died.

This must seem like tragic madness to outsiders, and even to many who live in Greece. When societies fail, it’s easy to conclude that people are irrational, that therefore there’s no prospect for improvement, and that imposing a basic plan or order upon them might be a good idea. Let me try and allay these notions.

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We in the west tend to think that myth is a naive attempt to understand nature. That’s untrue and not sufficiently generous to those who came before us. Myth is not a failed theory of the universe; it’s a brilliantly successful technology for changing it.

What is the world? It is of course the stars, the Earth, the weather, life, and all the things that are out there. But we do not perceive these things directly, nor do they affect us. What affects us comes through our senses, and the way we perceive is as much a product of our embodied senses and our mind as it is a representation of the true disposition of things. Our perceptions are shaped by the ideas we already hold.

As soon as our ancestral apes became intelligent enough to affect the world, seeking to make it more hospitable to their vulnerable existence, two paths were open. They could make tools, draw predictions, and try to alter the physical world immediately around them, or they could alter their own minds so that their experience would be less harsh, more hopeful, more meaningful, fanciful and interesting, and even less bound to the actual sensations of cold and hunger that the body sometimes offered. The ability to alter the human experience of the world through the communication of ideas is myth.

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I wrote this an for a while there was no example of the attitude that I advocate to security. Then the Norwegian massacre occurred and the Norwegian people responded by standing for more freedom, more openness, more democracy. That’s what I mean when I say that a society must strive for the minimum of security that it needs, not the maximum it can have.

Suppose that you’re a young member of a family – a fairly traditional family – and one day dad says: “You know, the world has become a really dangerous place. In order to keep you safe we have to install bullet-proof windows and 24-hour security”.

What do you make of that? Well, there are four explanations.

• Dad is a hero. He’s a judge in a high-profile corruption case. You need the protection for noble reasons, and you need courage.
• You live in a really rough neighbourhood and need the protection just because the family is well off, which is sad and cause for thought.
• Dad has his priorities misplaced. Maybe he’s too afraid of other people, or maybe he needs to care for the family more in other ways.
• Dad is a gangster. He knows just why there may be bricks or bullets coming through the window and, in order to continue being a gangster, he needs to arrange security.

If dad is your government, especially the government of the United States, I think the last explanation is most likely.

You’re in a gangster family. It may look cosy and civilized at home, and dad may be treating you and mom very well, but on another part of the neighborhood dad’s goons are breaking the arms of anyone who tries to develop in a socialist way (Vietnam), sell its oil to the wrong people (Iraq), or simply stand up and defy the racket (Serbia).

That may cause bricks, or even bullets, co come flying through the window. That’s why you need Homeland Security. The honorable TSA who protects you in good faith, and the high-tech scanner, are there so that dad can continue being a gangster while having a normal family life. Domestic security is a moral hazard.

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Despite being a good student, I never had a high opinion of school. I felt, and still mostly feel, that school is where you learn to feign respect to superiors who are less smart than yourself, and get used to spending half your day indoors, sitting at a desk. That’s what school is for. It’s to prepare intelligent, active, vibrant kinds for an adult life of compliance and submission.

Despite this, somehow, the Greek school system managed to give me one valuable teaching.

It was the story of Antigone, by Sophocles. The story opens after an insurgency. Antigone’s brother, who had attempted to overthrow the king, has been defeated and lies dead on the street. The king declares that he is not to be buried, as a form of debasement. Antigone insists that he has to be buried, because that is their duty to the gods. They both insist, and the substance of the play is them making their case. The king sets out the formal, legal right. Antigone, the individual, argues that there is a moral right. The legal and the moral right are not always the same. And when they differ the moral right is compelling.

I don’t know how this 2500 year old brazen story of humanist conviction and rebellion managed to make it through the stolid, reactionary school system and be taught saliently in substance. But I’m grateful.