Without the state

June Whitfield

Probably not known outside the UK, but a great comic actor with perfect timing.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/gallery/2018/dec/29/june-whitfield-a-life-in-pictures

Once upon a Time...

Sometimes you come to put up a post and for some reason nothing comes - not writers block, just you can't summon up the energy to bang your head against the wall of indifference and contempt that the political classes have erected. At times like that it is good to read Arther Silber's blog 'Once Upon a Time'. I've never met Arthur, never corresponded with him. I know very little about him other than he has cats and loves the work of Maria Callas - and that he is dying because he has no medical insurance.

Despite that he still manges to publish incisive demolitions of US foreign and domestic policy. Sometimes his anger just bursts from the page, raging and roaring around you. Sometimes he  writes about his condition in such bald terms that it leaves you breathless, marvelling that a man in such pain can summon up the energy to write anything - and angry that the soi-disant greatest nation on Earth can allow its citizens to live - and die in such a way.

If you do nothing else read his blog. Take the time to go through the old postings too. They are a remarkable collection.  And please - if you can make a donation to help this remarkable writer. Let him know he isn't alone.

Pete Postlethwaite RIP

 

A tearjerker moment at the best of times...

Brilliant video showing turn of the century New Jersey

Another obituary of Colin Ward: pioneer of mutualism

Colin Ward, the leading anarchist thinker and writer of post-war Britain, died on February 11.

For many people the word 'anarchist' is a barrier to understanding and engagement. If it is not the cloak and dagger and smoking bomb image of anarchism from the late 19th century, then it is the mainstream media image of young people in black masks lobbing things at the police, which shapes how many people respond to the word.

Colin certainly believed - as anyone on the left must - that there are times and places when you have to stand up against the state. But these images are particularly misleading so far as his anarchism was concerned. For his was an anarchism that was at once constructive, creative and immensely practical. It drew critical, but sympathetic attention from many outside the anarchist movement. It still holds many lessons for the left.

via www.nextleft.org

Colin Ward, RIP

On the anarchist society we live in: …[A]n anarchist society, a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.

. . . [F]ar from being a speculative vision of a future society, it is a description of a
mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society. This is not a new version of anarchism. Gustav Landauer saw it, not as the founding of something new, ‘but as the actualisation and reconstitution of something that has always been present, which exists alongside the state, albeit buried and laid waste’. And a modern anarchist, Paul Goodman, declared that: ‘A free society cannot be the substitution of a “new order” for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life.’

via c4ss.org

I never had the chance to meet him, even though we were both involved with the TCPA. I wish I had.

Shaking Hands with Death

If you didn't see Terry Pratchett's Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV last night then watch it now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qmfgn/Richard_Dimbleby_Lecture_Shaking_Hands_with_Death/

I'm not sure if this will be visible outside the UK, but I suspect it will be on YouTube very quickly.

Because of his condition, he couldn't deliver it himself and asked his friend Tony Robinson to read it for him.  This was itself a remarkable performance, delivered with passion and tenderness, and without once so far as I could see referring to the text in front of him.

Watch it if you can.

EDIT: Here is an extract published in the Independent today.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/terry-pratchett-why-stop-trusting-a-doctor-who-has-the-power-to-kill-you-1886159.html

You can have my kidney, when you pry it from my cold dead hand (and other stories to frighten the children)

The announcement from Gordon Brown, that he supports the principle of 'Deemed Consent' to organ donation has brought out the predictable set of responses, ranging from the demented (New Labour New Cannibalism), through the only slightly less barking (although the discussion remains surprisingly thoughtful in the main) to the surprisingly unthinking.

Starting with the mad we have this amazing outburst:

When the law allows organs to be harvested from the bodies of the dead without the explicit prior consent of the dead, or the explicit consent of the next of kin, the State becomes effectively a cannibal.

and:

...presumed consent really is only the beginning. Let this through, and it is only a matter of time before blood donation becomes compulsory. After cannibalism, after all, vampirism is very little.

The trouble with this absurd hyperbole is that no one will listen when you make a serious point and there is a serious point to be made, even from this rather crazy perspective. Do you really trust NHS bureaucrats to get it right? After all one of the reasons for the decline in donors is the Alder Hey and associated scandals, the roots of which go back to 1948.

As Chris Dillow points out, one reason for making the change is the assumption that many people will fail to do so through simple inertia. It is not proposed on the grounds of being more rational but simple expediency.

...the way in which choices are presented to us can affect what we choose - a fact which is awkward for conventional conceptions of rationality.

This outburst from Sean Gabb is totally irrational. It is playing directly and explicitly to the 'yuk' factor and is as nonsensical as the tabloid garbage on which it is modeled.

Moving on to the slightly barking, we have an argument based in part on property rights but also  implicitly on the concept that any action is permissible so long as it causes no harm to others.

...the State's plan to assume default ownership of my mortal remains is wholly and monstrously unacceptable. I reject the claim of the State to own my body just as I reject the legitimacy of its various claims to own my person whilst I am alive.

The second aspect is easier to dismiss.

1. Are you harmed by the State removing your organs after death in order to transplant them into another person? Of course not - you are bloody well dead.
2. Is anyone else harmed by this action? It could be argued that relatives suffer distress but I don't see much sympathy for that from Perry de Havilland and the other denizens of Samizdata if offense or distress is claimed as a reason for legal prohibition of an action.
3. Harm might exist in circumstances where a free trade in bodies or body organs is allowed, since these proposals effectively nationalise your corpse (not for the first time of course).
4. Harm is caused of course but indirectly. If your organs are incinerated or composted rather than being used to keep someone alive, then they will die. There is a strong case that by your inaction you have caused death or at least severe suffering.

Despite 3, I don't think an argument against opt-out based on harm to others can be made.

The issue of ownership is harder to deal with. We accept the disposition of property after death, although of course unless you are an anarchist or minarchist, the state will often set limits on that, for example through taxation. We do not generally accept that people can be owned even by mutual consent, (although there are some who argue otherwise). Can the body therefore be owned after death and on what terms?

It seems to me that this is easier to deal with from the atheist perspective. To an atheist, the body after death is just a collection of bones and tissue and has no intrinsic worth. Even atheists however recognise that to their friends and value their body does have meaning, if nothing else as a symbol of the person they were. This is of itself an important aspect in deciding on the disposition of one's body after death. In the extreme case of leaving one's body to medical research, you have to make specific provision. You apparently cannot simply write it into your will. Even here of course the 'yuk factor' comes into play, both for the owner of the body when making provision and of course for relatives.

For those of a religious bent, there will be other considerations. They are not considerations I accept, or even really understand, but it is your body and your beliefs and neither the state nor anyone else should be able to override those beliefs, even though it appears that the proposals will allow for opt-out.

On that basis, the proposals boil down to the state dictating how you should dispose of your body after death. The third posting I have picked out (cross posted from here) ignores this aspect almost entirely (although it is picked up in the comments) in favour of a rant about the right. It largely ignores the impact of death on the family and those around them - an attitude to a degree retracted in the comments. It simply assumes that there is no acceptable objection to the proposals.

Libby Purves puts it a little more rationally in The Times:

In any legal change, it must be acknowledged and accepted that some of our compatriots have powerfully superstitious beliefs about bodily parts: we are not historically far from the age of relics, and some of the Alder Hey parents held repeated funerals for recovered microscope slides. You may not think that way, I certainly don't; but nobody has the right to gainsay those who do. Not in the “public interest”, not using state authority. Your body is your own.

She also deals with the issue of implied consent:

My main caveat is that with presumed consent the opt-out should be staringly visible. It should be offered in a way nobody could fail to notice, and cost no time, stamps, visits or call centres. Perhaps a tickbox at 16 when you get your national insurance card; then every year a renewable consent box, maybe on your tax form (though given the Revenue & Customs' inability to handle data responsibly, perhaps not). But the opt-out must be unavoidable, universal, not in the small print.

There is no doubt but that people die every week because of the lack of a suitable donor and almost always that lack arises because the person who could have helped didn't get round to it and because no one had the nerve to ask the bereaved. Opinion polls actually show a high level of support for organ transplantation, much higher than for xenotransplants, held out by many as the ultimate solution.

The problem as ever is complex. There is no point in behaving as if there is one answer and ranting about the stupid behaviour of those who don't agree with you. At its centre are multiple moral and philosophical questions to do with our sense of who and what we are and about our place in the universe. Of course it would be nice to have a neat simple solution - but it isn't going to happen. We will have to carry on muddling through, making decisions that please no one.

Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act as if there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

Terry Pratchett Hogfather

More on fairs and festivals

Some time ago, (2003 in fact!) I posted asking for information about the economic impact of markets fairs and festivals. Some time later, (2006) I made a separate post about so-called Anti-Social Behaviour, that touched in passing on a phenomenon known as Charivari. I was intrigued therefore to discover a research project at City University in London, that focussed on economic outcomes from such events, but in one of the academic papers linked also to some of those other ideas inherent in Charivari.

Throughout the academic literature, carnivals and festivals are associated – by historians and anthropologists alike – with altered social forms, excitement, even danger. Opinion is divided over whether the carnival is a locus for radical transgression, or simply an escape valve for revolutionary energy, which acts to reinforce the status quo (Cohen 1993; Waterman 1998; Webb 2005). Either way, attention is drawn to the tendency for popular festivals and carnivals, in many parts of the world, and in many historical periods, to be characterised by risqué reversals of hierarchy, ludic mimicry, flamboyant and celebratory cultural expression, and a sanctioned overstepping of conventional rules and norms of behaviour. Arguably, carnival is also associated with spontaneity, and with a sense of being carried away by the momentum of the event through improvised action and kinetic excitement. Although many carnival arts involve meticulous attention to form, structure, even ritual, there remains a strong feeling that participation is more than can be conveyed through an account of moves, music and costume. The element of risk, of unpredictability – not, in any sense, of anarchy, but of an altered understanding of authority, whether actual or imagined – is at the heart of the experience of carnival.

There are also links here with the idea of the feast of the  Lord of Misrule

This is misnamed a feast, being full of annoyance; since going out-of-doors is burdensome, and staying within doors is not undisturbed. For the common vagrants and the jugglers of the stage, dividing themselves into squads and hordes, hang about every house. The gates of public officials they besiege with especial persistence, actually shouting and clapping their hands until he that is beleaguered within, exhausted, throws out to them whatever money he has and even what is not his own. And these mendicants going from door to door follow one after another, and, until late in the evening, there is no relief from this nuisance. For crowd succeeds crowd, and shout, shout, and loss, loss.

This fear of the reversal of power, of disturbance of the common good runs deep. After all, we can't have public officials made fun of can we?

Community and story telling

The two great arts of the 20^th century are I think, film and jazz. While jazz, unfortunately, seems to be declining into a minority interest, film shows no sign of flagging. It still has the capacity to stimulate, to touch us deep in our hearts, to excite and to reflect our world back to us. I was moved to think about this by a couple of films I saw recently, both of which managed to say more in a few minutes about the nature of community and identity than Blair and his cohorts have done in 10 years.

‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is I know a romantic comedy and the reviews on IMDB seem to treat it as no more than that, so probably one shouldn’t read too much into it. Nevertheless in one important scene Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey as the husband and fiancé (don’t ask!) of Reese Witherspoon talk about life in the small town in which Lucas and Witherspoon grew up. The details of the story don’t matter here, and would be a nasty spoiler if you haven’t seen the film. Essentially however it illustrates how an important part of real communities is not necessarily shared beliefs, but shared stories.

Think about any family gathering and almost certainly it will involve the sharing of stories, not just about the people there but also about people long gone. These may not be told chronologically or even completely, they may not even be true, but sharing them allows everyone inside the group to pick up and draw meaning and strength from them – reinforcing the sense of identification. I suppose wakes and weddings are the prime examples.

Translating this to the geographical communities of villages and neighbourhoods in which we all live, makes the importance of continuity in keeping those stories alive apparent. Villages drowning in seas of commuter housing, neighbourhoods facing a massive influx of people of other cultures and religions both face the same problem. Maintenance of shared stories becomes impossible and perhaps more importantly the old stories are lost.

We need to recognise that these strains apply as much to the ‘incomers’ as to the ‘locals’. I lived in Wolverhampton in the late 1960s at which time one could see at the weekend, large groups of men sitting in circles in the local park. I was told, and I believe it to be true, that these gatherings were based on links back to the local village in Pakistan or Bangladesh. For at least some of these immigrants therefore continuity was maintained but only it seems by discussion of the ‘old days’.

For children born in this country, the old days of course are irrelevant and unknown – perhaps even literally meaningless. A combination of religion, language and myth generate separation and isolation on both sides of the divide. Stories though have intrinsic value and sharing them in the new context could be a source of a new understanding. Stories from an isolated village in Bangladesh could be as illuminating to English neighbours as they were to those to whom they were originally directed.

Another insight may come from the phenomenon of so-called ‘world’ music where musicians from wildly different musical heritages often combine to generate new and exciting ‘stories’ in the studio. If we can get that openness out of the studio and into the locality who knows where we might end up.