Stern review

Oh well, I suppose it takes an economist to provide sufficient reasons for change in the face of global warning; the moral and scientific arguments have been clearly insufficient.

But in the coverage of the Stern review that I've read I haven't seen discussion of related political issues (I know it'll be there, I haven't looked very hard) . It will be politicians who take the most critical decisions, and they need all support to stiffen the backbone.

The review's recommendations to address climate change presuppose a stable political framework. Yet the stability of western governments rests on foundations which militate against radical or rapid change. Furthermore, to remain stable, governments have learnt to export destabilising threats. The predictable result will be a much more troubled world.

Western democracies are - because they are democratic - vulnerable to inertia. The time scales of both costs and benefits are much longer than the time scales of political cycles - and longer than the expected life of many political structures below central government.

In a democarcy politicians are expected to listen to their constituencies, or lose power. And it is very hard to persuade people to pay for a reduction of their own standard of living, and easy to let them protect their own wealth at the cost of other people's. People are liable to vote for whoever will offer them comforts and, in this case, that's whoever will let them off responsibility to an abstract, distant environment.

More dangerously western democracies, especially the US and UK, have become addicted to the politics of fear. It is almost second nature to shore up one's own government (and avoid serious critique) by pointing to someone smaller and shouting "Terrorist!" - or equivalent. And this is not a comment about the reality or seriousness of terrorism; it is a comment about the way governments manage their relationships with their citizens.

The report acknowledges that the greatest impact of climate change will fall on the poorest countries. They are likely to have least access to low-carbon technologies, least capacity to cope with the destructive consequences of extreme weather, and least provision to address the negative health consequences. Many are also likely to suffer water shortage and, quite possibly, the negative impact of rapid change in agriculture.

The political consequences are likely to include greater internal unrest, mass migration of poor people, and much greater demand for the wealthier countries to transfer more of their wealth to poor countries. All these will be experienced in the west as threats - and the west has learned to tackle such threats at the point of perceived origin (inside the poorer country) rather than wait till it becomes a problem internal to them.

The fear of the outsider is liable to rise proportionately with the inequality between the world's have's and have-nots. And it will be perceived to be in western governments' interests to maintain such fear.

(The term 'economic migrant' is used as an insult only against the poor who seek work away from their home. It's not used against globe trotting business executives, nor those who go from the west to work elsewhere in the world.)

Political questions for Western democracies will include: do they raise the barriers against immigration ever higher? Will they support strong (that is, strong-arm) governments, and intervene ever more early and more frequently in unstable regimes in order to keep people in their own countries and away from the wealth of the west? Will western militaries be sent in to settle wars over water, access to agricultural land, and to redress the disasters of sudden mass-migration?

All of which is a formula for violence. The poor have their little taken from them. The rich resent making small sacrifices and do not want other people to benefit. The poor will have to move to find the basics of life: water, food, shelter, work. And the places they move to will try to exclude them.

Violence will occur in countries destabilised by a combination of climate change and a harsh international regime. And the west will shake its collective head and blame those countries - their people or their govenrments according to political convenience - for their own misfortune.

And violence will grow inside wealthy countries. Some people will inevitably come where work is seen to be; people will escape brutal regimes; western businesses looking for cheap labour will import people and discard them when they are no longer needed. And these people will be the object of fear and local violence. It will be in the interests of western governments to use migrants as both cheap labour and as the lightening rod to deflect internal instability.

So I predict these consequences of climate change: greater international inequality; more brutal regimes and more instances of failed states; more frequent military intervention for peace-making, peace-keeping, and humanitarian causes, high and leaky barriers against poor migrants; increasing vulnerability to violence amonst those who migrate; and the rise of xenophobic far-right political programmes grounded in hatred of outsiders.

Violence will thrive. Terror will just be one part of this dreadful tapestry.

Keeping vigil

He was once a well built man, compassionate, intelligent, gentle, with a sense of humour that sparkled in his eyes and a long, distinguished record of civic service of which he was deservedly proud. In the hospital bed he was thin, uncomprehending, his hand regularly rising to touch the bridge of his nose and fall back again. His breathing was difficult, the skin of his chin hung down like a pelican's lower beak. He did not know me, though he opened his eyes just before I left as I said a prayer.

I find keeping vigil with those who are dying very hard, and very important, though I struggle to say why.

It is hard to concentrate on the person in front of me, putting aside my own sorrow and the ordinary distractions of the day and mendicant mind, to concentrate exclusively on him. I don't know what to pray for: a swift death without pain, perhaps, a blessing on someone whose connection with this world is now solely physiological.

Of course you can't avoid the distractions. Behind me a nurse was gently persuading a confused patient to take his trousers off: 'they're not yours,' she cajoled, 'they belong to this gentleman over here.' She gave the trousers back to their rightful owner. As she left the bay another patient called 'I'd better keep my teeth in tonight.'

I think I go for me - later, when he has died, I must be professional and push my own sadness pushed aside. This is a man I've known a little for 8 years, and seen more of more recently, not someone I know very well; but I grieve none the less.

I think I go for him: to keep vigil is to offer company to someone who can't receive it, sitting with someone utterly alone. Yet, despite that, I think I go for him.

Sometimes I go for the relatives - who often appreciate a familiar person watching alongside, and sometimes someone to talk to - but not this time, and it's never the main reason.

So I sit and think and pray. It's impossible to know but I think he'll live days more yet. Let us hope - for him, for his family, and for me too - it's not a lot of days. I will go back every couple of days.

See: Too many funerals

Funeral story

And a couple of stories today:

The funeral director told me they'd been at a cemetery doing a burial when someone jumped into the funeral car (keys left in because they were swapping drivers) and drove off in it at high speed, leaving the mourners open mouthed and stranded.

And a story from the life of the lady buried today. She was born in 1907 and grew up on a farm. As a child her father had taken her to the market to help him sell produce. They took a new pony on this occasion, recently bought from a circus. They happened to leave it outside a shop which started to play loud music - whereupon the horse broke into a dance as it had been trained - the cart still on its back dancing with it.

Harvest of Sorrow

Robert Conquest The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (Pimlico, 2002; first published 1986).

Published before the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union this study has (according to its 2002 Preface) been vindicated by subsequent access to the archives.

This is an excellent study. Conquest travels steadily and carefully through the available evidence to calculate numbers killed in the dekulakization and engineered famine (1930-1933) in the Ukraine and North Caucasus in particular. He arrives at a conservative estimate of 12 million killed in an act of genocide.

Conquest's style is somewhat stolid. But he is no blinkered accountant of death. He (unfashionably) quotes Schiller (p. 322): 'World History is the World's Court of Judgement' (his capitals) as he lays responsibility for this mass murder at the door of Stalin and those who carried out Stalin's wishes.

He also examines the role of the West - where accurate eye-witness information was available - and the ability of the Soviets to deny, dissemble and obfuscate and thus to avoid calumny. In the end, too many in the West heard what they wanted to believe:

"The scandal is not that they [intellectuals in the West] justified the Soviet actions, but that they refused to hear about them, that they were not prepared to face the evidence." (p.321)

Conquest records acts of compassion that were uttely futile in the face of this tragedy - small attempts to rescue a child, or to give someone food for the day, often only revealed because the benefactor was caught and punished. Yet somehow these indications of the capacity for altruism seem so important simply because of the magnitude of evil all around.

And he has a chapter on children - starved, killed, turned into beggars, left to die, even eaten, and, sometimes, turned into the next generation of NKVD interrogators and torturers.

It is this destruction of the human soul of the living that Conquest finds to be the worst tragedy: the dehumanisation of those who implemented policies of mass murder, the capacity to kill in the name of historical necessity and the party, the punishment of small acts of kindness.

Nothing has since stopped mass murder. Torture is not uncommon. I guess there is only one lesson, if that's the right word: the only judges are historians, by which time its too late.

Haiku

She wore her stories
like jewellery; we found them
as we cleared her flat. 

Buried in bedclothes,
curled up, foetal, an old man
cries for his mummy.

Attitudes to torture

A BBC survey of global attitudes to torture showed 59% opposed; 29% in favour in some circumstances; 12% didn't know.

Should we be pleased, or horrified?

There were marked differences by country: countries most accepting of torture included Iraq (42%), the Philippines (40%), Indonesia (40%), Russia (37%) and China (37%). Those most opposed were Italy (81%), Australia, France, Canada, the UK and Germany.

Israel's result was most striking:
A majority of Jewish respondents in Israel, 53%, favour allowing governments to use some degree of torture to obtain information from those in custody, while 39% want clear rules against it.

But Muslims in Israel, who represent 16% of the total number polled, are overwhelmingly against any use of torture.

In my view the end does not justify the means when the means are the violent breaking of individuals and the ends are uncertain.

But I would guess that very little torture is targetted to a narrow goal - that vital piece of information which will pre-empt the proverbial atrocity.

For the most part torture is state policy - and not just permission or turning a blind eye. The state makes the physical arrangements of torture, the training of state employees as torturers, the promise of indemnity for those who abuse, hurt and kill others. The state uses tax revenue to torture its taxpayers.

Torture is intended to intimidate the population, to rule by fear and violence. It is not primarily used against the outside threat to stable social order: it is the nature of a state's ordering of its society.

Torture is an instrument of government which divides the population from one another. It does not spur people to band together in opposition but to hide separately in fear. That is why torture is done in secret - and why it has to be an open secret.

Torture thus destroys social institutions (the Church, trades unions, clan affiliation). Only the state remains, and its character is violence.

And torture is widespread. Therefore every country which does not practice it is complicit: in the manufacture of materials for torture, in sending people to countries without caring about what will happen to them, in refusing to care adequately for victims of torture who flee their country, in ignoring the issue in bi-lateral discussions, in accepting (tainted) intelligence obtained through torture, in keeping silent.

And I abominate it.

See: William T Cavanaugh Torture and Eucharist (Blackwells 1998)

Haiku

An eighty percent
chance of rain; tomorrow is
only probable.

Photographs torn up,
memories maimed; I am left
with storyless frames.

 

Two Haiku

Mice live fast. No breath
for poems. Just for basics:
birth, food, sex, birth, death.

Autumn's gilt tarnished
to parchment; pauper winter
spits ice at my door. 

Mrs Spelling

I knew Mrs Spelling for the last ten years of her life. Next week I will take her funeral but she deserves an obituary of sorts on a medium she never grasped.

She was always Mrs Spelling to me, never Edith. It was strange to see her in hospital or the home (such a misnomer) and to hear her called Edith or Edie.

Even ten years ago she was odd. She had an obsession with money - not so much with hoarding it, though she was always careful, as with the exact cost of everything. It made no difference that the next time she told me what something had cost the figure was different, it was always exact to the penny.

She had a sweet tooth. I remember her stuffing chocolate cake into her mouth at a meal; and she ate biscuits one after the other. Yet we had to move her to a home when she had almost come to a complete stop, having forgotten to eat.

The home was good to her. She was fed and rehydrated: 'What's the food like?' I'd ask, regularly. 'Alright,' she'd say, and then would laugh at the the unbelievable behaviour of some people: 'sometimes it's soup, you know.' I remember her oblivious incontinence and her little smile.

She'd been a headteacher and was proud of her B Ed. gained through distance learning decades earlier, though where the school was and which University had awarded her degree used to vary. She was also proud of winning a swimming competition as a schoolgirl nearly seventy years ago. I know she learnt to dance in her sixties and once, before that, had a husband, but these were things she hardly mentioned. The rest of her life is entirely opaque to me.

Her children came to see her as regularly as they could, but lived away and it wasn't easy for them to get up regularly. She was always proud of them, of what she could remember they'd told her of their lives, and even at the end she knew they'd been, and there would be fresh flowers.

But the last ten years at least have been difficult and sad. She has taken a long time dying, her world shrinking by inches, and death for her was just a small final step.

Only now

Dan Simmons, Olympos (brilliant, energetic, completely off the wall, like going through a hole into someone's nightmare, highly reccommended - though I would distance myself from his characterisation of Muslims as world-destroying fanatics).  Anyway, he has Orphu of Io say:
'What is reality except a standing quantum wavefront collapsing through probability states? ... How does the human mind work except as a sort of interferometer perceiving and collapsing those very wavefronts?' (Orion Books, 2006, p. 545)

Or, less exactly: there is only now. And human imagination.

He also has: 'Context is to data what water is to a dolphin.' p. 554.

Anyway, there is only now. But we incapable of living in 'now': we can only live with a narrative of past and future, of continuity and change, of essence and ephemeral, of self in time and place. We live in context. Or, we continually create context by which to make sense of the 'now' we are living in. That is, we make our world personally and corporately in the context of the world continually being made for us.