belief

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=hitchens_28_1

Political and economic culture part deux

The previous post contained a distillation of Will Hutton’s deconstruction of the USA as an economic and political beacon for the UK to follow.

He admonishes us to look away from US to Europe. Its a powerful argument so long as we don’t oversimplify the issues.

For UK sustainable development our culture, via the Government (and enterprise culture as a whole) needs to enable economic development and growth in the longer term by reducing (penalising?) the short termist, shareholder-profit focus of ‘US style’ companies. This in favour of a holistic approach that treats staff (and even customers) as owners, or at least stakeholders, of the business (some of these do exist in the UK already, of course), and not disposable commodities after the US model.

Underlying this is a need to not only accept that ’society’ exists and has a culture that is not like that oif the US, and to embrace it and encourage participation as part of corporate life and its interaction with the rest of life. The ’social contract’. The US pays lip service but its a fundamentally dog-eat-dog society where individual freedom is paramount over all as enshrined in the Constitution, and thus US society fragments and Ghetto-ises even the rich (gated communities anyone?).

The ‘West’ would do better with the US on-side, no doubt. But not the current neo-con US, thank you very much. Gore’s ‘defeat’ in 2000 has been a major stumbling block to ‘world progress’ in my book, and possibly Will’s.

So what does he suggest as an alternative?

Europe.

Not a cow-towing enslavement to Europe but an engagement, with our own solutions where approriate. He also feels that we can heal many of our own ills. An example is pension provision. Barbera Castle, in the mid 1970’s, proposed a system of national pension to exist in parallel with private mechanisms and extend national insurance. This now appears remarkably insightful, and its very sad that it never came to be. Many people face an uncertain old age in the UK because of the pensions debacle and will have to rely on the generosity of future Governments. Many European countries have similar better state pension systems, and if they are struggling in some ways, its only because they are being cautious and saving to meet the  needs of thier elderly – we’ve not been doing in the UK, and that’s really worrying.

The social contract – a theme repeated in the book, one pretty absent from UK politics for some decades. And yet many of us do not want to go the American way of widening the poverty gap, social incohesion, fundamentalism and human value secondary to shareholder value – short term profit focus as opposed to the longer term view taken in Europe.

What do we (as British people) want that the US population is systematically being denied?

- high quality public services (health, education, local services)
- properly functioning and non stigmatised public transport
- decent social provision

All traditional Labour calling cards. Only this time, Labour have been acting very Conservative.

Gordon Brown’s government will be judged, at least by me, on how he addresses these points while hopefully, edging us away from the vacuous and ethicallybankrupt US neo-con model.

The World We’re In (Will Hutton)

Amazing book. Some key bits:

Religion and the US:

His contention is that the US overall political outlook is driven largely by the philosophical work of Leo Strauss (Natural Rights and History, Chicago University Press, 1953), a refugee from the Nazis promoting the ‘virtuous, morally cenreted citizen’ who must ‘face the consequenses of thier individual actions’ (i.e. law but without the State regulating too much). A key point is his view that religion and nationalism are two of the best ways to ‘entrench virtue’ . ‘Even if religion were bunk and its moral codes impossible to maintian, the task of the educated elite was to keep quiet and maintain the fiction in the name of order‘. And thus of course he’s only stating what many a leader / government has done over the centuries. But remember – Bush et al are living by these maxims. To me this is more dangerous than secularism and will lead to further polarisation of view and the movement of the US away from rationality. It is as Hatton says, a ‘lethal legacy’.

The mirage of the American Dream:

Bottom 20% of US population are locked in to poverty due to lack of available education and lack of social ’safetly nets’ – analyses have found that poor folk in the US are LESS likely to escape the poverty trap than in the UK, Europe, Canada and even if they do, are more likely to return. 54% of people in the bottom 20% in the 60s were still there in the 90s, but only 1% had migrated to the top 20% (all of this is publically available research). So much for ’social mobility’. For the middle 60% – economics is on a long term down term with stagnating wages, and a crazy mortgage system that is worse than the UK already and getting worse all the time (and part of the cause of the current ‘credit markets flutter’). The top 20% are doing fine of course, as the system remains geared to them.

There’s more on why the UK should look more to Europe. One for later.

Unintelligent Design

Evolution a ‘theory’?

A scientific theory is not a guess or an approximation but an extensive explanation developed from well-documented and reproducible sets of data based on repeated observations of natural processes (Stephen J. Gould, 1994).

Another one; as Theodosius Dobzhansky said “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”