‘Kim the Bulletproof Tank Engine’

As a child in the sixties I enjoyed reading a series of books about Thomas the Tank Engine. In colourful illustrations and simple words they told of the charming antics of anthropomorphized locomotives as they criss-crossed Britain.. Thomas and his locomotive friends remain classics, and the series is very much still in print, and I couldn’t help thinking of Thomas and co. when I read the news about Kim Jong-un’s visit to Russia, which is still on-going as I write this post.

For the tin-pot despot has his own personal bulletproof train that is so heavily armoured it can travel no faster than 37 mph. It’s a rather natty dark green with yellow trim. Here it is shown chugging through North Korea:

And here is Thomas the Tank Engine:

By coincidence Thomas first appeared in the second book in the series, published in 1946 (the first came out in 1945). That means it was published the same time that in far away Korea Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Kim Il Sung, was put in place by Stalin to eventually become, in 1948, the ruler of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It therefore seems oddly appropriate that a regime that’s essentially stuck in a time-warp back in that epoch should be using such a characterful locomotive so evocative of those times in the 2020’s.

I think it would be nice to write an up-dated locomotion story called Kim the Bulletproof Tank Engine. But I doubt it would have the kind of happy ending to make it a children’s classic, although maybe today’s children are inherently more cynical than my generation. I don’t believe that for a minute, by the way! Thankfully, children are always born optimists and stay that way for a remarkably long time..

*

The news that Putin and Kim were meeting in Vladivostock led me to wonder yet again about their people’s credulity and compliance - their willingness to support or at least tolerate despotism. As I’ve already discussed in previous posts, an obvious explanation is fear. Protest carries a very high price, especially in North Korea. But it seems wrong to believe that the citizens of Russia and North Korea all live in abject fear. The evidence suggests they do not. One explanation is that a sufficient number are given a small bite from the cherry of power. The residents of Pyongyang, for instance, have a relatively secure standard of living. The story is very different in the provinces. But as long as the cadres close to the leadership are seduced into loyalty through adequate material, cognitive, and emotional rewards, their obedience is guaranteed without brandishing a cudgel. The same seems to be the case in Russia. Another important explanation is the obvious fact is that most people are not heroes. All they want is to live their lives protected from the possibility of unbearable uncertainty, and it doesn’t really matter how the uncertainty is assuaged.

In fact, people will believe in the most ridiculous things in order to achieve the cherished sense of security. It might even be the case that the more ridiculous the belief is, the better. Both historically and today, millions believe in nonsense, and it certainly seems to make them less insecure. It might even be the case that the more a belief departs from what can be factually verified, the more secure people feel in embracing it. In other words, the leap of faith is a way of minimizing uncertainty.

*

The meeting between the two tin-pot dictators was a great media event. In fact, maybe that was its primary function. During the parts that were made public, they both spouted the usual bullshit.

But, really! How can Putin get away with calling the Ukrainian regime ‘Nazi’ or Kim talk of his regime as as ‘democracy’? It seems obvious to us in the ‘free world’ that these are grotesque lies. But apparently, many Russians and North Koreans believe. They believe because they are lies based on a historical truth.

What Putin has done by invoking Nazism is to draw on the collective and traumatic memory of real events and spun it into a web within which to capture Russian people’s fealty in the present.

This is possible because, as neurologists show, our minds deal not with the direct processing of stimuli but in predictions. That is, we deal with what we already believe to be the case. We draw on ‘priors’ - memories, habits, and social consensus - to make sense of the uncertainty of unfolding experience. Whenever something unfamiliar presents itself we feel it as a ‘prediction error’, and this is uncomfortable and potentially fear inducing. We reduce the force of this negative affect and emotion by doing one of three things: we bend the meaning of the stimulus so its conforms to what we already know; we ignore it altogether; or we struggle to adjust our prediction to accommodate the stimulus. The last option involves imaginative growth, experiential development, openness to surprise. The other two are instinctual responses that totalitarian regime lean on in order to maintain their grasp on power. They know that humans will either adjust a new experience so it conforms to experiences already safely processed, or that they will ignore the experience altogether. Either way, the result is to guarantee a remarkable level of social conformity rooted in very deep seated fear of existential uncertainty.

But there is an ultimately optimistic possibility to draw from the fact that Putin brandishes the ‘Nazi’ slur and Kim talks about ‘democracy’. It is that, seemingly paradoxically, even these monsters recognize that people are fundamentally good. People live with positive values that prioritise the desire for personal freedom and the flourishing of society. That’s why even when they are perpetrating crimes against humanity they are obliged to wrap their heinous deeds in noble attire. It is therefore unlikely that anyone will publicly describe their barbaric acts as barbaric.

However, the despots nevertheless end up naming their crimes through accusing their enemies of what they are themselves responsible. We can therefore hold the words despots speak up in a mirror so they are reflected back upon them. For, in accusing others of being, say, ‘Nazis’, Putin is actually very accurately naming his regime’s own crimes.

Try the mirror trick. This is text from a speech made by Putin when he ordered troops into Ukraine on February 24rd, 2022:

“Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous, bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.”

And now, let’s hold these words up in the mirror, where it becomes something nearer to the truth:

“Its goal is to subject the people of Ukraine to bullying and genocide. And for this we will strive for the militarisation and nazification of Ukraine, as well as refusing to bring to justice those who committed numerous, bloody crimes against civilians.”

NOTES

The images of Kim’s train are sourced from : https://www.npr.org/2023/09/11/1198781448/kim-jong-un-vladimir-putin-meeting-north-korea-russia

The image of Thomas the Tank Engine is sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Tank_Engine#/media/File:Thomas_the_Tank_Engine_1946.webp

For more on the mind and ‘prediction” see, Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), available on Amazon at::

https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action-Embodied/dp/0190217014

The Putin quotation is taken from: https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/in-putins-words-why-russia-invaded-ukraine/

The Bully (Part 1)

A still from the movie Class of 1984.

In my previous post I discussed what makes one person stand up to a leader or a tyrannical system, and other people – most - just try to stay out of harms way, or even to become facilitators and accomplices. In this post I want to think about the person who’s causing all the sorrow. It’s probably fear of the bully.

We all remember being bullied at school. I had the misfortune of going to all-boys grammar school in a small provincial seaside town in England in the 1970s that was founded on what might be called the Bully Principle, or maybe just ‘traditional educational values’. It was all about discipline enforced through playing endlessly, and often ingenuously in a sadist sort of way, on us children’s vulnerabilities. Eastbourne Grammar school in the early 1970s was intimidation and bullying from top to bottom.  The teachers (or many of them) did it, the Prefects did it, the Sub-Prefects did it, the older boys did it to the younger boys, and the bigger boys did it to the smaller boys of the same age. As a result, my school life from age 11 to sixteen was full of dread.

A bully must remind people on a regular basis that that’s what they are, which, as a typical dictionary definition has it, is ‘a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.’ But what exactly did these bullies at school want?  Power?  Prestige? Glamour? Status? Love? Attention? Revenge? I suppose, all of the above, which means they wanted what we all want to a greater or lesser extent but are willing to share with others, or to leave unobtained. The bully, by contrast, thinks there’s only one person who can have these things, and so they must make sure that the others don’t. And the best way to do that is by keeping them down and keeping them fearful.  Vulnerability is therefore perceived by a bully as a sign that someone is inherently weak and  inferior, and if they are shown to be weak and inferior, they cannot be a threat.

Most people – let’s say the Russian populace who are not either part of the state’s organs of repression nor active protesters, like Marina Ovsyannikova whom I discussed in my previous post, the tv news editor who ‘invaded’ the news programme she worked for recently, and held up a banner saying the Russian people should not believe the propaganda – are basically OK with the limited power they can obtain by conforming with the status quo, keeping out of trouble, cooperating with others, and having a secure and good enough time. Some are OK with colluding with the bullies so that they won’t get bullied themselves, or with doing some minor bullying themselves. But a few hard cases think they can only have enough power if others don’t have any. This is because they think there just isn’t enough to go round. In other words, bullying is a zero-sum game. It’s winner takes all.

Which explains Putin, to some extent.

***

George Orwell, 1917. shortly after leaving St. Cyprian’s in Eastbourne.

I went to school in the same town as George Orwell, who was at a Prep School named St. Cyprians before going on to Wellington and Eton. This school had ceased to exist by the 1970s, but when I was recently back in my hometown I noticed for the first time a plaque marking the place where it once was.  At St. Cyprians, Orwell said he was often bullied. As a young adult, between 1922 and 1927, he was a member of the Imperial Police in Burma.  There, he had plenty more chances to witness officially sanctioned bullying, and to resist the temptation to do it himself.  

In an article Orwell wrote for Tribune, published on November 29, 1946, he reflected on the topic of bullying, which, in a sense, is his fundamental theme:

It is commonly assumed that what human beings want is to be comfortable.  Well, we now have it in our power to be comfortable, as our ancestors had not.  Nature may occasionally hit back with an earthquake or a cyclone, but by and large she is beaten.  And yet exactly at the moment when there is, or could be, plenty of everything for everybody, nearly our whole energies have to be taken up in trying to grab territories, markets and raw materials from one another.  Exactly at the moment when wealth might be so generally diffused that no government need fear serious opposition, political liberty is declared to be impossible and half the world is ruled by secret police forces.  Exactly at the moment when superstition crumbles and a rational attitude towards the universe becomes feasible, the right to think one’s own thoughts is denied as never before.  The fact is that human beings only started fighting one another in earnest when there was no longer anything to fight about.

He concluded:

The desire for pure power seems to be much more dominant than the desire for wealth.  This has often been pointed out, but curiously enough the desire for power seems to be taken for granted as a natural instinct, equally prevalent in all ages, like the desire for food.  Actually it is no more natural, in the sense of being biologically necessary, than drunkenness or gambling.  And if it has reached new levels of lunacy in our own age, as I think it has, then the question becomes:  What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others?  If we could answer that question—seldom asked, never followed up—there might occasionally be a bit of good news on the front page of your morning paper.

This is an excellent question to ask. “What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others?”  Why is “pure power” so appealing? Is modern life really especially prone to idolizing ‘pure power’, thereby also idolizing those who achieve and maintain it? Is Nietzsche’s vision of the master/slave relationship, and his admiration for the master (which the Nazis found especially appealing) a prognosis of human nature in general, or was he diagnosing the symptoms of a specifically modern sickness, as Orwell suggests? Are we talking about a fundamental human weakness for power, and of a weakness of the weak for the powerful who oppress them, or some modern perversion?  

Of course, as Nietzsche knew very well, it’s misleading to talk about ‘human nature’ as if it’s  something fixed and essential. We are socially constructed. The raw material of our biological nature places limits on the range of this construction, but it doesn’t fully determine what we end up being. There’s a kind of feedback loop in which a society reinforces certain preferential traits, and often these are very far removed from what Evolution has in mind. Think of religion and ideology. These do not simply mirror the apparently pristine state of human nature. They are social constructions that feed on themselves, and this leads to weird and grotesque versions of what ‘human nature’ is. Take the God of the Old Testament, for instance. He’s certainly not something that Evolutionary theory would expect to appear.  Or, take Kimilsungism-kimjongilism, the reigning creed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea…….

So, is Orwell correct in thinking that modern society is especially prone to idolizing the bully? It must have looked like that in 1946. But surely less so in 1946 than in 1940. After all, the Allies had just defeated Hitler, the ace bully on the Western block. True, Stalin was very much still there. In fact, the Cold War was just getting under way, and China was about to get its very own super-bully. But shouldn’t the fact that an alliance of liberal democracies thoroughly defeated totalitarian Germany and Japan - with, it has to be added, quite a lot of help from Stalinist Russia - suggest that things were not as bleak as Orwell thought, certainly not as bleak as the novel he was soon to write, Nineteen Eighty-Four, makes out: a dystopian vision captured by the harrowing words of O’Brian: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”? If this is really true, then there is surely no hope at all that we can successfully oppose the Bully Principle, or at least minimize the damage done.  

There are plenty of examples from the present day to suggest Orwell is correct. Russia, for instance.

And yet…..

History shows that humans have always grudgingly admired might. After all, in less civilized times, ‘might was right,’ and you’d have been dumb not to respect it. And old habits die slowly. Very slowly. Over millennia.

The point Orwell is making, however, it that this behaviour, or more significantly, people’s respect for it, may have made sound if regrettable sense in the past, but in modern times had become much less essential, and therefore a seeming anomaly. Orwell couldn’t understand why it is that a society that has managed to gain such secure levels of comfort and control over nature would still wants to idolize the archaic bully.

Maybe the cult of the bully is a negative consequence of the Enlightenment’s declaration that everyone is born free and equal. Ideally, this is a wonderful vision of social justice in the future. But it could also be a recipe for social injustice. It could make someone think that life really is a zero-sum game. If there are no traditional hierarchies serving as entrenched checks and balances, then it really is a case of if you don’t stop others having the pie there won’t be any left. The individual within a competitive meritocratic system  sees a level playing field in which the most ruthless are the winners.

***

The majority of people do not “habitually seek to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.” After all, it’s hard work, and likely to end in tears – the bully’s own, as well as the vulnerable’s  – because if bullying is a zero-sum game, then logically speaking, it’s only a matter of time before someone else grabs your pie.

There are many ways to theorize or explain why some people think life is just winners and losers. Psychologists point to the childhood of a bully, and argue that a cruel father or mother, or cruel siblings or relatives, or the wrong choice of friend, or sadistic teachers, set in train the compulsion to repeat the traumatic experience of being powerless and dealing with it in the same way that you were once dealt with. Sociologists refer to environmental  conditions of deprivation or alienation, or conditions that in one way or another encourage bullying. But there is no overarching explanation for why bullies are bullies in general, or of why a few people perceive powerlessness as caused by a finite amount of  a resource that is non-shareable.

But with a Russian arch bully currently grabbing headlines, one might feel like asking if there is something specifically about Russians - or certain peoples - that makes them prone to idolize bully-types? It’s a risky question, as it suggests there’s an essential ‘Russian-ness’ to be analyzed. But there isn’t. Peoples’ societies evolve. For example, none of the liberal democracies have always been liberal democracies, of course. The places where they are now more or less well established were previously ruled by fairly freely-operating bullies: absolute monarchs, for instance.

Sources:

George Orwell, ‘The Impulse to Bully Others’, Tribune, 29 November 1946. http://alexpeak.com/twr/titbo/

‘Class of 1984’ photo: https://reelrundown.com/movies/The-Top-10-Best-High-School-Gang-Films

Orwell photo: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/engelsineastbourne/2020/11/16/george-orwell-and-st-cyprians-school/

Which one are you?

Marina Ovsyannikova interrupts the Russian state television news to protest against the war in the Ukraine. A still grabbed from the video available on The Guardian’s website ((https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/marina-ovsyannikova-russia-propaganda-putin)

When I saw the photograph above, I was led, perhaps like you, to ask myself an uncomfortable question: in such a situation, which one of these two people was I more likely to be, the newsreader or the woman holding the anti-war banner?  

Of course, I would like to think I’d be the latter, that I would have the principles and the guts to risk my comfortable future, perhaps even my life, because I believed in standing up to the orchestrated state aggression being perpetrated in my name. But what are the psychological and statistical odds that this really is the case?

Evidence coming from schoolyard to totalitarian regime shows that most people do not take risks like this anti-war protester, Marina Ovsyannikova. They will be like the newsreader, Ekaterina Andreeva, or the cameraman, the programme producer, the editor, the make-up lady. They will be silent. They will not rock the boat. They will  maintain the status quo. But of course, they will not admit that this means they are also complicit in horrible levels of violence and oppression going on.

We humans all basically want three things: to survive, to feel attached to others, and to have a sense of control over our lives. We will do almost anything to guarantee we don’t die, are not alone, and our secure existence is guaranteed into the future.  To ensure we get them, we are obliged to conform with the status quo. This inevitably entails compromising our innate sense of what is just and fair. For it seems a tragic fact of life that, while we all know instinctively what is right, we are willing to turn a blind eye to get the sense of security we need.

The most obvious reason not to speak out is fear. It’s clear that Putin will ruthlessly punish anyone who steps out of line. This fear if often freely admitted, but other times, rationalized excuses are offered.  A very common one is: “I have a family.” Another is: “What’s the point, protest is useless?” Another is:  “I am resisting in subtle ways, I am only  ‘playing the game’ just for now.”  A news report by Denis Kataev in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/marina-ovsyannikova-russia-propaganda-putin)  added a specific example: ‘A source I know at VGTRK, the state media holding company, has said that many others at the main news programme were considering resigning, and the mood among remaining employees was nasty. They said: “If we didn’t have our mortgages, we would quit too.”’ Other excuses can feign or rationalize a commitment to the status quo: “I believe that, were it not for Putin, Russia would descend into anarchy. OK. I don’t agree with everything he does. But the alternative would be much worse.” Some - the weirdest of all, really - are fellow-travelers who are there out of ideological or religious conviction. Despite all the evidence that can be marshaled against the version of reality and truth to which they adhere, they will remain faithful. Indeed, evidence, or reasoned argument, are not significant determining factors. The ‘leap of faith’ is also a leap into fantasy.

But actually, all these dissembling alibis or motives are based on one sort of optimistic fantasy or another. An optimistic fantasy has two broad features: narrative structure, in the sense that we construct a plausible story-line, and an egotistical ideal, a way of maintaining self-esteem. The optimistic fantasy makes the story we tell efficacious (I am the bread-winner, and have people who depend on me.”) They help us imagine that some  - enough - of our desires have been satisfied (“After all. I have a family, live in a society which offers mortgages and well-paid jobs in the media.”). But optimistic fantasizing inevitably detracts from one’s ability to turn intention into action, and distracts from the ability to form plans responsive to real-world obstacles. It also disposes one to expect that things will improve, and that reality is better than is actually is.

This means we are all inclined to approach situations having already decided to shield ourselves from anything that could puncture our vulnerable sense of security. We cushion ourselves from unwelcome facts.   We will explain terrible events so that we can put  distance between them and us, and circumscribe their impact on us. In other words, we make excuses to lessen the impact of current and potential awfulness.

To this end, we externalize the awfulness by placing the blame on factors beyond our immediate social world and outside our control.  We tell ourselves that we really can’t do anything about it, and that we have more tangible and real responsibilities - a mortgage to pay, children to raise, grandparents to care for. We evaluate the awfulness going on around us as just temporary. We say that things will improve.  We conclude that, actually, things are really not so awful here and now. The awfulness is happening in some other places and to some other people. It doesn’t concern me.

Does this mean we are mostly all cowards? Probably. Life is about getting by, after all. We can’t all be heroes. But we are mostly not bullies or tyrants. We are, however, complicit with bullies and tyrants, because  by trying to keep our head down and being shallowly optimistic we make the bullies and tyrants possible.

So, I suppose this means I’m the newsreader.

But why did Marina Ovsyannikova do what she did? What turned her from a complicit cog in the tyranny machine into a heroic protester, a beacon of light?Apparently, according to another news item I read, a Russian colleague confided that up till that moment Marina Ovsyannikova had mostly been interested to talk about her dogs, clothes, and home.  She was definitely not a member of Pussy Riot. In her video statement she admitted she was someone who had played along, worked quietly for the state media propaganda machine, served the status quo. But something had forced her to stop making excuses or staying in the mental shallows so she could enjoy life’s little pleasures. What was it?

Interestingly, in the video she released Marina Ovsyannikova mentioned that her father was Ukrainian and her mother Russian. So, the war had a very personal dimension. It struck her as not just a war, or even a civil war, but as a repudiation of who she biologically and culturally was as a human being. In other words, the war was not an abstraction, something that could relatively easily be dealt with through dissembling. It was horribly personal.

This fact made me think of something I’d recently read which the American philosopher Richard Rorty wrote about Martin Heidegger in an essay from 1990 called ‘On Heidegger’s Nazism.’ Rorty asked himself what would have stopped Heidegger being a Nazi and behaving as he did. Another kind of thinker might have searched for some ideological, philosophical, or spiritual leverage. But Rorty asks us to imagine something very tangible, something very human:

Imagine that in the summer of 1930 Heidegger suddenly finds himself deeply in love with a beautiful, intense, adoring philosophy student named Sara Mandelbaum. Sarah is Jewish, but Heidegger barely notices this, dizzy with passion as he is. After a painful divorce from Elfride [his real-life wife] – a process that costs him the friendship of, among other people, the Husserls – Heidegger marries Sarah in 1932. In January 1933 they have a son, Abraham.

The point is that, had such a love affair actually happened, Heidegger would almost certainly not have given his support to the Nazis and condoned their antisemitism. If Heidegger had been personally involved in the tragedy of the Holocaust through love of a Jewess, and so gained intimacy through her with her culture, he would have been unable to have the beliefs and opinions he did regarding the racist nationalism of the Nazis. In other words, for something to really affect us it needs to be personally felt. It is very unlikely that we will be willing to sacrifice our secure lives for something abstract. And the chances are, if we did feel driven to action by some abstraction, we would be tempted to act in precisely the manner of those we thought we were opposing, because our actions do not come from empathy and compassion but from impersonal principles. Only when we act from genuine compassion, from personal experience of the Golden Rule - ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, or ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ - can genuine resistance to oppression be launched.

This means that one of the primary ways in which the powerful maintain their power is by alienating us from each other. How do they do this? There are plenty of tools at hand. Some are very old, like a religion that teaches that only those who believe in our God are worthy of compassion. Or like a political ideology, which teaches that only our race or our class or our nation is worthy.  If one was to be especially gloomy about the human prospect, one might argue that it is almost impossible for people to extend the net of compassion much further than immediate biological family, or at most, their tribe. One might then conclude that being human means being aggressively sectarian. But then, the fact that almost all world traditions have sooner or later come up with a variation on the Golden Rule, suggests that this is being too pessimistic. For example, the xenophobic bully-God of the Old Testament was superseded by the Christ of the New Testament who said, “love they neighbour as thyself.” (Not that Christianity has in practice done very well on that score.)

In the modern age, the mass media have greatly extended the means through which the powerful can divide and rule us, making the Golden Rule difficult to live by, even as communication technology has turned the world into a ‘global village’. It has also created new kinds of warring tribe. The Internet and social media, in fact - all the visual communication media - have probably helped make us more compassionate. Images are more emotive. More conduits for empathy. Think of all the pictures from Ukraine, and how they create affective bonds much more effectively than words. But information overload breeds indifference, and greatly facilitates those who for one reason or another want to bully and cause pain. And images can be a poor basis for genuine compassion: because they work on our emotions, they short-circuit of rational faculties. The Golden Rule is not just about feelings. It is a considered, rational principle based on empathetic experience.

So, it is especially poignant that Marina Ovsyannikova worked for Russian state television. Because the media can be used to expose the powerful as well as protect it, those who crave absolute power can truck no genuine freedom of speech. Here is Denis Kataev in The Guardian article:

The programme she protested on, Vremya, is a legacy of the former USSR. It is perhaps the most prestigious news show on Russian TV. For millions, it is part of a daily habit for years, even decades, to watch the big evening news at 9pm.

Fitting for its Soviet beginnings, it has been an ideological weapon for decades, shoring up the government with strict pro-regime coverage. It is not subtle. The hosts look like robots, or Soviet or North Korean broadcasters. Just watch when Ovsyannikova makes her shocking move. The host Ekaterina Andreeva doesn’t even bat an eyelid. It doesn’t compute. I’m not sure she even sees herself as a propagandist, just a person with a social mission. This didn’t fit into it, and she – along with all the others – had no response.

If the Golden Rule is ultimately the only genuine way to fight tyranny, then that means the more cosmopolitan - the more open - a society is the more likely it will be to recognize that justice must be extended to all. At the very least, a cosmopolitan society will act to ensure that there are checks and balances in place to hinder those who want to divide and rule ruthlessly.

Total Lies and Half-Truths

One of the places I go to hear alternative points of view on what’s going on in the world is Russell Brand’s podcasts on YouTube. Usually, I appreciate his irreverent but compassionate take on things. But in a recent podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=595Esg6Mz0U) on the war in the Ukraine I found myself being very troubled by something he said.

Brand claimed that we are so ‘knowing’ about the ways of the world that we recognize that “everyone’s a ‘bad guy’ now.” He meant we can’t any longer sustain the illusion that any war is fought between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, as was the case, say, during World War Two. We are too aware of how any claim to the moral high ground conceals mendacity, greed, and the will to power. For instance, Brand mentioned the way in which the mainstream media stokes the fire of war because it increases ratings, how the armaments industry is set to make huge profits, and how the USA and NATO may have forced Putin’s hand.  

But to claim that this means we must proceed in general to make judgments from a position that considers everyone is a ‘bad guy’ is obviously a failure of the imagination.  First of all, it’s logically impossible, because if no one is a ‘good guy’, then no one is a ‘bad guy’ either, insofar as the two positions must be relative to each other, and possess their meaning by being in a binary pairing. You can’t have a sense of what is bad without also having a sense of what is good. Brand’s comment is like saying that because not everyone passes the moral test 100%, then no one does. 

As if to help me get my head around Brand’s comment, I came across a piece by the professor of journalism and political science Peter Beinart in The Guardian entitled ‘Russia speaks total lies. That doesn’t diminish America’s half-truths’ (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/26/russia-lies-america-half-truths). Beinart seemed to be reflecting on the same problem – that of claiming moral equivalence because  we can no longer see issues in clear black-and-white terms. He quoted the Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler, who in 1943 at the height of the war against Hitler, wrote: “In this war we are fighting against a total lie in the name of a half-truth.” Beinart noted: “That’s a good motto for American progressives to adopt in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”  

Implicit in Koestler’s wise insight is the recognition that morality is  a spectrum not a see-saw.  You can be very far from speaking the unblemished truth and still be a lot closer to it than someone else – Putin, for example.  In other words, there are ‘bad guys’ and ‘good guys.’ You just have to see that some are more bad than others, and some are so bad that they must be condemned wholeheartedly, even though one also recognizes that this means bracketing out a lot of the misgivings that under less extreme circumstances would challenge one to dissent.  

This is obviously not the time to be berating the USA, Europe, or NATO for all their many failures. In fact, amongst much else, this crisis is a reminder that the critical intellectual and activist juggernaut that exposes systemic racism and sexism, political chicanery and greed,  within our own society is a luxury of peaceful times made possible by the relatively smooth functioning of the ‘open’ society that is the focus of the progressives’ critique.

Which isn’t to say that such critique shouldn’t be undertaken!

What is ultimately at stake here is a way of seeing things that reduces them to simple moral choices - the fallacy that Brand himself is so adamant to draw attention to. He is usually excellent at revealing how complex any given issue is, but is clearly not up to the challenge in this case.

This recognition also led me consider how Brand’s usual focus of criticism – that most crises are usually caused by people wanting money and power – cannot be a sufficient explanation in many cases. Putin, for example, is not primarily motivated by either money or power. His motivation lies somewhere near the kind that religion channels, but in our secular age are more commonly driven by ideology. An Ideology is not just a cloak under which to conceal the desire for money of power  - although it is also this. An ideology is not only about abstractions. Rather, an ideology  addresses very basic and very real human anxieties – above all, perhaps, the need to have a confident sense of mastery, security, and attachment to others. Totalitarianism’s enforcement of ideology, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968), “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man." This is what gives Putin the capacity to lie.   

Brand knows that today we cannot ignore all the plentiful  signs of  violence, war, genocide,  sexism, slavery, economic exploitation,  inequality,   dehumanizing technology, and catastrophic ecological despoliation. He is aware that there is a  huge  distance  between how things should be and how they actually are.  Wars  proliferate endlessly, racism and sectarianism  is on the rise.   1% of the planet’s human population own 82% of the wealth; if  the United States was an apple pie, the top 20%   are currently helping themselves to  90%.   The fragmentary and speeded-up nature of our culture distinguishes  it from all others  in  ways that have shattered the old hierarchies.  Especially in the west, for those educated within the  secular humanist ideology, modernity is characterized by disenchantment and disillusion. The experience of what Heidegger called ‘groundlessness’,   the  loss of faith in a convincing ‘grand narrative’ through which to securely establish and maintain faith in the meaningfulness of existence,  has led to a pervasive yet intangible feeling of disillusionment, anxiety, resentment,  and inner void.  

Let’s not beat about the bush: Brand is flirting with nihilism, literally, ‘nothing-at-all-ism’. The term defines  one of the most significant tendencies in modern culture. In the nineteenth century,  as the Russian novelist Ivan  Turgenev has one of the characters declare In Fathers and Sons,  it became a way of describing  “a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.” For Friedrich Nietzsche,  nihilism was an inevitable  consequence of the Enlightenment.  The idea of the  Christian God furnished the faithful with a sense of absolute worth in a world in which  they believed they were masters, and where there was the possibility of attaining knowledge of  ultimate meaning.  But science left  no place for such an omnipotent God, and the value system which belief in God produced. Everything could  now be explained without him, and so, “God is dead, and we killed him.’  But as  Nietzsche also saw,  while this Christian God may be ‘dead,’   modern people still  mainly clung onto  a mindset  that forged centuries before around God’s image.  As a result, nihilism  bred in the empty void created between what modern  humans value and how the world appears to be. Being a nihilist requires removing God from the world and then recognizing that the world is now  lacking something. Life now seems devoid of meaning, because the  old values are  absent. Those who collectively gave birth to the secular Enlightenment had  believed that it was possible to transfer the values of the religious world to the purely human realm,  safeguarding  citizens from the dangers of a loss of meaning, inequality of life, and the  rule of the strong over the weak.   But the project tragically failed. No credible metaphysical framework was created to replace the one once provided by Christianity. Slowly but surely, faith in progress was replaced by a pervasive sense of dread. 

But Nietzsche believed that   nihilism was not only a disaster. It does  not simply have to be a passively endured condition, and  could also be an opportunity.  Nietzsche identified what he termed ‘passive’ and ‘active forms of nihilism. Nietzsche saw that ‘passive’ nihilism involved  the perpetual search for the original values that were once  embodied in religion and tradition. In this sense, nihilism is inevitably wedded to pessimism, and to the disjunction between the  world we can imagine and the one we must live in.  The  passive nihilist sees that the world they inhabit does not correspond to the one they recall or have been led to expect, and so  they accuse this world  failing to provide them with the sustenance they need.  There can only ever  be temporary  distractions from the crushing  reality of the empty void  within which they are forced to exist, and  this offers no enduring consolation.  The passive nihilist is  forced to live in a world that doesn’t provide them with a sense of purpose, but at the same time seems to them to suit others very well.  It is the world  that is at fault, or rather the people who seem to be profiting from this world while  they are made to suffer. It is the politicians who control government, the one percent who get ever richer, the wreckers of the planet, the wired cosmopolitans of the global network, the foreigners who steal jobs.  

But Nietzsche also identified what he saw as a second kind of nihilism, which he called ‘active.’  The recognition of life’s fundamental meaninglessness then  serves to free those strong enough to embrace nihilism, who know that  they can  do whatever they want,  and can create their own purpose.  Nihilism then empowers.   The  ‘active’ nihilist embraces destructive action against what they recognize to be an empty value system.  Because this system is based on reason, they pursue the irrational, and because it is founded on obedience to the moral law, they flout conventional morality.  They embrace the will to power, and through their actions prepare the way for the overcoming of nihilism.  They no longer conform to the values and standards of  the society within which the unenlightened masses live like obedient cattle, because they have seen through the sham. 

‘Active nihilism’ seems to be what Brand endorses. But it is tragically evident that this posture of defiance becomes the pretext for believing that the most ‘honest’ and ‘honourable’  actions are those that are taken in  pursuit of one’s own self-interest. If there is no purpose to existence - if everyone is a ‘bad guy’ - then one may well conclude that only one’s own profit counts. In this sense, so-called ‘active’ nihilism becomes little more than an intellectual justification for behaving in ways that are immoral and selfish.  

Now, I of course know Brand would wholly disagree with this prognosis, and his goals are far from immoral and selfish. But it is the unforeseen consequences of holding the views he does that worries me. The course of history since Nietzsche’s time  has revealed that the commonest outcome of a sense of meaninglessness  has been destructive violence motivated by the  anger and resentment that arises when there is an unbridgeable  chasm between hopes and expectations and the  social reality that always thwarts these aspirations.