General Election 2017

That is a headline that was never supposed to be written. We have fixed term parliaments now. The date of the next General Election has been known since 2010. First Thursday in May 2020. The 7^th in case you were wondering.

At the time of writing it is three hours since Theresa May emerged into the Downing Street spring sunshine to say that she has reluctantly decided that there is no alternative to an early poll. She seems to believe that it will strengthen her hand in the Brexit negotiations in some ill-defined manner. Clearly she also sees an opportunity to bomb the Labour Party back to the Stone Age in a metaphorical kind of way. Who knows, she may be right.

The problem with this election compared to all the others I can remember is that there are just too many moving parts to make even a sketchy prediction of the outcome. Just a few of them are:

How will Scotland vote? A strong showing for the SNP would make another referendum on independence a racing certainty.

How will Northern Ireland vote? A poll over the weekend showed that half of those who expressed an opinion would prefer to unite with Ireland in the EU rather than staying in the UK. If it is so, how will it be expressed in a national ballot?

Will Labour unite behind Jeremy Corbyn? I could write an entire post just about this one but it is entirely conceivable that we will see the end of the Labour party as we know it if the MPs and the broader membership can’t manage to pull in the same direction for the next six weeks.

Wither UKIP? Or indeed "Whither, UKIP!". Having achieved its primary aim last year will UKIP fade away? We can hope.

Perhaps the most interesting question is about the Liberal Democrats. They say that they received 1,000 membership applications in the hour after the election announcement. Clearly this reflects the status of the Lib Dems as the party that has most identified with the European Union and offers the most obvious vehicle for a General Election vote to protest the lunacy that is Brexit. But given that Nick Clegg’s support for his chum Dave in the 2010-2015 coalition arguably got us into this mess to start with, can we actually trust the party ever again?

These questions will play out over the coming six-week campaign and no doubt some things will become clearer and others more obscure. Based on what we know now the election is about Brexit and nothing else matters this time around. All of the usual concerns about the NHS, education, security, the economy, science policy, the arts and whether chocolate eggs should be emblazoned with the word Easter will be seen through the prism of Brexit.

For me the most important question is what is the best hope of ameliorating the damage that Brexit will do? We may not be able to reverse the decision completely but the 48% need to send a strong message that Mrs May’s mulish insistence on pursuing a scorched-earth version of withdrawal cannot go unchallenged.  On that basis my initial thought is that I will set aside my resentment of the part they played in the unfolding tragedy and put my support behind the Lib Dems. Clegg was probably more naive than evil and anyway he’s mostly out of the picture now. I can’t say that I make this decision with a light heart nor that it couldn’t change as the campaign unfolds, but right here, right now my first instinct is to support Tim Farron’s team.

A Tradition is Slowly Dying. Good Riddance?

I might be about to lose some friends.

That’s sad of course but I’m prepared to take the risk. It comes with talking about a certain Spanish cultural practice in terms more nuanced than condemnation to the ninth circle of hell.

I was in Valencia last week for the annual festival of Fallas (if you’re speaking Castillian Spanish) or Falles if you are speaking the local Valencian language. Fallas has grown from being uniquely Valencian to being a world event of cultural significance immortalised on a list kept by UNESCO, who seem to have jurisdiction over this kind of stuff. I had a blast at Fallas and I intend to write something about it soon but for now I want to concentrate on one specific corner of the festivities. That’s the bit that took place in the Plaza de Toros, which if you are interested is located right next to the North Station just outside the medieval city centre.

Oh dear. The Plaza de Toros. We know what that is don’t we? It’s where the Spanish practice their cruel “sport” known as bullfighting. Every civilised person knows that bullfighting is barbaric and to inflict pain and humiliation on a sentient creature in the name of sport must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. The chances are that most people reading this would agree with those sentiments to some extent.

And straight away we have a problem and I am going to try to explain why.

I lived in Madrid with my family for a couple of years in the mid 90s and in the second of those years we rented a house from a landlord who was a great aficionado of the bulls. The landlord had (still has) three daughters and the youngest of the three had inherited her father’s interest. Between them they taught me a lot about their passion and I came to a level of understanding in excess of most foreigners’ but still far behind theirs. I suppose this is why I am trying to shift my readers’ understanding just a little.

The first challenge that we have is that it isn’t easy to talk about this subject in English. The terms that have been adopted by English-speakers are more or less meaningless to the Spanish. For a start it isn’t called “bullfighting” in Spanish. There is no sense in which this is a fight as we might understand it. The bull is going to be dead at the end come what may[1]. Even if the torero ends up dead, a member of his team will finish the bull.

What’s that? What’s a torero, and how might he end up dead?

The torero is the guy in the fancy suit who waves a cape around to induce the bull to charge at it. He is also the one who (assuming he is still capable of doing so) finally dispatches the animal with a sword that cuts its spinal cord. In English he is often referred to as the matador and indeed “matador de toros” which means “killer of bulls” is a real title and is actually used. But torero is the more usual name. And how does he end up dead? It’s rare in modern times but it remains the case that 600 kilos of fighting bull equipped with sharp horns is a pretty deadly adversary. Those horns might have been designed expressly for the purpose of opening arteries. And sometimes they do. Modern medical attention means that gorings are very rarely fatal nowadays but sometimes, in a small bull ring, in a remote province, the medical facilities just might not be up to the job.

And while we’re on the subject of the toreros, just a word about the pronouns. The overwhelming majority of toreros are male but there are a few, a very few, women who have achieved that status. I saw the first female torero of modern times, Cristina Sanchez, appear as a novice at Las Ventas in Madrid in around 1994. She later “took the alternative” - “tomó la alternativa” over the border in France in 1996 to become a full matador de toros. However she retired from the ring after three years and there have not been too many following in her footsteps.

So back to the language. If it’s not a fight then what is this strange sport?

Well, for a start it’s not a sport. For the critics who cry “How can they call this a sport?” the answer is simple. They don’t. If it were a sport the newspapers would report it in their sports pages and they do not. The posh papers in Spain actually have a specific section in which they report on the Corrida – a word that literally translates as “run” – as a cultural event or even an art. Definitely not a sport.

What about the other problems?

It’s cruel and degrading!

This charge is harder to dismiss although it is worth splitting out the two components. The popular British tabloid view of the Spanish as a race of people who delight in the torture and degradation of dumb animals is almost entirely fiction. Who would have thought it? Tabloid journalists making shit up? Whatever next? I can’t speak for every small fiesta in every small town in the country but the idea that Spanish people like nothing more than shoving donkeys off church towers or setting fire to furry animals in the name of a perverted pleasure is a long, long way from the truth. The bull that enters the ring at the start of a corrida has the respect of the crowd merely for being a bull. The crowd wants the bull to do well. It wants the bull to provide a stern test to the torero. It knows that the bull will end up dead but it wants its death to be a noble one and in my opinion it is, compared with being herded into a dark cage, stunned with a bolt gun and having its throat cut surrounded by the urine and faeces of the hundreds of others that have gone before it. On the whole I would defend the charge of degradation fairly vigorously.

But cruelty? This is more difficult and there is no doubt that for the final fifteen minutes of its life the bull does suffer significant pain. An inept torero can make the final dispatch much more traumatic than it need be. Jumping back to the degradation for a moment, there are few spectacles to match the anger of a knowledgeable crowd at a corrida if the matador fails to do his job properly at the moment of truth. So, yes, the bull suffers pain for around fifteen minutes and ends up dead. Compared with a bull that has been bred purely for meat it has a few minutes more pain although arguably a lot less fear and at least it has the opportunity to strike a few blows back at its tormentor. On the other hand the four year life of  brave bull (that’s the best translation I can make of toro bravo but it isn’t exact) leading up to those fifteen minutes is more pampered than that of any other domesticated animal except possibly thoroughbred racehorses. Fighting bulls are raised by specialist breeders from bloodlines that go back through generations. Some hard-core aficionados maintain that the quality of the brave bulls has never recovered after most of them were lost during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s but it isn’t for want of trying. The program of the corrida usually lists the breeder of the bulls before the names of the toreros who will go into the ring with them.

So there are a few things that it isn’t but then what is the corrida about?

There are many ways of thinking about the corrida. It’s a direct throwback to the games in the Roman arena. It’s a spectacle on a grand scale with music and brightly coloured costumes. But what it is above all else is a place where men – and a very few women – test their skill and courage in a public arena. More or less every society there has ever been has had ways in which young men are tested to prove their manhood. Sometimes it is traditional like the Land Diving of Vanuatu, sometimes it is modern like the various gang initiations in Los Angeles and other American cities. It seems to be hard-wired into the human psyche at some level. A form of the corrida has existed since classical times but in its modern guise it dates back to the early 18^th century. For almost three hundred years it has been the most prominent way for a Spanish man to prove his courage. When the torero steps into the ring his aim is to win the respect of the crowd, to prove that he is worthy to kill the brave bull that has the crowd’s respect already.

Perhaps the most telling argument against the corrida is that it is outdated. In the 21^st century there is no justification for this type of macho demonstration of manhood. It’s an argument that has found support in Spain and the Autonomous Region of Cataluña outlawed the corrida in 2012. This might have had more to do with Cataluña’s aspirations to independence from Spain but the measure could not have passed the regional legislature without a degree of genuine support. Between 2007 and 2012 attendance at corridas in Spain fell by 40%. Partly this was due to the economic crisis but it must also reflect a waning interest among Spanish people.

So on the whole I expect that the tradition of the corrida will gradually fade away. It will linger longest in Madrid, Seville and across the southern region of Andalucía but eventually it will be uneconomic. Perhaps there will come a point when an ambitious politician will judge that there is advantage to be gained by promoting its final demise.

Meanwhile many people will continue to inveigh against the continuation of this tradition and it is of course their absolute right to do so. Those who avoid the use of animal products of all kinds may do so on the grounds of animal rights without the suspicion of hypocrisy. Those who continue to eat meat or consume cows’ milk are perhaps less certain of the moral high ground and must fall back on other arguments. Perhaps the degradation that they worry about is not that of the bull but rather that of the crowd of people that draws pleasure from the spectacle. It’s a thought.

In writing this piece it has not been my intention to persuade anyone of the value or the justification of the corrida. You will make up your own minds on that and probably have already done so. I am more concerned that if you condemn it you do so based on a clear view of what it is and what it is not. Over time it will probably go the way of other outdated traditions and when it does something will have been lost from the world. I think that is a little bit sad but I suppose I am in the minority.

---

[1] Yes, I know that there is a very rare provision that a particularly brave bull might be spared to breed but I have never seen that happen and nobody I know has ever seen it happen so to all intents and purposes it doesn’t happen.

Science, Belief and the Fall of Empires

I never visited the old Soviet Union. This may be a bit of a surprise, especially considering my youthful left-wing politics but I was really too young to be taken in. I was born in the year of the Hungarian uprising and one of the first big international events I can recall is the Prague Spring and its subsequent brutal suppression by Brezhnev’s tanks. I grew up with the understanding that whatever the attractions of Marxist-Leninist political theory its actual application in the real world had failed to live up to expectations. So, I felt no more desire to go there than I did Apartheid-era South Africa. I have actually been to both Russia and South Africa since the fall of those two regimes and I may write more about them some day. But for today I want to focus on just one aspect of the totalitarian state that emerged after the 1917 revolution.

Joseph Stalin was a monster. There is no serious doubt about that. He was responsible for the death of more of his own countrypeople than any other person in modern history. He constructed a state in which his control over people’s lives was all-pervasive. He, and his party apparatus could, and did, direct every aspect of life in the Soviet Union. The extent of his power was nearly absolute and he used it with great enthusiasm. Stalin probably came to believe that his power actually was absolute and that his word was law in all respects. And that was where some of his problems lay.

Unlike King Canute, whose command to the sea that it should recede was intended to demonstrate to courtiers the limits of kingly power, Stalin really did appear to believe that he could order nature to bend to his will. Science in the Soviet Union was constrained to operate within ground rules laid down by the Party. Where it furthered the aims of the Party it was supported and financed to the extent that it achieved stunning success in fields such as space flight. The state also funded so-called science that followed its agenda but was built on a tissue of falsehood and ideological positions in place of observation and experiment. The career of Trofim Lysenko came to symbolise this tendency but it was not the only example.

It wasn’t only in natural sciences that the dead hand of the Party forced ideological solutions that simply didn’t work. Economic theories based on a command economy and isolation - “Socialism in One Country” – caused the resources of the empire to be squandered and most the people to be impoverished while a small number of Party insiders enjoyed such wealth as was available. In Stalin’s own time there were probably enough old people around with memories of the last days of the Czars that it was possible to keep a lid on things.  As that generation died out the contradictions in the system became less and less tenable and Stalin’s successors were unable to do so any more. Eventually the whole thing fell apart in 1989 and the Soviet Empire fell as surely as Empires have eventually fallen throughout human history.

Regular readers – assuming I have any – will probably have already realised where this is going. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the United States has been the dominant world power and I have no doubt that among its political establishment there are many who believe its power is near absolute. Leaving aside the rise of China in recent decades it is a supportable position.

Although the United States like the Soviet Union was born in revolution, the nature of that revolution was quite different. The founding fathers of the USA were men (predominantly) of the Enlightenment. They tried very hard to be guided by empiricism and reason, explicitly confining the irrational (religion) to the personal realm and separating it from the management of the state. It proved to be a good model and as a result the new state prospered and was able to parlay its abundant natural resources into wealth greater than any other country has ever seen. Along the way it remained substantially true to its founding ideals and offered its military might to support others who shared those ideals, notably in the two world wars of the 20^th century.

It is a truism however that no human construct is ever perfect and there have undoubtedly been imperfections in the United States. The support of slavery by some of the states led to the horrendous civil war of the 19^th century. The discrimination against black people even after the end of slavery was a shameful stain on the country. Fear and suspicion of different ways to organise a country led to irrational foreign-policy positions, some of which caused great harm and suffering around the world. These imperfections, some of them substantial, must be set against the successes but overall it is possible to make a solid case that the United States of America has been broadly a force for good in the world. On the whole it has applied its founding principles of reason and justice to improve the lot of its own people and many in other nations.

This legacy of sustained progress towards a better world is constantly under threat. There have always been those that reject the founding principles and seek to change the country for their own purposes. These purposes are often around personal enrichment at the expense of others. Sometimes they are based on religious irrationality and sometimes on misguided ideas of the innate superiority of one section of humanity over the rest. Sometimes it is hard to tell where one ends and the others begin. The framers of the US Constitution understood these threats and built in the famous checks and balances to guard against them. In general they have been successful for two and a half centuries but their continuation into the future is by no means guaranteed.

In the modern world the aspiration to manage affairs by means of reason is best exemplified by science. Science is not a list of formulae or a laboratory full of bubbling apparatus although both these things may play their part. Science is a method of investigating and thinking about the world to better understand its workings. Its tools are observation, experiment, reasoning and collaboration. It has been stupendously successful in enabling humans to live the lives they do with the comforts they enjoy, free from many of the dangers that used to beset us. It is also profoundly democratic. No scientist, however exalted, can successfully defend a position when the evidence contradicts it. The laws of physics care nothing for the status of the physicist. To quote a t-shirt I have seen recently, “The great thing about science is that it is true whether you believe it or not”. Failure to understand and accept this truth contributed to the fall of the Soviet Empire. My great concern is that the United States could go the same way.

Creationism is an obvious issue. Somewhere between a third and a half of American adults believe that the Earth was created around 6,000 years ago. By itself this probably doesn’t matter very much. The practical implications for day to day life are small. Separation of religion from civil power means that this irrational belief can do little harm. The problem is that in order to support that belief it is necessary to discard a huge proportion of the findings of science: geology, astronomy, physics – including kinetic theory, thermodynamics, electromagnetic theory, nuclear physics -  chemistry and genetics. These scientific fields are supported by many years, or even centuries, of observation and experiment. Together they provide a coherent description of the universe that enables us to survive and prosper as a species. It is no exaggeration to suppose that our future security and prosperity depend on the continuation of the victory of reason over superstition. If the protections that the founding fathers built in to the Constitution are eroded and the workings of the state become predicated on irrationality the dangers are evident.

The new American president has said that he believes climate change is a hoax concocted by the Chinese in order to fetter US industry. If he genuinely believes this it is an irrational belief not dissimilar to the belief that the universe was created in six days 6,000 years ago. Unlike a belief in young-Earth creationism this piece of irrationality has direct and grave consequences. It provides a pretext for policy decisions that are demonstrably harmful to the majority while helping a small minority to become wealthier. Precisely the thing that Washington, Jefferson et al sought to avoid.

Apparently President Trump has also decreed a GDP growth rate of 4% for the US economy in order to justify some of his financial plans. This is a small step for a man who is prepared to deny basic science and in some ways it is less challenging. Economists have a knack of making measurements that suit their expectations – a habit that real scientists are trained for years to avoid. I must say that when I heard this story I was immediately put in mind of the old Soviet Union where Brezhnev would decree the number of tractors to be produced in a five year plan and produced they would be. Whether any of them were actually fit to do real work was another matter. If Trump’s America produces a notional 4% GDP growth but fails to improve living conditions for its people who will benefit?

Denial of science and denial of economic data appear to be par for the course in the new world of Washington DC. In just a few weeks I have lost count of the time that President Trump has been caught in easily-demonstrable falsehoods. It is rapidly becoming the new normal. Over time the most dedicated fact-checkers and myth-busters will be worn down. It may even become a little quaint to expect to hear truth from power. Trump hasn’t yet claimed a round of golf with eleven holes in one as Kim Jong Il infamously did, but some of his boasts are straying into dangerously similar territory. And on the other side of the coin, speaking truth to power may become almost as dangerous as it was in the Soviet Union or is today in North Korea.

I suppose what it comes down to is this. Denial of evidence, lies and manipulation may keep a government in power in the short to medium term but eventually the dam will break. It worked for Stalin, less so for his successors. For the Soviet Union the fall when it came was absolute. Donald Trump may be able to hold his mentirocracy* together for a while but eventually it will give way. The Constitution of the United States should prevent a collapse exactly like that of the Soviet Union. But to do that it needs people in power who believe in its aims. That’s the bit I am worried about at the moment. 

 * A Government based on lies and falsehoods. I think I just invented that word but I am open to correction.