How many crises?

RTE structured its Sunday morning report on the Spanish elections around a young women studying for an MA in Psychology in Madrid who speaks four languages and can't find a job. I've had her on my mind as just one example of what is happening to millions of people across Europe and America.

Of course if you are a particular kind of economist the idea that she "can't" find a job is wrong. Rather she won't accept work at the price it would be available and she, and the rest of us, have to traverse a difficult adjustment until a new equilibrium is found. I think this a profoundly mistaken understanding of what is going on. Embedded in that young woman, and everyone like her, is up to four generations of investment in her capacities. As the Atlantic and European economies have matured asset prices have been driven up, capturing too much of the value of productivity gains, but what hasn't been captured in this way has been used to build social capacity, a lot of it embedded in people like my Madrilena. If someone suggested digging up the railway system for the metal in the rails, or burning the books in the British Library for fuel we'd recognise both suggestions as vandalism. Using someone like this as cheap undifferentiated labour is  also vandalism and totally unnecessary.

The financial crisis that has made her prospects so insecure is an event, but the globalised world she and I have to make our way in is a process. All we have going for us is the flexibility, creativity and capacity for collaboration we learn in our wonderfully complex societies. No matter how cheap we make our labour someone else will be cheaper and if we go this way we will end up burning the furniture. So the crisis she and I share is that of systematic underinvestment in the industries and activities we could flourish in.

There is no mystery about what kinds of social organisations foster successful, high value enterprises in mature economies. The SMEs clustered around the Marche, the Rhineland and that used to be the backbone of places like Sheffield, assign human and financial capital in wonderfully creative ways and reproduce themselves through real apprenticeships, proper colleges and financial institutions committed to long-term results. Similar complex social systems are the backbone of university towns, or the cities that house the fashion industries. The core strategy of the developed world in the last thirty years of using financial services, backed up by political hegemony,  has been to claim as much as possible of the growth in the developing world through rents. The financial crisis is, in my view, epiphenomenal to the emerging limit on that strategy. The Atlantic littoral may be in the situation of the Asian core in the late eighteenth century: still dominant but becalmed.

The creativity and capacity of my iconic Madrilena, and all her brothers and sisters, offer the best possible route out of our current situation. But to unleash those capacities we are going to have to have a jubilee, not a default. A set of defaults might have worked a few years ago but now we re too deeply in. We will have to discount every asset against labour, to reassign the productivity gains away from capital. If she is used up rebuilding the value of assets we will stop the process of social investment that makes the complex, subtle daily miracle of society possible, let alone the economy that feeds off it. My suspicion that an inchoate sense of this demand is already latent in the Occupy protests.

So many crises and that is without even looking to Cairo

The Rugby World Cup and the Scottish Enlightenment

I feel embarrassed at writing about sport. Financial crisis is unravelling key institutions. We learned this morning that the wealth of the average American family has receded from its high point, attained in 1973, back to the level it was at in 1959 and is still falling. A major social movement is unfolding in New York. Any serious person interested in the Atlantic world has a lot of things to respond to and I am going to waste valuable time writing about a game. I should blog anonymously.

Were the Irish rugby team to win through to the final they would be tested psychologically, morally and physically (obviously) in ways that no group of Irishmen have been tested before. The cracks get opened up by that sort of pressure and these guys directly reflect the shattered nature of Irish history. They are riven by stresses and differences. The sort-of-anthem (Ireland's Call) had to be made up because the team represents two states. Half the team think they are part of a GAA club and the other half think they just stepped out of the Trinity JCR. Moreover this pain-racked circus are playing in a competition only JGA Pocock could love. The ex-colonies, formal and informal, reassert their connection playing a game codified at Thomas Arnold's school. It should be a disaster, but of course it isn't. However the joy and love reflected back at the team by the people on the terraces is a little hard to explain, especially as the island is again suffering.

And that suffering and pain is the root of why the whole thing hangs together, why the team bonds and why the public loves them. The other main contenders, apart from France, who in this as in so many other ways are a category unto themselves, all integrated into the culture of empire. The countries they represent bought into the promise of the Scottish Enlightenment; that civility, moderation, politeness and an imperial division of labour would lead to individual and collective flourishing. Even when the Australians or the New Zealanders are hammering the Poms they are fulfilling a role in the imperial imagination (hardy colonists). Ireland, as Paul Bew explains in his latest book, rejected the Scottish Enlightenment. The culture, for whatever reason, makes nigh on impossible demands and resists compromise in the name of loyalty to the transcendental. There is no more Irish slogan than "No Surrender". And of course if you live in a world structured by the institutions of the Scottish Enlightenment, like markets or individualism, to demand the transcendental is to invite pain and failure into your collective life. And so two things that give us hope. We are fueled by pain, that is what we share, and as Sophie de Grouchy said shared pain, or compassion, is a powerful force. And the beauty of rejecting Hume is that though you get to be maladapted to the modern world, you also get to believe in miracles. A comfort, when in truth it would take a miracle for us to win this.

Centres Can be Where You Find Them

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague during the week where he asked me which of the social sciences had the intellectual vitality of economics in the past twenty years and I replied social theory. He though this was ridiculous just as I was unhappy with embracing as science a discipline that thinks the objects of its theories are irrational if they do not fulfill its expectations. That conversation came to mind later when I was discussing our department with a friend, another academic, who was visiting from Canada. He is an enthusiast for intellectual history and a particular fan of Pocock and was wondering where we were on this. As anyone who knows the University of Sussex will know that is a complicated question, but it came up in a useful way as we had been discussing what had happened to the humanities after the collapse of academic Marxism as a dominant trend in the early eighties. Game theory, in its many forms has moved in to occupy much of the space that had been occupied by that body of thought and we agreed, though many others might not, that the move to cultural history as a response had not been a success because it offered so little to explain either long term trends or account for agency and contingency. So if you are interested in providing complex and rich accounts of change that do have agency and plurality built into them intellectual history offers a rigorous position from which to work.

It is not the only such position though and as we were talking I was thinking through the way that within our history department intellectual history is in debate with at least two alternative possibilities for a revivified humanities. The children of Thompson, or in Sussex's case more properly Briggs, have made social history a far more intellectually nimble discipline. They have absorbed the really important contribution made by cultural history that social identity and economic function are only loosely aligned, but turned that into a powerful interpretative position. The history of science, and its aligned programmes in the histories of technology and environment, are where the ideas derived from social theory are most relevant. That field points in two directions. It offers a bridge from nature to culture, working very hard to eliminate the difference between natural and human knowledge. It also can handle the most difficult questions of social epistemology, that is, it addresses how the very categories we organise the world and act through get generated. What makes the department an interesting place to think, is that these three strong programmes are well represented and beautifully practiced within it.

So a better answer to my colleague would have been to acknowledge that while no discipline has been as successful as economics in offering us powerful tools, but that right now the really interesting debates about what will next structure the humanities are happening right in front of us.

An idea tentatively proposed

I noticed a conversation between Peter Gordon and Avi Matalon on Facebook, itself provoked by Natanyahu's recent speech to Congress in which he had made at least some positive sounds about support for gay rights. Even though the conversation between the two was entirely civil and reasonable I found myself profoundly depressed by it because it illustrated how hard it is to frame the competing political imperatives in the Middle East in such a way that one doesn't end up in a position that is totally partial. I don't think this is a feature particular to the politics of Israel and Palestine. However conflict over the way newly revivified religious, national and ethnic movements can be institutionalised in politics, and how differing normative orientations can co-exist, get dramatised there in a way that is more vivid than in France, Holland or Denmark.

Within the borders of the EU it would be nice to believe that political Islam's engagement with European democracy will repeat the transformation of political Catholicism into Christian Democracy (anticipations of an Islamic Reformation however strike me as really misguided). In that scenario the Justice and Development Party in Turkey is the interesting development that points to what we might hope to see within the states of the Union. Unfortunately the contemporary conditions are not a good match for the nation-building moment of the late nineteenth century or even the more chastened post-war moment of Adenauer, Monnet, Spaak and Schumann. It is impossible to imagine a circumstance in which Europe and its constituent nations balance the contesting claims of universality and identity (and the claims to legal power and resources that go along with them) if the nations of the Maghreb and the Middle East do not. Globalisation makes it hard to cultivate just your own garden, even if that is the way of wisdom.

There is little prospect of the Isrealis and the Palestinians making sense of this conundrum on their own, but  the core constituent problem of the the creation of rational (in the sense of not being a threat to the well-being of their own citizens or others) political communities is far from being theirs' alone. This problem of political comity is the reason that the European Union was founded in the first place. The acquis communitaire, in its more than 80,000 page glory, may not have the inspiring tone of the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution, but it is a powerful resource and a living, evolving solution to this set of problems.  This acquis was profoundly important in the transformation of Ireland over the last forty years and the framework it offers has had obvious effects in the post-Communist democracies in Eastern Europe (which is not to say that the institutions of the Union, and in particular the Commission have been popular). It could provide an institutional and constitutional framework within which to reframe and escape some of the zero-sum games of Palestinian-Isreali politics. If Israel and Palestine were to be offered full membership of the union together they would inherit a legal and institutional framework that does much more than regulate inter-state relationships. European citizenship creates opportunities for individuals to reorientate themselves toward one another. Obviously folding this conflict into the institutions of the Union will test their robustness, and no-one expects universal brotherhood and amity to break out. To achieve civil dissensus would be a triumph of statecraft. Moreover the challenge of such integration might provoke the rest of Europe to some necessary political creativity. And this is not entirely a step into the unknown. The Israelis have already taken the first step: winning Eurovision.

The Nice and the Good

Maria Farrell has a wonderful, warm appreciation of the recently deceased Garret Fitzgerald on Crooked Timber. I only ever met the man among crowds, but the picture of a complex and emotionally engaged person that she paints rings very true. The contrast between Fitzgerald and the far less attractive Charles Haughey, who paralleled his career, can drive Fitzgerald into a frame as a kind of plaster saint. As a serious public figure he deserves a more rigorous response. His values and character were very attractive, but his intellectual position and his record as a politician are both questionable.

Fitzgerald was Taoiseach (Prime Minister) for the bulk of the early and middle part of the nineteen-eighties. If anything that period was even more crisis-ridden in Ireland than the present moment and his governments failed to address the many crises successfully. The failures were not for want of trying. He sponsored a movement toward constitutional revision, an opening to a rearranged relationship with Northern Ireland and some tentative intiatives in economic reform. Every initiative failed and in most cases had perverse results. The New Ireland Forum and first Anglo-Irish agreement, for instance, were designed to outflank Sinn Fein and bolster the SDLP. The proposals he actually came up with were so politically impossible that they drove Mrs Thatcher into a restatement of the integrity of the United Kingdom (the famous "Out, Out Out" comment in 1984) and shattered the possibility of a nationalist solution brokered by the SDLP and Fine Gael. The long-run consequence was that the eventual settlement was shaped as a reaction to his ideas and led to the rise of Sinn Fein. 

The "Constitutional Crusade" had the same result. The proposal to liberalise the 1937 constitution mobilised the pro-life amendment campaign and contributed to the domination of Irish public life by the issue of abortion for a decade. In 1986 the campaign for the introduction of divorce in Ireland was so badly prepared that the provision was not only lost, but was voted against by a two-thirds majority. This despite the fact that in principle most people were in favour of the idea. As a politician he went through a recurring pattern. He seemed to fail to understand that in politics you have to win, you have to create the solution and the alliance committed to that solution in order to construct the institutions that in turn shape the life of the political community. If you don't find a solution for the political community someone else will. My suspicion is that his failures directly led to the dominance of Fianna Fail in the following period.

Even if the details of Irish political history are not close to your heart there is something important to learn from Fitzgerald and his politics and this is about the nature of politics itself. He never found a way to make his liberal, or more properly Christian Democrat, values and norms speak to the specific and local problems and situations he faced. I suspect, and this again I can only suspect, that this was because he had been captured by revisionist historiography. From that perspective the Irish Republic was fatally tainted by its origins in an act of violence in 1916 and the core political work to be done was to realign the polity to norms of legality. Much of Fitzgerald's politics can be understood through this optic of rescuing the polity from its provisional status. This disposition crippled him as a Prime Minister. It made his values and ideals more real than the polity he had responsibility for. So he lost again and again, because he was not crafting a solution for the time and place he found himself in, he was not slowly drilling the hard boards. When confronted with more robustly integrated models of ideals and a community, on the part of Unionists, Nationalists or even religious fundamentalists, he became immobilised and consistently overpowered. What he seemed incapable of doing was giving shape and form to the political community that was actually there before him; the "actually existing Irish Republic". In my view the damage he did to the credibility of the Irish liberals and even the  left, effectively to respond to the aspirations of the population was fatal. By being nice, he made it hard for us to be good, and we are living with the consequences. Salus populus ultima lex.

This is why we bother

At one point in Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz she has her characters wandering around the small roads of Limerick and Clare in a car, finding a way to talk to one another and when you are reading the book in one sitting on a Sunday morning this moment comes as a bit of a relief. Everything in her book is so pitch perfect that the lapse into basic Irish pastoral ("if only we lived in the beautiful West we could get it together") makes the performance less intimidating. And then you look at where they are actually driving and it is on the small roads that you used to have to take to get to Shannon Airport, and of course these are historically significant roads. Elizabeth Bowen has her character Jane in A World of Love drive along those roads to collect Richard Priam off the flight from America. Emma Winer made me see how important that excursion was for Bowen, it literally got her out of the Big House. Emma hasn't been the only person to make a lot of those back roads either. Roy Foster reads the whole novel as a final critique of the kind of society Bowen suffered in the Ireland of the 1950s and the journey as into a kind of nothingness. He places the incident into the context of what he argues was the failed effort of Bowen and her colleagues at The Bell to reconcile Anglo-Irish culture to the new state and society. Others, like Brian Corcoran, read it as a much more interesting opening to new possibilities on her part. So the roads have a literary intertext and speak to a contemporary political resonance. So much for a lapse.

I have no idea if Anne Enright had this set of references consciously in mind as she was writing and it really wouldn't matter anyway if she didn't. The basic architecture of the book is so secure that in some ways she may get those kinds of references as a kind of unconscious free gift. She makes it so easy to see the basic reference points for understanding Gina Moynihan, like Bovary or Gretta from "The Dead", that  the reviews I've read so far miss what seems to me to be the real ambition of the book to explore the modernisation of Ireland, from the fifties to the crash, through Gina. Gina is one of the many angels of history that see the debris piling up behind them. There is a lot to debate in some of the ideas that could be extracted from the book, but to be honest that seems pointless to me. What this book does is start to allow us to imagine the experience of my generation as a whole and to locate it in the sweep of our history. You can only know what you have first imagined.

It is a fierce book. The last line condemns a whole generation. But despite that it is also written from inside and with emotion rather than outside with anger. Only one real flaw. Imagine how much more depth and complexity it would have it set in Cork.

The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

I suffer from a very old-fashioned sense of poetry as successful divination. Good poetry makes objective and visible ideas that are haven't yet found expression, and since my old friend Shelley put this far better than I could in his Defence of Poetry I won't develop this thought any further. Sean O'Brien expresses the problems we confront when the transcendental horizon of judgement, often expressed through religious language, becomes totally disassociated from the local strategies we use to solve specific, local problems, in his poem "The Citizens". The idea of a negative dialectic of enlightenment is not new. Also this is not a perfect poem by any means. The echo of the Holocaust in the last two lines unbalances the central idea comprised in "all we want...". Something with more bathos is needed to follow the tragedy of small dreams. It is inaccurate, and a bit lazy, to use the Holocaust as a metaphor for anything else. For all that the first six lines unlock how humble, limited modern citizens who make no claim beyond their own interests, can still be monsters.

What language? You had no language.
Stirring bone soup with a bone, we sip
From the cup of the skull. This is culture.
All we want to do is live forever,
To which end we make you bow down to our gods
In the midday square's Apollonian light
Before we ship you to the furnaces
And sow you in the fields like salt

Another line from the collection, November, "Work is good, like love and company". Wish I'd said that.