Secularisation, Athena and all her family

Earlier today standing in front of the wonderful altar frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin Joanna asked if the ambition to find an analogue to the kind of integrated aesthetic, moral and political qualities expressed in the altar had even been achieved in German culture. The traditional response to this is to look at Nietszche's Birth of Tragedy so we ended up chatting about that. Just today my own thinking about this book was framed by the debates on the previous day at the really great conference that Mark Somos had organised on secularisation and particularly on a remark made by Pascalis Kitromilides that one of the tragedies of modern politics was the manner in which the nation had, in some cases, become an object of religious energy in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Monotheistic nationalism has been one of the curses of the modern world. The idea that the nation offers a means of saving the individual, giving him or her a cast-iron set of values which meet all the exigencies of modern life, while guaranteeing justice and welfare for the community and the individual, has been a disasterous notion. As the nation has not fulfilled this set of expectations some national communities have taken flight into a fantasy that the problem has been pollution of the nation by heresy and heretics which could and should be eliminated, rather than a recognition that redemption cannot be a political event.

That thought in that place led me to have a better understanding of how poor Nietszche could have been so misunderstood, but also a suggestion for why his project, a this-worldly sufficient worldview, simply could not succeed. A man who was trying to move experience beyond what he saw as the wreckage left behind by the death of God suffered complete misunderstanding by monotheistic nationalists as yet another religious thinker. My suspicion though is that this fate, though unfortunate, was no accident and that such a thorough-going secularisation is impossible. Without religion to offer a rational locus for the hope of redemption of the broken world, that hope finds much less rational places to attach itself to.

To a mind or a community that can conceive of justice, it is intolerable that justice not be done. The village Hampdens cannot be unrecognised, the sparrow that falls must be accounted for. However, such a regime of totality would be unbearable, and the liberal demand that the individual confrontation with their own resolution of these impossible problems be absolutely respected is the core inheritance we take from the Enlightenment. This is the engine that drives secularisation of experience, but this resolution is insufficient. Everyday life without a framing idea of justice is impossible.

This is why my view is that the response to the problem of nationalism, even fundamentalist nationalisms that use religious dogmas as their content, cannot be secularism or total secularisation. The intuition that all is redeemed is fundamentally a religious intuition, and when expressed in that register enables a liberal politics and does not compete with it. Not everyone has to live in the two cities, but both have to be inhabited; we can never feel completely at home in the world and reconciled to it.

The Hamiltonian Moment

In January 1790 Alexander Hamilton presented the First Report on Public Credit to the House of Representatives. His plan called for the federal government to assume the war debts of the states and to meet them by issuing a 4% bond. The plan succeeded and so proper national politics was born, soon represented by the opposition between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. It had taken from 1783 for debt and a new politics to find their definitive point of equilibrium (not necessarily the optimal one); from the crash of 2008 to December 2011 may be a shorter period of time, but the deal proposed by Merkel and Sarkozy creates the ground for a real European politics in the way Hamilton's plan created the ground on which American politics were conducted for decades.

There are many different and important aspects to this initiative. The technical details will no doubt be haggled over for months, the role of the ECB in issuing bonds is still not clear, the mechanisms for integrating the states' budgets have nowhere been specified, and all of this detail will deeply matter. But if we grant that the parallel to the founding of the United States has some merit to it, then it is probable that this initiative will open a period of political contestation, not close it. The debate will not be between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, though there will be parallels. As Philip Coggan argues, in his new book Paper Promises, the politics of the next period will pitch debtors against creditors. I suspect, at least in Europe, that we are beginning to see the creation of the political institutions in which such a politics will be played out. When, rather than if, the sentiments that animate the occupy movement break out of the constraints of national politics, they will find expression at the European level, because at that level a resolution/default can be credibly imposed on creditors. How creditors will politically express themselves is not clear. Just where this will leave Britain, which has nailed its future to the City of London and financial services, is anybody's guess. This is where our current circumstance starts to get even more interesting.

Brief encounter

I was traveling up to Cambridge last Wednesday and as I got on the train I noticed the woman on the seat in front of mine crying, not in terrible distress or fear, but crying nevertheless. As we were all traveling through the Downs I couldn't help overhearing her conversation with her companion, who was clearly a colleague as well as a friend. It turned out she was a primary teacher (on strike that day) and had been given the year six class this year. In the UK system this makes you very visible to the headteacher, the governors and the parents as in that year (age 10/11) all children take a national test and schools are ranked by the results. So this was a cause of some considerable stress to her. What was actually making her cry with frustration though were her unsuccessful efforts to get her children to get a grip on the denotative and connotative aspects of words. She described her efforts to get the children to give her examples of words that made them go "wow" and how incredibly difficult she found it when instead they gave her words that meant "wow", (flabbergasted and gobsmacked were the two she her most often).

Two things struck me about this brief encounter. The care and energy this public sector teacher was putting into her profession, and the children for which she was responsible, was really inspiring. To spend your strike day talking about the more recondite elements of your teaching technique, with a companion who was just as focused, though less engaged, than her, speaks to real commitment.  On the other hand the punitive system that she works in is clearly unsurvivable. The terrible ratchets created by the techniques of the new public management rely on the commitment of people like her, but crush it out of them. Our social systems are running in the red and that cannot be sustained. Underneath the crisis of the financial system is a hidden crisis of social capital.

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.