The Virtual Stoa

I haven’t been paying much attention up to now to the WTO meeting currently underway in Canc�n in Mexico. So I was pleased to read the various briefing papers prepared by my excellent friend and co-conspirator Raj Patel at FoodFirst, which patiently explain why the current proposals on liberalising trade in agricultural products spell disaster for small farmers in the developing world, and, partly for this reason, why this week’s talks are likely to collapse without an agreement.

His “Citizen’s Guide to the WTO Agreement on Agriculture”, written three weeks ago, is here, with updates tracking the twists and turns in the global agriculture negotiations in the run-up to Canc�n here, here, here and here.

Salvador Allende, President of Chile: born 26 June 1908, died 11 September 1973 in the violence surrounding the coup which brought General Pinochet to power.

Today’s New York Times carries a timely reminder of what it calls “the other Sept. 11″.

Also Nikita Khrushchev, b. 17 April 1894, d. 11 September 1971. (Neal Ascherson’s recent LRB review of William Taubman’s Khrushchev book is here).

Here.

Go and play the distributive justice games, if you haven’t already. The results, though, aren’t especially surprising.

It turns out that I’m a Rawlsian, after all.

Mao Zedong, 1893-1976.

According to the programme notes for John Adams’s splendid opera, Nixon in China, “Chairman Mao was probably the closest thing to Plato’s Philosopher King that the world will ever see. He was a brilliant peasant autodidact who played up his thick Southern accent, spat, belched and scratched himself. He wrote great poetry in the classic Chinese forms, and later banned those forms. In a country he had made puritan, he was an inveterate womanizer. His enemies destroyed one another; millions died who opposed his thought.”

I wander over to right-wing hack Stephen Pollard’s blog, and there I find a badly-written post called “The EU kills one person every 13 seconds“.

It’s advertising a think-tank report which he’s co-written against EU trade rules, and in his post he restates the claim and makes it slightly more precise: “EU protectionism kills one person in the third world every thirteen seconds”.

Curious as to how these figures were calculated, I follow the link to the press release put out by an outfit Pollard works for called the Centre for the New Europe, and there, in a summary of “Key Findings”, I read that “6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the EU. That is 275 people every hour”, and then, with a bullet point all of its own, that, “In other words, one person dies every 13 seconds somewhere in the world - mainly in Africa - because the European Union does not act on trade as it talks.”

Still curious, I download and skim-read the report, and about two thirds of the way through a pop presentation of the case for free trade attached to some rude remarks about the EU I find this:

The Human Cost of Protectionism

24,000 people die every day from starvation, or from causes directly related to malnutrition. Let us make a reasonable assumption - erring on the side of caution - that 20,000 of these people do not die from the purely local causes of civil war and crop failure.

In a world of potential abundance that could be made actual by more open trading rules, the European Union accounts for a third of trade protection. Thus - given the earlier assumption - 6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the EU. That is 275 people every hour of the day.

In other words, one person dies every 13 seconds somewhere in the world - mainly in Africa - because the European Union does not act on trade as it talks. (p.10)

And, er, that’s it. That’s the sum total of the pathbreaking reasoning and demographic analysis employed to produce this conclusion. It seems to be slightly more respectably generated that the figures about global child abuse which Michael Jackson tosses around whenever he’s given the chance, but not much.”These are questionable, if not unreasonable figures…”, the writers recognise in the sentence that follows on from the chunk quoted above, but they don’t go on to question them. And, regrettably for the credibility of the report, this flash of self-awareness fails to percolate through to the trumpeting of “key findings” in the press release, nor to one of the co-authors’ own breathless blogging of his own achievements.

EU agricultural subsidies produce grim results. There’s no disagreement there between people like me and people like Pollard. (Lots of others, though).

But there’s a part of me which likes to think that so-called think tanks are supposed to raise the level of public debate, sponsor interesting research papers and produce real “findings”, rather than churning out tabloid-esque shock headlines which turn out to be underpinned by little more than tabloid-esque arguments.

Another part of me wonders whether the entire output of the Centre for the New Europe is as silly as this, or whether it’s just this report, or just the stuff that Pollard works on; but having spent the time reading one of their efforts this morning, I’m not sure I can be bothered to invest the energy to find out.

Here’s the first question-and-answer from this morning’s press conference…

QUESTION: Prime Minister, the last couple of days there have been a lot of changes around Downing Street, new structures, Alastair Campbell going, Trade Unions come in for coffee and cup cakes, if not beer and sandwiches… What was it that went wrong that you felt the need to change and work on over the last few days?

PRIME MINISTER: I think it is important that we - especially 6 years into government - not that we change our course and direction because I do passionately believe that that course and direction is right and I think that the changes that we have made on the economy, and that we are making in the Health Service and schools and on crime, are the right changes.� But I also think it’s important that we are engaging with people and explaining to them why we are making these changes and allowing people to understand that whatever the understandable preoccupations with the Hutton Inquiry are, there is a basic domestic agenda out there that we continue to work upon, and I think centring our operation, making it more accessible, is an important part of that.

So that’s that cleared up, then.This exchange is quite entertaining, too:

QUESTION: I understand you say it would be improper to comment on the outcome of the Hutton Inquiry, and I accept that, however can you clarify a point of logic for me? … Last Thursday you told Lord Hutton that you chaired a meeting of Downing Street officials to discuss how you would go about naming Dr Kelly, and yet on 22 July when asked on your plane on the way from Shanghai to Hong Kong, why did you authorise the naming of David Kelly, you replied “That is completely untrue”…. Asked whether you had authorised the leaking of the name of David Kelly, you replied “Emphatically not… I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly.”…  How can both those statements on 22 July and last Thursday both be true?

PRIME MINISTER: Well I think Julia I am afraid I am going to say to you, let the Hutton Inquiry make judgments about these things.� I could go into a long and detailed answer, but I won’t. Sorry.

Shame.

Prime Minister of Italy and songman.

[US Senator Orrin Hatch also, and even more entertainingly, but you already knew that].

Yesterday’s barking put me in mind of my favourite passage in John Campbell’s generally very good first instalment of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, The Grocer’s Daughter (2000):

“Politically she embraced - and at the zenith of her premiership enthusiastically promoted - materialistic values and an ideology of consumption, based on the easy availability of credit, which would have made Alderman Roberts blench. To Brian Walden in 1981 she admitted that her father disapproved of the Stock Market, which he considered ‘a form of gambling’. She explicitly abandoned his dedication to serving the whole community (’Together - and for all’) in favour of a blatant policy of rewarding her favoured supporters, the home-owning middle class. She devoted much of the energy of her administration to destroying the independence and vitality of local government, to which Alfred had given his life. One could even see her loathing of railways as a rejection of Grantham. All the while, however, she continued to hymn the homely values of the corner shop, lauding the neighbourly virtues of the ’small town’ and the ‘close family’ in which she had been brought up, as a smokescreen for the increasingly fractured society her policies were deliberately creating. Alf Roberts would have been appalled by ‘Thatcherism’.” (pp.29-30)

The thought about the railways seems a little forced (a bit like the old theories about Mrs Thatcher’s fondness for America possibly stemming from adolescent encounters with G.I.s based in England during the war). But the rest seems to me to be quite right, and insufficiently appreciated.

The Government was unveiling its absurd citizenship tests today (Bernard Crick and David Blunkett on the Today programme, that kind of thing). And I’m ashamed to report that I got all ten of the BBC’s hypothetical questions in their online citizenship quiz right.

I’ve just written a rather mad comment over at the Fistful of Euros site I plugged a moment ago, but it’s long enough and self-contained enough to make a post of its own, so I’ll stick it here, too. It’s a comment on Iain Coleman’s comment on this Spectator article, with the typos lovingly corrected and some relevant hyperlinks to Papal encyclicals put in…

*** [Adrian] Hilton’s piece is a little overheated, but he isn’t entirely mad. Or, rather, he is entirely mad, but he’s also onto something which isn’t entirely trivial.

Article 14.3 of the European human rights charter [On reflection, I may be getting my Fundamental Charters and my European Conventions mixed up here, but the political point is the same], for example, insists that it is the right of parents to “ensure the education and teaching of their children in conformity with their religious, philosophical and pedagogical convictions”. That clause is widely taken (though it has not been conclusively demonstrated nor legally tested) to prevent an elected left-wing government in this country from abolishing the private schools — still an ambition of most members of the governing Labour party, unless I’m very much mistaken — and the reason it’s there in the human rights document is that, roughly speaking, the Catholics insisted on it.

The Popes were always terribly hostile to the Rights of Man through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — and to liberalism, socialism, ordinary people having votes, etc: see Rerum Novarum (whose centenary was celebrated by the current Pope with a new encyclical, Centesimus Annus) and many other key Papal pronouncements — and the price for getting established Catholic Europe to agree to the Euro-human rights document was that the document should ensure the protection of Catholic schools — which had been controversial above all in France since the 18th century (think of the expulsion of the Jesuits and the educational debates that led to in the 1760s) and especially in the late 19th century (think of the titanic battles between the Third Republic and the Church over the schools).

So — and here’s a cheap point — anyone on the Right in the U.K. who thinks that the human rights charter is going to defend their private schools is hoping to be the beneficiary of Catholic social policy…

But, more interestingly, I think Hilton’s not wrong to detect a link between the organisation of Catholic hierarchy and the organisation of the EU through the subsidiarity discourse. The other group which talked in similar terms were the Marxists, for the model of democratic centralism which Marx set out in the pages of The Civil War in France (though he didn’t call it that) was of a centralised national structure which, nevertheless, let the local branches run their own affairs in their own way much of the time, but could always overrule them. And the point here is that not only were the Marxists on the one hand and the Catholics on the other hand the two most important genuinely internationalist movements of the nineteenth century, but that they also pissed off those in Britain who claimed to be the inheritors of local traditions, government by consent, organic community, the whole Burkean shebang, etc., and it’s this rhetoric which Hilton is inheriting and redeploying.

The trouble is — to make another cheap point — the British Right is far too content with the authoritarian structures of the centralised Jacobin (OK, let’s call it Hobbesian) state to make any attack on European top-downery in anything like the language of the Burkean shebang at all convincing. (Think of the Thatcher government’s onslaught against local government power, just for starters). So its political language gets pulled in two directions, first towards the language of market fundamentalism (centralised state power is OK insofar as the state takes itself to be preserving the workings of the free market), second towards crude populist nationalism (centralised state power is OK insofar as its the Brits governing themselves rather than anything to do with foreigners). But those aren’t two terribly happy directions to be pulled in, especially not these days, with the result (among other things), that the Conservative Party is now rather firmly wedged into the dustbin of history, and finding it almost impossible to clamber out.

It’s just such a shame that Mr Blair is the main beneficiary of all of this. ***

On Monday I linked to the excellent Fistful of Leone website while enthusing about spaghetti westerns, which makes it appropriate that today I should like to the altogether-different-but-similarly-named blog, A Fistful of Euros, which has brought together a bunch of the better weblog writers out there to comment on matters European. It’s too early to say yet whether it’s going to be any good or not, but the auspices are favourable and it has a jolly good name.

[This is an atypically long post for the Virtual Stoa, for which, apologies in advance. You may want to stop reading now, and go and have a drink, or something.]

One of the many valuable things I learned from Bonnie Honig when I was a graduate student was that the reasons why Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lawgiver must leave the city he helps to found in Book Two Chapter Seven of the Social Contract are the same as the reasons why the cowboy rides off into the sunset at the end of a Western.

Roughly speaking, the key claim is that, having solved the most pressing problem of a newly-established, somewhat precarious frontier community — bandits, Indians, the imminent return of Frank Miller, corruption, the problems that emerge when the farmer and the cowman aren’t friends (whoops: wrong genre), whatever: it varies from flick to flick — it’s important for the hero to Go Away if that community is ever going to be genuinely self-sufficient and able to solve its own problems with its own resources, rather than perpetually remaining dependent on (as Honig puts it) the”sheer power” of the hero’s “exemplary if flawed personality, innate sense of justice, and … mighty prowess with firearms” (see her excellent Democracy and the Foreigner, p.22 and, for the full argument, pp.18-25). (And my apologies for the overlong sentence there).

Since a typical UK undergraduate finds making sense of Rousseau’s political thought to be a slightly harder enterprise than enjoying classic Western films, it is a very useful analogy on which to draw when trying to teach eighteenth-century political philosophy. And the conversations to which it gives rise always remind me that I spend too much time reading (boring) academic literature, and not enough time watching (fun) Westerns.

The figure of the foreign founder — the stranger who comes in from outside, shakes things up quite a lot, mostly for the better, and then departs — is at the centre of that particular part of Honig’s argument. And in the context of the Western, the most interesting foreigner of all is the great Italian director Sergio Leone, who did not (of course) found the genre, but whose four Westerns (plus, I suppose, the superb Duck, You Sucker / A Fistful of Dynamite / Once Upon a Time in the Revolution [delete according to taste], which is set during the Mexican revolution but is still, basically, a spaghetti Western) exploited all of its conventions, turned them inside out and left the story of the American West just as epic as it had been before, but altogether more cynical, more violent (yes: more violent) and not a little bleak. (To continue the political-theoretical analogies, think of what Roman political thought looks like once Augustine of Hippo has gone to work on it in City of God: Augustine lacks Leone’s subversive piety towards his material, but the effects are much the same).

All of which is just a long and pretentious build-up to saying that I enjoyed watching Leone’s 1968 film Once Upon A Time in the West last night on BBC2 — the first time I’d seen the film in a decade — very much indeed. Oh yes, and that reports of the death of Charles Bronson, who played Harmonica in the film, were published this morning (a not-so-different kind of riding off into the sunset, after all).

And, as we might expect, then, the closing scene of Once Upon a Time in the West both repeats and avoids the classic conventions. Insofar as there is a hero — Charles Bronson / Harmonica wears lighter coloured clothes than the other leads, is not a crook, survives to the final scene, and is motivated by the non-mercenary consideration of blood revenge — he does ride away alone at the end of the film. But this departure is simply for the sake of narrative form. Were Harmonica to stay in the new town being built up around the railroad, it’s not clear that he’d destabilise it at all; there just wouldn’t be anything for him to do — though this may be a reflection of the wider fact that, having shot Henry Fonda’s Frank dead in the extraordinary gunfight at the end of the film, he doesn’t really have anything left to do with himself anyway or anywhere. But the genre still demands that he rides off stage right (the trains, which will replace his kind, enter from the left), and so that’s what he does.

Bronson faithfully follows the conventions of his genre in form, but in substance his exit more closely maps onto the departure - literally into the shadows - of that other hero of 1960s epic Italian cinema, the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) in Visconti’s Gattopardo (see last week’s post below, and which also stars Claudia Cardinale). For by the end of their respective films both the Prince and Harmonica are anachronistic figures whose work is done, individual patriarchs who represent an older order (the Sicilian aristocracy, the Western gunfighters), and who, through the drama of the film, have successfully exploited the turbulent present to create a possible and - crucially - materially prosperous future not for themselves but for the representatives of a younger generation: Jill (Once Upon a Time…) and Tancredi (Gattopardo).

Significantly, however, neither the Prince nor Harmonica are the founder-figures in these films. There are Rousseauesque legislator figures in both movies, who, following in the footsteps of the Ur-founder Moses, never come to take possession of the land of milk and honey which they call into being. But despite this formal similarity, however, the founders which Visconti and Leone show us (or not, as the case may be) are quite different figures. In Gattopardo, on the one hand, the heroic founder figure is Giuseppe Garibaldi himself (as featured in Wind in the Willows, no less!), an absent presence throughout the film, who brings to birth the new world from the ashes of the old but who is never reconciled to the new regime — and is finally shot and wounded at Aspramonte on the orders of the repulsive Colonel, who is lionised during the stupendous ball scene that fills up most of the second half of the film.

In Once Upon a Time in the West, on the other hand, the Moses-figure is the generally unheroic (and, not coincidentally and in a rather unPC kind of way also physically disabled) Mr Morton, the caricature capitalist who dies staring not at the Pacific Ocean — his life’s ambition has been to see his railway extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific — but face to face with a muddy puddle, having been shot (one assumes) by Cheyenne / Jason Robards and his gang in a massacre which — unlike the massacre at the McBains’ farm — takes place off-camera.

So there we are: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bonnie Honig and the Old Testament as the crucial texts with which to decipher the classics of 1960s Italian cinema, as it works through Italy’s own fantasies of national founding and political consolidation through projections onto its own periphery (Sicily / Gattopardo) or its transatlantic other (Arizona / Once Upon a Time…). And that’s enough rambling on a variation on a theme for now.

Finally: if anyone thinks they understand all the twists and turns in the plot, do get in touch. I have a number of questions about what goes on in the middle of Once Upon a Time…, though offhand I’m not sure that those questions really have answers.

Final, final Rousseau - Spag. Western question: can anyone tell me whether the Christopher Frayling who published the book which people tell me is very good about Sergio Leone the same Christopher Frayling who wrote his Ph.D. on Rousseau’s La Nouvelle H�lo�se? (There can’t be too many Christopher Fraylings in the world). If so then the pathway from eighteenth-century France to nineteenth-century Arizona (or wherever) is happily well-trodden indeed.

UPDATE [8/9/2003]: There’s some further comments on this kind of thing over at Walloworld.