Fascism, totalitarianism and theocracy

The late Isaiah Berlin, in his Two Concepts of Liberty, made the point that “liberty” is a concept that has become so “porous” that it seemed there was no meaning that it couldn’t bear. This was due to the positive connotations of the word; regardless of how actually illiberal a measure advocated by theorists, politicians and activists – it is presented as representing “real” liberty. (Nowadays, New Labour prefers to call its various illiberal measures “progressive”.)

The use of the above three terms is, I think, exactly like this – in reverse. For the polemicist, they are perennially attractive as a means of discrediting your opponent without having to engage fully with the arguments.

There has, as everyone knows, a long and ignoble tradition on the left of using the epithet “fascist” in this context. Having spread like a semantic virus, the inflation of this concept apparently knows no bounds: sometimes it would be used accurately, sometimes used to describe any undemocratic regime that was capitalist and sometimes simply used as a synonym for anyone or any regime even marginally to the right of Mao.

Regrettably, a new strain of the virus has appeared amongst those on the left who supported regime-change in Iraq. Regrettable because while I do think the Ba’athist regime was accurately described as fascist, it shouldn’t, in my view, be used to describe those who opposed the war; that didn’t make them “objectively pro-fascist” any more than supporting it makes me an “objectively pro-neocon, Republican oil-driller for Jesus”. You’re entitled to disagree but if so, do try to be consistent.

A contemporary example of concept inflation can also be found in the use of “totalitarian”, which in some cases seems to have become a synonym for regimes and movements that are merely authoritarian. Properly understood, this concept – developed by, amongst others – Hannah Arendt, holds that fascism and communism, rather than representing authoritarian regimes at the polar opposites of the political spectrum, have in reality more in common than separates them.

There are a number of reasons to be suspicious of the idea as it was originally presented: it was a Cold War concept designed partly to identify Soviet Communism as belonging to the same species as German National Socialism – the appeal of this to those on the American right being fairly obvious. Other criticisms include the notion that it is too static - practically useless, for instance, for the analysing the Breshnev-era stagnation.

There is some merit in this first point: being old-fashioned, I would argue that fascism is and was worse both qualitatively and quantitatively than communism. Historical examples, I think, show fascism to be intrinsically more unstable and is, therefore, much more likely to be territorially expansionist. Every believer in the totalitarian thesis knows – ironically in a Chomsky-esque fashion – that more souls died under Stalinism than German National Socialism. Well, yes – but Stalin was at it for that much longer, and the “body-count” approach usually fails to factor in the obvious point that, unlike WW1, who was responsible for the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 isn’t questioned by any serious historian. Fascism is also qualitatively more wicked; surely everyone agrees that the fascist utopia – in the German case, a world free from Jewry – is intrinsically more repulsive than the objectives conceived by Stalin in the first five-year plans?

However, while resisting the complete conflation of the two, the concept is not without its uses - for communism and fascism do indeed share a number of features and describing these as “totalitarian” is as good a word as any. In any event, it was never solely a right-wing concept: although I’m not sure if he ever used the actual term, George Orwell developed the idea most famously in 1984 in which he identifies some of the most crucial features of totalitarian regimes. We have the party, a feature of totalitarianism everywhere, which is above all institution of the state and whose task it is to mobilise the population – rather than ensure their passivity, as in traditional authoritarian regimes. It’s not enough to obey Big Brother, O’Brien tells Winston; you have to love him. For the totalitarian, the citizen must believe – and it’s here that the relationship with religion is interesting. Everyone knows Orwell’s targets were Nazism and Stalinism; less that the Catholic Church was for him the third great totalitarian institution of world history.

Which brings us to theocracy. Like the first two, this concept has suffered from a great deal of inflation recently and tends to be used to describe any situation where organised religion has any significant input into the political life of a state. But properly understood (as the rulership of priests), there is something intrinsically totalitarian about theocracy because just like 1984, in these states one is required to believe.

I’m not sure if I entirely agree with Orwell’s use of the Catholic Church. Its rule, while obviously stifling and reactionary, has often been characterised by the compromise and passivity that one normally associates with traditional authoritarian regimes. Although perhaps risky to say so in this part of the country, a much better candidate would be the rule of the Calvinists, as experienced in Geneva and, I regret to say, Scotland – at one time the most Calvinist country on the face of the planet bar none.

The rule of the Church of Scotland was proto-totalitarian in the way that the attempt to build the Holy Community was similar to other totalitarian experiments in that it atomised individuals and then reformed them into a community of believers, whose fidelity to the Faith is monitored as closely as possible with the best technology available. As T.C. Smout said, the innovation of the Reformation in Scotland was the novel idea that everyone was to be a religious virtuoso.

The history of the Church of Scotland is a good example of the ways in which religion, and politicised religion can be misunderstood. A number of features of the Calvinist tradition can be seen as “progressive”: the Church of Scotland was, for example, impressively democratic sometime before the British Parliament was elected by universal suffrage and it is very egalitarian in its government. It has no bishops or cardinals and it has had women ministers for many years.

But while I’d agree with the redoubtable Lenin that one shouldn’t consider all religion reactionary, I’d argue that when it expresses itself theocratically, it always is. And I’d argue further that this is always a danger because religion expresses itself this way as one of the three ways that salvation religions adjust to the fact that the world is evil: from Max Weber we have the idea that religion can either retreat from the world in a monastic, quietist sort of way; engage with it ascetically; or try and take it over theocratically. In the case of the Calvinists – option 1 was impossible because the Reformation abolished it; option 2 was attempted but failed - leaving only option 3, which it did, although was by that time succumbing to the forces of secularisation anyway. In all its historical incarnations, the Church of Scotland may have been relatively egalitarian but liberal it has never been and life in 17th century Scotland must have been absolutely intolerable. (I like the phrase I read somewhere that said "one could be forgiven for thinking that the purpose of the Reformation in Scotland was to eliminate purgatory by getting it over while they were still alive".)

Theocracy and religion need to be kept separate; the relationship with power is the crucial one and it should be understood from history how often religion has appealed to the powerless. Critics of religion and religious political movements like to dredge up blood-curdling verses from the Old Testament and the Koran in an attempt to expose the inner, oppressive nature of religion. But while differences in religious doctrine can be significant, I think this approach misses the point of theocracy for here power lies not with the oracle but with the priesthood and the scholars – who are the custodians of orthodoxy. The significance of theocracy lies in the social and political reality of being governed by those who make a claim to cognitive infallibility, rather – as some suppose – what the texts actually say.

And the crucial point which I think needs to be understood is that the basis on which people make this claim is not necessarily decisive. Whether your ruler does so because he thinks he’s in mystical communication with God, or the Volk, or the proletariat; or whether he thinks he has a unique understanding of Marx, or the Bible, or the Koran – the net result is much the same: tyranny, oppression, and a pile of corpses that stand as a monument to the attempt to build paradise with human material.

Skool Discipline part 2

The Scotsman carries this today, with the teachers' unions warning that Scotland's schools are facing "breakdown" after the Executive's own figures showed a shortage of almost 800 teachers, with around 335 posts remaining vacant for over three months. The problem is set to get worse : over 50% of Scotland's teachers are set to retire in the next ten years. If you consider that someone like me - replete with the grey hair, the alcoholism, and the distressed wardrobe - is inaccurately, but routinely, described as a "young man", you'll begin to appreciate the gravity of the situation.

Now, what could possibly be putting people off this wonderful and fulfilling profession? Perhaps it's this; not only are teachers apparently too knackered to pursue romantic liasons - it seems that our profession is a distinct disadvatage in the mating game, with 1 in ten women and 15% of men saying that their jobs have scared off potential partners.

More likely it's the actual conditions of the job. The Scotsman piece quotes James Douglas-Hamilton, the Tories’ education spokesman, as saying "the Executive will fail to retain teacher numbers while a school staff member is attacked every 12 minutes in Scotland".

Hmmm, the problem with these discussions is that they focus too much on the extreme end of the discipline scale. The rising incidence of teachers being assualted is of course a serious issue, which I'll return to in a mo' - but I think most teachers would agree it's all the low-level nonsense that we have to put up with on a day to day, period by period basis - this is what wears you down. Too much is taken up every day arguing about the basics. I mean, barring attendance, one could be forgiven for thinking that nothing - excepting obvious infractions of the rules, such as arson, murder etc. - is compulsory when it comes to education these days.

One of the most frustrating things about this job is the failure, so often, for teachers and their unions to make a left-wing case about some of this garbage we have to put up with. On the question of assaults against staff, for instance, although I don't have the data available I bet a majority of them have been perpetuated against female teachers. Although unscientific, that's certainly been my experience; of the seven teachers who have told me recently that they've been victims of assault, six of them have been women. The reason, as most observant teachers will tell you, is pretty straightforward: with so little in the way of formal sanctions, teacher discipline lies largely in the perception of the pupils towards them - and this is where sexist stereotypes can become self-fufilling; female teachers often have more problems because a significant number of their charges perceive them to be less disciplinarian before they've even walked in the classroom for the first time.

Now, if this has been raised by the EiS or SSTA formally, I apologise in advance but in my experience - at staff and union meetings convened to address this and the general problem of discipline - what one tends to get instead is the vocal contributions of the "he's alright when he's with me" brigade. For those of you who aren't teachers, I think you'd be unpleasantly surprised at just how many of my fellow professionals prefer to make themselves or their departments look good at someone else's expense, rather than stand by their comrades who might be struggling at the chalk face.

I don't hesitate in describing such people as part of the problem, particularly if they're in management positions - which they so often are. They're part of the problem because those who profess never to have any problems with a given class or pupil are often macho dickheads who are so thick that they don't realise their "techniques" can't be employed by the nearly 60% of our secondary staff who are women; because they are also often obsequious, ass-kissing functionaries who profess to care about the children when the only thing they care about is career-building; because those they pick on to make themselves look good are invariably those in the weakest positions - supply-teachers, probationers, students and so forth.

These people should be ashamed of themselves and desperately need to be challenged. It really gets up my nose when apologists for the on-going Lord of the Flies situation in our schools do so in the name of "equality" or "socialism". As far as I've been able to see, the policy of allowing a handful of badly-behaved pupils to routinely disrupt the learning process and paying a bunch of bureaucrats and wannabe social workers to spout low-grade management-speak to justify this in the name of "social inclusion" is at best a force for the status-quo; at worst it's actually exacerbating the situation.

Schadenfreude

When it was led by Ken Livingstone, the GLC got up the Thatcher government's nose with impressive regularity. For one, their high spending policies were anathema to Thatcher and her promise of Britain as a low tax paradise. Also, their attitude to personal and social education in London school was right out of some Daily Mail nightmare as their efforts to make education free from racism, sexism and homophobia earned them lurid headlines in that paper, as well as the Evening Standard and the Sun - the last of which dubbed him "Red Ken", a fully paid-up member of the "looney left".

The GLC was unquestionably a victim of Thatcher's wider war on local councils - and this period saw a number of measures which would be impossible in countries with constitutions that entrench local and regional government : the introduction of rate-capping, which imposed a financial straight-jacket on councils regardless of the wishes of the local electorate; Section 28, a homophobic central government intrusion into the classroom; the "right-to-buy" policy, popular certainly, but again an unwarranted incursion into the right of councils to manage their housing stock; and the abolition of the GLC itself, an event that demonstrates the elasticity of the British constitution to the astonishment of American and Continental observers who have to live with those pesky written constitution things.



But none of this means I have any sympathy for Newt-boy; he's a prat - always has been, is now and always will be and although it may not reflect well on me, I'm rather enjoying his present discomfort. Much has been written about his embrace of Al-Qarawadi. I've no interest in discussing further an issue that's been done to death elsewhere but I have to say that I'm quite sure that had Al-Qarawadi been a fundamentalist Christian, such was the atmosphere in the 1980s - Ken and his ilk would have been amongst the first to (noisily) denounce a meeting with someone with views like Al-Qarawadi's.

And now there's his unbelievably crass comments to a Jewish reporter of the Evening Standard. His excuse - that he was responding to the years of racism promulgated by the paper just doesn't wash. If he felt so strongly about it, perhaps he could explain how he came to be their restaurant critic for four years? (He also had a column in the Sun for a while, if I remember rightly - another paper not exactly renowned for celebrating the cultural diversity of Britain.)

But - while he should of course apologise - I certainly don't want to see him resign. I rather agreed with Simon Jenkins that our Ken adds to the entertainment value of political life in this country and if the presence of holocaust survivors at the meeting where Livingstone was called upon to apologise was an over-reaction, it's exactly the sort of treatment that Ken and his type were dishing out to anyone whom they decided fell short of their impeccably high standards of "tolerance" in local government and the voluntary sector during the 1980s.

French scrap 35-hour week

As the living antithesis of the work ethic, I have to say that I'm disappointed by this news. I'd always drawn a certain amount of satisfaction that France - along with Germany and the USA - have consistently been near the top of the OECD's competitiveness index, without sacrificing their long lunches and holidays.

However, it isn't - as I've no doubt free-marketeers will argue - a resounding defeat for the so-called "European model". French workers, when they're not at lunch, are actually more productive on an hourly basis than the Americans or the British. While there are a number of possible reasons for this, I reckon it has a lot to do with what economists refer to as the "law of diminishing returns to the variable factor" and occurs when ever at least one other variable in the productive process is fixed. So, for example, adding ever increasing amounts of fertilizer to a field will eventually produce zero returns because at some point, what you need is more land.

Working hours are surely like this? I don't know if the average French man-hour is more productive because they have better technology than the Americans but surely part of the reason must be because the tenth hour in a working day is less productive than the second? This is certainly true in my case : second period, I'll smile sweetly, greet my class and say, "class - as you know, I see you as my 'internal customers'; what can I do to raise your attainment and socially include you?" - whereas, at the end of the day I'm more likely to say, "begone, disagreeable cretins - you are responsible for the decline of Western civilization".

Bad attitude? To this, I'd cheerfully confess. My defence? Lunchtime's too short, dammit!

The economics of Independence

Over at Independence, there is a discussion about the lethargic condition of the Scottish economy (bottom of the OECD ranking for competitiveness it seems) - and given that by "independence", we're talking Scottish nationalism, there's no prizes for guessing who the culprit is : Scotland's poor economic performance is all their fault - the omnipotent masters of economic destruction, the English.

I'm going to throw away all my old economic history textbooks because now I've seen the light; in this, and this post we have the revelation that economic performance is, apparently, solely a function of political independence.

All my life, I've been listening and reading arguments favouring a given political outcome, justified in the name of economic growth; proportional representation, devolution, strong local government, a large state, a small state, high levels of welfare, slashing welfare, membership of the EU and withdrawing from the EU have all been advocated in the name of higher economic growth - so I don't suppose one can blame the nationalists for doing the same. But these sorts of choices should be primarily civilisational - not economic.

Moreover, even if this argument isn't accepted, the simplistic equation of independence with economic success is, in any event, complete bollocks. It just takes two of the countries on the list here to demonstrate this : Hong Kong is number 6 on the list; when - pray tell - was Hong Kong independent? Or Ireland - Mr. Salmond's favoured example - it stands at number ten. Stuart Dickson has helpfully put the dates when various countries were made independent in brackets for the reader to draw the inference that the economic success of Ireland is due to the fact that she is independent where Scotland is not.

But you don't need to know too much about either economics or history to immediately spot the flaw here. Ireland gained its independence in 1921; does that mark the point at which the Irish economy - freed from colonialism - started to take off? Er, no : Ireland's relative economic success is dated much later, with growth particularly strong in the 1990s - so I think other factors have to be considered. (The same fallacy is used as an argument for joining the single-currency but, as with the independence argument, the dates simply don't fit.)

That Alec Salmond et al speak of the "Emerald Tiger" economy of Ireland should set off alarm bells because it was drawn from an expression used about economies such as Korea, Singapore, Japan etc. These examples were used by the right to argue for a range of reactionary measures such as privatizing welfare, draconian policing and, that perennial tory favourite, family values.

I argue for the union not on economic grounds but because, apart from anything else, I prefer belonging to a polity based on civility rather than ethnicity. Making arguments like these in this part of the world inevitably draw the accusation that you're suffering from the "Scottish cringe" from the more-Scottish-than-thou brigade.

The only sense in which I'm any less Scottish than anyone else is genetically; being as I am half-Scottish, quarter English and quarter Welsh. To use this against me would be a bit dodgy - and if you think that those cuddly non-racist, forward-looking, civic nationalists would never do such a thing, I regret to inform you that you'd be quite wrong...