Eating Your Enemy’s Heart…

 American Foreign Policy, civil unrest, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  2 Responses »
May 192013
 

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The video of Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade commander Abu Sakkar cutting out the ‘heart’ of a dead Syrian government soldier and then appearing to take a bite out of it has certainly stimulated intense debate and much criticism right around the world. (An edited version of the video can be played above this paragraph.) So much so the Free Syrian Army (FSA), to which the Brigade is affiliated, has been bounced into issuing a statement that: “Any act contrary to the values that the Syrian people have paid their blood and lost their homes to will not be tolerated, the abuser will be punished severely even if they are associated with the Free Syrian Army.” It has been reported by John Hall in The Independent that  ‘wanted’ posters have been put up in rebel-held areas, calling for Sakkar to be brought to justice ‘dead or alive’.

Quite what Sakkar hoped to achieve when he staged the gruesome stunt - it was, in fact, a lung - is questionable. According to TIME’s Aryn Baker (2013a), in a Skype interview Sakkar (real name: Khalid al-Hamad) said it was a response to material found on the dead soldier’s mobile phone. “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there.

However, Sakkar also boasted to Baker: “I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip, I am sawing another shabiha [pro-government militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him into small pieces and large ones.” Sakkar also explained that even though both sides of the conflict in Syria are using video clips of their own brutal actions to intimidate the other, he believes his clip would have a particularly strong impact on the regime’s troops. “They film as well, but after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is.”

If Sakkar hopes that his ghoulish act will strike paralysing terror into the government troops and the regime’s Shabiha militiamen, he may be miscalculating on 2 levels:-

Firstly, evidence of rebel troops committing atrocities undermines those in the West who are trying to persuade their leaders to allow arms to be sold to the rebels. The Saudis and Qataris, who are already providing ‘lethal aid’ to the rebels, can control, to some considerable extent at least, their populations and what they see. In contrast, the Western ‘democracies’ have more limited control over public opinion and the stories the media presents to them.

Poll showing support for arming Syrian rebels, March 2013. Copyright © 2013 Pew Research Centre

Poll showing support for arming Syrian rebels, March 2013. Copyright © 2013 Pew Research Centre

According to a Pew Research Centre poll this March (Bruce Stokes, 2013) – see left - there is already little appetite among the general public in the West for arming the rebels amid political concerns that weapons supplied to moderate FSA groups could all too easily end up in the hands of al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists like those of the al-Nusra Front. Seeing and reading about Sakkar – who has also been filmed firing rockets indiscriminately into a Shi’ite village in the Lebanon border area, killing at least 2 villagers - will only make it more difficult for FSA supporters in the West to make their case.

No wonder the FSA are talking about bringing Sakkar in for trial ‘dead or alive’! His video is doing massive damage to their cause and they need to limit that damage fast.

The conflict in Syria has been ongoing for so long now that, short of truly dramatic news like Sakkar’s stunt, it rarely makes the headlines more than once or twice a week. Yet the Sakkar incident has been followed in rapid succession by headline-grabbing allegations of more chemical weapons use by Government forces,  Russia supplying state-of-the-art ‘ship-killing’ missiles to the Syrian Government, Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries now officially topping 1.5 million and leading international figures from to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to our own David Cameron trying to get the Russians moving on an international peace conference. Clearly the situation is getting a lot worse - and a lot more dangerous - but could it just be a coincidence that a number of stories portraying government brutality and the intransigence of their Russian backers have arrived in rapid succession to kick Sakkar out of the headlines…?

The second way Sakkar’s stunt could backfire on him is that it ups the ante for committing atrocities. Aryn Baker (2013b) reports that fighters from both sides no longer simply brag about their exploits on the battlefield; they film them and share them, competing in a gruesome game of one-upmanship. Rami Abdel Rahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Baker that this trading in trophy atrocities, played up for the camera and passed from phone to phone, has a desensitising effect. When such gruesome footage - eg: rape, torture, amputations, even a 13-year-old boy beheading a man – is passed around like trading cards, it escalates the cycle of honour-driven revenge. Each atrocity published demands a response from the other side. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch adds: “When people see these acts of brutality and mutilation, it leaves deep scars – and there will be a temptation to replicate it in revenge. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Quite a few fighters in Syria interpret that literally.”

The Beast in Man
I first wrote about war releasing the ‘beast in man’ for Prisoner Abuse and the Mess in Iraq back in 2005. I also wrote about ‘berserker rage’ in Munir Hussain and the Wrong Messages of Judge John Reddihough (2009).

In sociopsychological terms, this is the work of the RED vMEME set free from all BLUE/GREEN constraints of behaviour in the battlefield. Sigmund Freud (1923b) would have seen it as the work of Thanatos, the death drive of the Id. The RED vMEME can be seen as the most extreme vMEMETIC expression of the if-it-feels-good-do-it motif of the Id – the Pleasure Principle, in Freud’s construct. Thus, RED/Thanatos will carry out the most barbaric cruelty because, in the moment, it gives pleasure.

If Sakkar is to be believed, it seems to have given him pleasure to cut his enemy’s heart out and appear to eat it, partly as revenge for what he found on the dead soldier’s mobile and partly because he clearly enjoys thinking of himself as someone who fills his enemies with fear. Viz: “…after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is.” Talk about RED bulling itself up to be the ‘Great I Am’!

That RED/Id was driving Sakkar in his gruesome pantomime is also indicated by the fact he clearly hadn’t thought through the potential consequences of his actions. He was too ‘in the moment’, as Tad James & Wyatt Woodsmall (1988) would put it.

There are neurological correlates in this sociopsychological explanation of Sakkar’s ghoulish actions. In Freud, the Ego and the Superego repress the Id to keep it under control. Clare W Graves, on whose work Spiral Dynamics is based, saw it as the role of BLUE and higher vMEMES to compensate for and, if necessary, constrain RED in its more dangerous self-express moments. Mark Solms (2000) has carried out research to indicate the Superego and Ego functions are located in the frontal cortex and the Id function in the limbic system. Similarly Svenja Caspers et al (2011) found evidence for ‘cool’ vMEME activity to be associated with the frontal cortex while ‘warm’ vMEMES were more defined by limbic system activity. Key inhibitory circuits are known to be in the frontal cortex - which would fit with the constraining and self-sacrificial/conformist functions of the Ego/Superego and the cool vMEMES. Correspondingly, the limbic system is associated with desire and emotional responses which fit with the self-expressive nature of the Id and the warm vMEMES. (See A Biological Basis for vMEMES…? for further details.)

Freud (1926) saw dreams as the leaking out of repressed Id desires as the Superego is dormant during sleep and the Ego virtually dormant. In terms of neurological correlates, Solms found that the frontal cortex is relatively inactive during dreaming while the limbic system is highly active. While research has yet to demonstrate this, it is highly likely that, in the moment of wanton brutality the perpetrator’s inhibiting frontal cortex is a lot less active than the self-expressive limbic system.

A further neurological correlate lies in the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine, activation of which is highly rewarding on the meso-limbic pathway. From her work with fighting amongst mice, Maria Couppis (2008) has postulated that some people intentionally seek out aggressive encounters because of the rewarding sensations, caused by the increase in dopamine from these encounters.

So intense aggression, rabid destructive urges freed from the constraining inhibitions and rules, can be very rewarding and pleasurable.

A personal anecdote: I remember the last fight I got into, around 30 years ago…feeling my fist crunch into my opponent’s face, the flesh on his face giving way and the cheekbone beneath seeming to bend beneath the force of my blow. To recall that sensation today still gives me a little thrill of pleasure. (Karma: I lost the fight in the end and was quite badly beaten up!)

Of the ‘pleasure’ aspect of committing atrocities in conflict, Roland Weierstall (2013) writes: “About one third of all former combatants in our studies said that to some extent the violence and the struggling of the victim could be fascinating, emotionally arousing and even linked to excitement. In these cases, blood must be shed as the victim is killed.”

All of which brings me back to Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck telling a HemsMESH meeting in October 2000: “When a country goes to war, its government had better prepare the people for tales of their troops committing atrocities.

What Sakkar did is, of course, by civilised standards, deplorable. But he and others like him are not operating in a civilised world. They’re in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war where deep trusts have been betrayed, safety is an all-but-impossible ideal and living on the edge, ‘in the moment’ is often the only way to be because there may be no moment after. We may be dismayed by Sakker’s grisly video but we should not be surprised.

Almost inevitably worse is yet to come – as Weierstall confirms: “…the Syrian case should not surprise anyone. We should rather be surprised that the extent of human right violations we should expect to happen in Syria is kept secret.”

Ethnic divisions facilitate dehumanisation and derogation of ‘others’
Facilitating such atrocities is the dehumanisation and derogation of the enemy because they are not-of-our-tribe. This has been noted as typical of the first 2 stages in Social Identity Theory (Henri Tajfel & John Turner, 1979) in which the ‘others’ are castigated, blamed for ‘our tribe’s problems and consequently demonised. This then permits action of some kind to be taken against the ‘others’ in the third stage, Social Comparison.

This is the way the Nazis built up the persecution of the Jews to the point where they could perpetrate the Holocaust, is typical of both Serbian and Crotian ethnic cleansing strategies in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and was a hallmark of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

A number of commentators have expressed concern at the way the Syrian conflict has become increasingly polarised along Shia vs Sunni sectarian lines. Sunni Saudia Arabia and Qatar are arming the rebels while Shia Iran funnels weapons through to the regime of Bashar al-Assad - Assad is an Alawite, Alawites being an offshoot of Shia Islam. Meanwhile, according to BBC News, both Shia Hezbollah fighters and Sunni militants are coming across the Lebanese border to fight for the respective sides. Even Sakkar’s grisly pantomime has an alarmingly sectarian element to it: according to Peter Bouckaert, in the unedited (and so far unpublished) version of the video held by Human Rights Watch, Sakkar exhorts his men to “slaughter the Alawites and take their hearts out to eat them”.

Sectarian divisions essentially emerge from the PURPLE vMEME’s differentiating of ‘our tribes’ from ‘others’ in its quest to find safety-in-belonging. If the BLUE vMEME is also activated – for example, by differences in religious belief, even very minor ones – then a PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic is created. Thus, the difference in beliefs between Sunni and Shia add an extra driver to tribal and ethnic differentiations and make the ‘others’ even more different. As BLUE cannot tolerate any deviation from ‘the one true way’ even those with the slightest difference in belief easily become categorised as ‘heretics’. And, if the ‘heretics’ cannot be converted, they must be destroyed to prevent contamination of the ‘true believers’. Thus, a dreadful combination of xenophobic PURPLE, over-pious BLUE and RED in a Thanatos mode lead to the kind of atrocity against ‘others’ that Abu Sakkar and others like him are revelling in.

Erwin Staub (1999) has studied a number of recent conflicts where mass killings and other atrocities have taken place. All the issues discussed in this Blog are among those he identifies as contributing factors to genocide. However, Staub identifies an additional factor: the passivity of bystanders to the process.

Whereas it can be argued that the international community got over-involved in Libya’s 2011 civil war, with NATO effectively acting decisively as the rebels’ air force, the United Nations has been paralysed by disagreements between the West, hesitantly on the rebel’s side, and Russia brazenly bolstering Assad’s position on the other.

The result has been inaction by outside powers, other than arms sales, with the consequence that the conflict has become more and more dangerous and more and more violent and brutal. Peter Weierstall is almost certainly right: we shall see much worse than the kind of atrocity Sakkar committed as the conflict drags on.

Moreover, the direct involvement of Lebanese factions, the overt support for Assad from Iran and the semi-covert support for the rebels from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar poses a real risk of the conflict spilling across Syria’s borders and mutating into a regional conflagration. That undoubtedly is one of Israel’s reasons for destroying convoys of hi-tech arms Assad intended sending to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Modern missiles launched across its northern border would be on a completely different level from the paltry salvos of home-made or outdated rockets employed by Hezbollah and, in Gaza, Hamas so far. Israel would feel obliged to react with massive force which would risk bringing in Iran and uniting the Arabs (Sunni and Shia together) against the common enemy: the Jews. Samuel Gaertner et al (1993) identified this coming together of sworn enemies to battle a common threat as the Common In-Group Identity Model.

You could almost argue it’s in Israel’s and the West’s interests to let the Sunnis and the Shias engage in sectarian conflict right across the Middle East – and Samuel Huntington (1993), with his theoretical division of the world into near-incompatible cultural zones, would almost certainly advocate such a course of action.

There are at least 2 major problems with that approach.

Firstly, there are too many outside parties with interests in the Middle East to just let them slug it out. From Israel desperate to maintain its security and possibly expand its borders, to a large part of the world’s dependency on oil from the Middle East, to Iran and several Arab states tacitly – or not so tacitly! – providing support to al-Qaeda and other jihadist movements - outside countries have good and often competing reasons to meddle in the Middle East. Plus, of course American and Russian arms manufacturers have a live war in which to try out their latest death toys for a sizeable profit - only that very easily degenerates into a proxy war between their respective governments.

Secondly, the way the Western media works means that, in ORANGE’s desire to make more and more money, it will ramp up the ‘atrocity factor’ by coming up with ever more gory, outrageous and scary stories to sell. The ‘desensitisation factor’ results in eventual boredom in the audiences, meaning the media have to find even more gory, outrageous and scary stories to continue making money. This gives the RED/Thanatos-driven extremists on the ground in Syria an external and ever-more demanding market for their filmed atrocities.

It’s certainly given Abu Sakkar his ’15 minutes of fame’, with several major league interviews and lead stories in international media last week.

For Barrack Obama, Syria presents a damned-if-I-do-and-damned-if-I-don’t challenge. The situation is so complex, both non-intervention and intervention (at any level) present dangers from virtually every angle. No wonder he is clearly procrastinating! But the intense public reaction to every new outrage that is worse than the one before puts more and more pressure on him and other Western leaders to act. The reaction, of course, fades with the desensitised ‘boredom factor’ until an even worse outrage sneaks its way on to YouTube.

While the political leaders of the Western world ring their hands and wonder rather helplessly what do, the next Abu Sakkar is carving up his next victim, all the while hamming it up for the camera.

Margaret Thatcher: Saviour or Devil?

 civil unrest, community, Europe, finance, government, politics, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Apr 212013
 

The responses to Margaret Thatcher’s death a fortnight ago (8 April), both at home and abroad, serve to remind us only too well what a divisive figure she was.

A 'Maggie' fan getting ready for the funeral - copyright © 2013 Wenn

A ‘Maggie’ fan getting ready for the funeral – copyright © 2013 Wenn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As several tributes have been titled – eg: Ian Dunt at politics.co.uk – she was indeed ‘The Woman who changed Britain’.If you were one of those who saw the need unequivocally for those changes or indeed benefitted from them, then she may be a hero to you. My late father, Ted Rice, thought no less than that she had saved Britain. I once said to him: “You think the sun shines out of her arse!” – and he agreed totally.

If you were one of those who lost out badly or were just deeply offended at the wholesale destruction of traditional working class communities as the result of her policies, then you may well view her as, to all intents and purposes, some spawn of the devil. My distant friend Chris Maguire would sometimes wear a t-shirt emblazoned with “I still hate Thatcher!” It wouldn’t surprise me entirely if Chris didn’t end up at one of those parties celebrating her death.

As for the reports – eg: BBC News – of Tony Blair condemning such parties and Ed Milliband telling hard left Labour supporters to show respect for Thatcher, that would have had about as much effect as if David Cameron had told the right-wing arch-Tories not to regale each other with victory stories of Thatcher ‘handbagging’ other leaders to gain concessions at European Union conferences. (Note: notorious hardliner Dennis Skinner’s refusal to participate in the recall of Parliament to pay tribute on the following Monday (15th) and his co-sponsorship of a (defeated) motion to refuse the postponement of Prime Minister’s Questions on the day of the funeral so leading politicians could attend.)

As someone who has lived in the North of England all my life, was raised in the manufacturing town of St Helens and been engaged in projects concerned with ‘disappeared industries’, such as HemsMESH (coal mining in South-East Wakefield)  and Humber MeshWORKS (docks and fishing in Hull), I understand (to some degree at least) the bitter resentment and simmering hatreds of people from areas which suffered under Thatcher.

It took a conversation a few years ago with Jon Freeman of the  Centre for Human Emergence UK, a man I much respect, to really show me that people who were not particularly political and of my own generation (rather than my father’s) thought highly of

Thatcher’s legacy. But then Jon does come from the South-East which, generally speaking, did rather well out of Thatcherism!

 

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher's death - copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher’s death – copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The extremes of hatred for Thatcher and the extremes of unwavering support for her policies reflect an inability to appreciate viewpoints beyond your own perspective and show the workings of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect. In essence, the more the RED vMEME has invested your self-esteem in a viewpoint, the harder it is to see any merit in your opponent’s arguments. Even your less extreme friend may seem like a turncoat because they don’t support your extremes.

Thus, Blair and even the once-supposedly-‘Red Ed’ Milliband can appear to be closet capitalists supporting the Establishment to the hard left while Cameron can be portrayed by the hard right as just the sort of ‘Wet’ Thatcher appeared to despise.

The problem with being fixed by RED in the extremes of a political spectrum is that it leaves you unable to appreciate all other viewpoints and, thus, effectively deluded and incapable of getting a balanced perspective.

Did Thatcher save Britain? If so, what was the cost?
The argument that ‘something needed to be done’ in 1979 is unassailable. As Andrew Crisell (2002, p194) so poignantly reminds us, in the 1970s the country was plagued by “strikes, sit-ins, lock-outs, occupations, demonstrations, pressure and splinter groups…industrial stoppages were so common and inflation so rampant that Britain became known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.” This culminated in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 when, as a result of various strike actions and union blockades, rubbish remained uncollected in the streets, many hospitals were forced to take in emergency patients  only and , in Liverpool and Tameside, the dead remained unburied.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Margaret Thatcher swept to power in the 1979 general election on promises to curb trade union power and to reign in public spending. By 1985, following the collapse of the national miner’s strike, Thatcher had pretty much achieved these objectives.

Thatcher’s policies in these respects can be characterised as coming from BLUE thinking. Unfortunately the BLUE vMEME, in its nodal state, is so focussed on doing ‘what’s right’ that the human cost of such policies is all but irrelevant.

Thus, the Thatcher Government’s withdrawal of subsidies for increasingly-unviable state-owned monoliths such as British Coal and British Steel led indirectly to the wholesale devastation of working class communities in the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the Central Scottish Lowlands as their big industrial monoliths were wound down and/or broken up and scores of smaller support industries went to the wall without them.

These communities were largely dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking. PURPLE tends to assign rigid gender roles, such as male breadwinner and female mother/housekeeper. The truncation of hundreds of thousands of jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled male labour in a relatively short space of time turned households inside out. Women tended to take 2 or even 3 part-time menial jobs (such as cleaning) while the men dossed at home, trapped in their ‘ex-miner’ or ‘ex-steelworker’ or ‘ex-docker’ identities, claiming benefits (where they could) and doing black market work (where they could). With this collapse of traditional PURPLE certainties – such as young adult males in the family having gone down the mines for the past 200 years – and the economic pressures put on households, family breakdowns multiplied, divorce rates spiralled and drugs and gangs stole in to further ravage the remnants of these communities. (The former mining town of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire had the dubious distinction of being the first place in Britain where a bag of heroin could be obtained for just £5.) When PURPLE becomes destabilised, a very unhealthy manifestation of RED emerges to take over, seeing the world as a jungle in which the strongest and/or the most devious survive.

The huge expansion of what Charles Murray (1989) labels the ‘Underclass’ – has its origins in Thatcher’s economic policies – see: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism. In a very real sense, the ‘Shameless’ culture which permeates so many of Britain’s sink estates is a by-product of Thatcherism.

It’s not clear whether Thatcher didn’t anticipate the effect of working class communities – or she did but perceived it as worthwhile cost to pay. Either way, she had few effective social policies to counter the effects.

So, yes, it can be argued that Thatcher did save Britain from union power and cut down a bloated and profligate public sector…but the cost was horrific and we are still paying the price 30 years later.

No wonder, on the day of her funeral, in the South Yorkshire former mining village of Goldthorpe, they burnt an effigy of the ‘Iron Lady’!

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Thatcher understood the need for growth!
Margaret Thatcher knew that you can’t just cut back but you also have to stimulate growth of the economy – a basic fact that seems to completely elude her successors David Cameron and George Osborne! See: Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 - copyright © 1980 The Sun

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 – copyright © 1980 The Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thus, powered by ORANGE, she supported inward investment, hi-tech industries and specialist manufacturing, in which Britain could develop a competitive advantage – strongly encouraged by Michael Heseltine. She also liberated capital so that Britain – and London especially – grew to become one of the 2 or 3 major financial centres in the world. On the back of these innovations, Britain went from being ‘the sick man of Europe’ to the seventh richest country in the world (as measured in gross national income) by 1997. (With Tony Blair more or less following Thatcher’s economic policies – at least during his first term – Britain became the second richest country, according to the  World Bank in 2007.)

The downside, of course, is that the wealth was very unevenly spread, being mostly concentrated in the South-East of England, home of the financial services sector. Real deprivation and poverty afflicted parts of the country, with Cornwall, Glasgow, Liverpool and South Yorkshire meeting the criteria to receive EU Objective One structural funds – meaning they were among the poorest places in the entire EU. (South Leeds would have met the criteria too but affluent north Leeds pulled Leeds as a whole beyond even Objective Two.)

So, it can be argued Thatcher not only saved Britain but launched the country on a new path to prosperity. The problem is that Thatcher’s policies failed to bring a great deal of Britain into that new prosperity. In essence, a few got very rich indeed but an awful lot of people got much poorer. The global financial collapse of 2008-2009 also exposed the over-dependence on the financial services sector of Thatcher and successive governments for growth.

Evaluating Thatcher’s legacy
From a 2nd Tier viewpoint, away from the extremes of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, Thatcher’s legacy is far from all bad. If the Government in 1979, of whatever party, had had a less strong and determined leader – another muddler like Edward Heath or James Callaghan, say – the economic decline might have continued over decades with the consequence that Britain might have ended up a Greece-like drain on the EU. Instead Thatcher’s hard right and ruthless tactics stopped the rot quite forcibly – and violently on the miners vs police battlefields of West and South Yorkshire.

The likelihood, if Thatcher hadn’t come to power, is that everybody would have suffered a deterioration in living standards as Britain slowly ground to a halt, ever more dependent on begrudgingly-given International Monetary Fund and EU handouts. How that economic decline would have played out in terms of further social unrest is hard to imagine from a perspective of 30 years later.

That being so, it has to be conceded that Thatcher undoubtedly changed Britain and she saved the country for the benefit of those ORANGE-driven wealth creators and those who made a reasonable living as a by-product of that wealth creation. Left behind, more or less to rot, were those – for the most part the traditional working class communities – whose thinking was dependent on there being steady jobs with steady incomes that required little more than low skill labour.

Thatcher, then, saved us all to an extent. To ORANGE thinkers, she was a godsend who facilitated the generation of wealth by individuals. To those PURPLE-dominated working class communities, she was a devil who tore apart the lifestyles they had unthinkingly taken for granted for decades (and longer!) and offered nothing to compensate them for what was lost.

The question to consider, then, in evaluating Thatcher’s legacy is not whether she had to do what she had to do. But could she have done it differently? Or, could she have done more for those who were displaced and dispossessed by the changes her economic policies brought about? Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ and the ‘repressed’ is relevant here. The ORANGE culture of the endless pursuit of wealth Thatcher inaugurated led to a 25-year firestorm of wealth creation in this country, seducing many of us into the consumer society it spawned. But what about the repressed – those thousands upon thousands cast upon the human scrap heap and lacking the psychological wherewithal to get off it? Did there have to be so many of them?

And now we’ve got them and the country is buckling on the verge of a triple-dip recession, what do we – what can we do – for them? The repressed are as much Thatcher’s children as the seduced.

Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

 business, community, finance, government, politics, prejudice & discrimination, regeneration, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Mar 242013
 

Of course, the rot set in well before David Cameron and Nick Clegg formed the Coalition Government in May 2010. Public Sector BorrowingAs the Public Sector Net Borrowing chart shows, it was during Gordon Brown’s ill-fated premiership that the deficit increased massively. (The Public Sector Deficit is the difference between what the Government spends and what it takes in via taxes to fund that spending - that difference being borrowed.) To give them some credit, as the chart shows, the Coalition did bring the deficit down quite markedly in their first couple of years primarily via swingeing cuts in the public sector.

However, there are significant signs that the rate of decrease in borrowing may be slowing down. In December’s Autumn statement Chancellor George Osborne predicted that borrowing would be £108B this year, and £99B next year and just £31B in 2017-18. In his Budget last week, just 3 months later, Osborne revised those figures to £114B this year, £108B next year and £61B in 2017-18.

Hand in hand with this, Osborne was forced to revise December’s estimate of growth this year from 1.2% to O.6%. While it looks like the UK may just about avoid a triple-dip recession, the outlook for growth in the British economy is poor, with 2014 revised down from 2% to 1.8%. With the ‘Age of Austerity’ now officially extended from 2015 to at least 2018, it’s no wonder Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls shouts repeatedly that austerity isn’t working and that his Labour leader, Ed Milliband yesterday, in a speech in Birmingham, spoke of the Government having resigned itself to a ‘lost decade’ over the economy.

Of course, it isn’t Cameron and Osborne’s fault that the UK’s borrowing requirement spiked so highly in 2008-09 and 2009-2010. Nor, strictly speaking, is it Gordon Brown’s - other than that he and Tony Blair, in their spending review of 2000, moved away from the tight fiscal policy they had adopted from the previous Conservative Government and allowed public spending to increase. The result was that the mild surplus they had created was quickly reversed. Thus, when the world went into financial meltdown in 2008-09, Brown had no recourse other than to go to the markets and borrow heavily to keep the country in the style it had been accustomed to…and more than double the Public Sector Deficit in the process.

By 2010 no leading UK politician, other than Balls, was in any doubt that public sector borrowing had to be reduced. Even outgoing Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling championed cuts. The debate was not about whether to cut but how far and how fast. Labour, with their concern for the impact on the less well-off, advocated a slower reduction than Cameron and Osborne who opted for as fast and as deep as possible. Their concern was Britain’s reputation in the financial markets. Last month the UK lost its Triple A rating with leading credit agency Moody’s Investors Services. Balls was right: austerity isn’t working.

Austerity or growth?
Moody’s cited ‘subdued growth’ as one of the reasons for the downgrading.

A major problem with austerity – and something Cameron and Osborne don’t seem to get - is that you can only cut so far. What happens when there is little or nothing left to cut? This is part of the problem faced by Ireland, Greece, Spain and, to some extent, Italy as they struggle to meet the stringent reductions in debt reduction demanded as a condition of bailout by the German-dominated European Union. Since a large part of the bailouts come from the German taxpayers, it’s not entirely unreasonable that they should attach conditions to them. But how far does it go? Will a number of European governments end up stealing their citizens’ private savings to finance debt, as the Cypriot government proposed doing until its parliament was ringed with angry savers ready to commit violence upon their MPs if they had approved the proposal…?

Some see the Cypriot government proposal as a test for how such a strategy might be received elsewhere in Europe!

Last year new French president François Hollande proved a keen advocate of economic growth, daring to challenge the German mantra of austerity. (Since the Germans tend to prudent spenders anyway and their juggernaut economy is said to be pulling back from a relatively minor slip in growth of 0.6% in the last quarter, the impact of an austerity programme on others is something they might find difficulty in appreciating.)

The problem is Hollande, the socialist, doesn’t really know how to stimulate growth. The French economy remains stalled.

Neither, it seems, does Ed Balls. Since 2010 he has championed such strategies as investment in infrastructure and housebuilding as stimuli for growth. Lately - and perhaps surprisingly! - Confederation of British Industries director John Cridland (2013a) has come to agree with him, calling for an investment of £1.25B to build 50,000 new affordable homes. After the Budget Cridland (2013b) castigated the Government for not doing enough on infrastructure.

The problem is that neither strategy in itself is a wealth generator - and it’s surprising, given his position, that Cridland doesn’t champion wealth-generating measures more vociferously. As he points out, investment in housing is a surefire way to kickstart the economy. It creates jobs, workers and their families are more likely to spend in the consumer society and affordable housing meets a huge social need. And certainly investment infrastructure is necessary if the economy is to grow, enabling people and goods to move around more easily. But neither strategy in itself will create sustainable growth.

Henley modelThe graphic above is adapted from the Henley Centre Model for Regional Competitiveness (2001). It shows clearly the relationship between the institutions of society and wealth generation through an export-driven economy. For sure, it’s a neat and overly-simplistic Functionalist model that addresses none of the social, moral and philosophical issues that a society faces such as distribution of wealth amongst its citizens. But, if a society in a late-Modern Capitalist world, doesn’t create wealth, then it is effectively dysfunctional. Road-building and house-building may create a trickle-down effect of people feeling more confident about spending which can have powerful short-term effect…but, in the long-term, like hairdressers, it is recirculating the same money within a closed economy.

For the institutions of society to be sustainable in the long-term, that society must earn as much as it spends. For it to grow wealthier in a sustainable manner, it must consistently earn more than it spends. In a chain of such economies - as shown in Marxist Critiques of Development - inevitably there are winners and there are losers - the poor and the exploited. But the morality of that is for a discussion on the nature of Capitalism. Until Capitalism is superseded as the dominant economic system in the world, the UK needs to ‘play the game’ which means generating wealth to support its people.

A deficit in thinking
The big problem for the UK in playing that game is the poor quality of its leadership. Cameron and Osborne seem to be dominated by the BLUE vMEME in thinking in that efficiency is the only way to manage the deficit. Growth, for the most part it seems, can be sacrificed on the ‘Altar of Austerity’.

That Moody’s disagree with Cameron and Osborne on the importance of growth clearly hasn’t undermined their determination to stick to Plan A: austerity. Perhaps the reports of a second agency, Fitch Ratings, being about to take away Britain’s AAA on their scoring might give them pause for thought. Though probably not!

The unfortunate thing is that their much-vaunted Tory predecessors understood the importance of growth. While Margaret Thatcher reined in public spending viciously - in the 1979 election campaign she famously said: “You cannot spend what you do not have!” - she also liberated and encouraged business to make money. Indeed, wealth creation might be said to have been her mantra! Thatcher, at least in her public persona, was dominated by ORANGE (with a dash of RED ruthlessness and power-lust). There was, of course, a truly-terrible social cost outside of the South-East to her policies and it may be that she made the UK over-dependent on the financial services sector - and that in itself was a factor in the internal crash of 2008-2009. However, in overall terms, Britain recovered from the near-bankruptcy of 1976 and was on its way to becoming a wealthy country again - policies Tony Blair clearly saw fit to continue initially after being elected in 1997.

Perhaps a better model for Cameron and Osborne would be Thatcher’s sometime-nemesis Michael Heseltine. He clearly agreed with Thatcher that Britain’s old industries were unsustainable in a changing world increasingly influenced by transnational corporations who would site their manufacturing operations in the cheapest labour source – see The New International Division of Labour. But he understood the crux of the Henley Model – that export is king in the world of buying and selling and so championed niche and specialist manufacturing, arguing that British design was amongst the best in the world. While doubt has been since been cast on just how effective some of his strategies (such as the DTI Enterprise Initiative) really were, there can be little doubt that Heseltine’s championing of industry and exporting enabled an element of British manufacturing to change, survive and prosper. If Cameron these days sometimes talk up manufacturing as playing a role in any growth that might occur, he has Heseltine to thank for that. While he may have had some very different beliefs to Thatcher about strategy, Helsetine clearly was driven by ORANGE, innovating against the odds to further British industry.

The paucity of quality thinking amongst the Tory strategists these days is shown clearly in Cameron’s delusion that the private sector would grow so fast it would give jobs to all the public sector employees made redundant in the cuts. According to David Blanchflower in March 2012, in the previous year 44,000 more public sector jobs have been lost than private sector jobs created. In the 3 years of the Coalition Government, little has been done either to increase inward investment (from abroad) or to boost exports.

Cameron and Osborne’s BLUE strategies to cut public spending may be successful to a notable degree so far in cutting the requirement for public borrowing; but, in addition to doubts about how much further it is possible to cut, there is the ‘elephant in the room’ that hardly anybody is talking about and which the Cameron-Osborne tactics are not going to even scratch: the size of the National Debt. Both Moody’s and Fitch have expressed concern about UK debt. National Debt

As seen from the chart left, this was stable but not decreasing under Blair. However, it has grown considerably since Brown’s spike in public sector borrowing 2008-2009 and has continued to increase under Cameron. This, put simply, is because each year of deficit and the interest that goes with it increase the overall size of the debt - estimated in December 2012 to be around 89% of gross domestic product (GDP). Some commentators, such as MoneyWeek magazine, believe the size of the National Debt is simply unsustainable and that Britain going bust sometime in the next decade is inevitable. This is probably unlikely, given that other Western or ‘westernised’ are carrying far higher debt-to-GDP ratios. For example, Japan has a national debt of around 194% of GDP whilst that of Italy is more than 100%. The US national debt reached 100% of GDP in November 2011. In the aftermath of World War II, the British National Debt reached 180% of GDP.

What is clear, though is that, if the National Debt can’t be reduced in the short term, then British GDP has to increase.

The social cost of debt reduction
BLUE cut-back thinking on its own is simply not enough for the economic problems Britain faces. It requires at least ORANGE thinking. So, if Cameron and Osborne can’t manage that, they have to go.

There are certainly signs that a number of Tory MPS are profoundly dissatisfied with Cameron’s leadership. There is even talk of a leadership challenge prior to 2015. There will certainly be one if the Tories are unable to form a majority government the day after the election. While Cameron and Nick Clegg appear to have formed a reasonable working partnership, many Tory backbenchers hate the alliance with the Liberal Democrats. Their natural preference under pressure is to lurch to the right and try to appeal to voters on xenophobic issues such as immigration and the testy relationship with the EU – appeals that hit on PURPLE’s susceptibility to prejudice & discrimination against those not-of-our-tribe.

A slide down the Spiral is not, however, what the UK needs. Such slides on a macro-cultural level tend to lead to extremist groups gaining ground - eg: the rise of the Golden Dawn neo-fascists in Greece. In a country like the UK, where there are large Muslim populations, a slide down the Spiral may also lead to increased fundamentalism amongst such communities.

What the UK needs is at-least ORANGE thinking in economic issues. However, there needs to be thinking more complex than that if a real economic recovery, along the lines, Margaret Thatcher piloted, is not to produce the kind of huge social costs British society is still paying for more than some 30 years after Thatcher first started implementing her policies.

While ORANGE is well-suited to driving economic performance in a Capitalist global system, its workings need to be managed from a 2nd Tier perspective. This meta-thinking can anticipate the effects of economic and fiscal actions on communities and modify them and/or compensate for the unavoidable side effects. 2nd Tier overviewing is also necessary to keep ORANGE on the right tracks and prevent it deviating into the kind of loans and investments which led to the burst bubbles of 2008-2009.

Unfortunately there seems to be little sign of 2nd Tier thinking amongst our political leaders. Without it, regardless of which party is in power, the mess is likely to get worse, not better.

Moral Panic and the Great Horsemeat Scandal

 civil unrest, community, crime, government, Health, morality, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Feb 212013
 

The current furore over horsemeat being found in some processed foods shows the media still likes to create what Stan Cohen (1973) termed a ‘moral panic’. The ‘folk devils’ this time around initially were food processor Farmbox of Aberystwyth and  the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse in Todmorden who, it is alleged, knowingly introduced (unregulated) horsemeat into the British human food chain. Increasingly there is talk of an ‘international criminal conspiracy’ – led by no less than Environment Secretary Owen Paterson who was reported by the Daily Mail’s Tom Kelly (among others) to have said (12 February): “’I'm concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we’ve really got to get to the bottom of it…. This is a conspiracy against the public. Selling a product as beef, and including a lot of horse in it is fraud.” Kelly goes on to speculate that the Italian and Polish Mafias are behind the operation.

Rightly there are concerns about food hygiene standards not having been adhered to and that there is a risk of dangerous substances entering the human food chain through unregulated meat. The only substance to be identified so far, however, is the veterinary drug phenylbutazone (‘bute’) which was found in less than 4% of horsemeat-contaminated samples taken in the 9 days of 30 January-7 February. As the BBC’s Medical Correspondent Fergus Walsh has written, based on information Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies provided: “In order to get a single therapeutic dose of bute from horsemeat you’d need to eat 500-600 250g horse burgers. That’s an awful lot of meat.”

Walsh goes on to write: “you assume that there is a strong health angle to the horsemeat contamination scandal. The evidence so far would suggest otherwise. This is a food fraud rather than a food safety issue.” Clearly the labelling of some of the foods under scrutiny may have little correlation with what is actually inside the packaging and that substances potentially harmful to humans are entering the food chain – albeit in almost microscopic amounts.

So the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’ appears to throw up 2 issues:-

(i)             Does the poor regulation of food processing pose a genuine threat to human health?

(ii)            Is consumer confidence in meat processing and the labelling of food undermined…and, if so, how can it be restored?

The answer to (i) has to be Not so far but potentially Yes. If – and, to some extent, it is still ‘if’ – regulation of food in and into the UK has been circumvented as easily as it appears to have been by entrepreneurial but relatively low-level criminals, what would happen if an intelligent and well-funded terrorist organisation wanted to infect the human food chain in this country with a deadly bacterial and/or chemical agent…? The results would most likely be catastrophic and scarcely bear thinking about. Thinking about them – and hopefully preventing them – is the job of the Government’s ‘COBRA Committee’, MI6, the police anti-terrorist squads and other pertinent agencies. Preventing such an attack is a considerable task one can only hope the COBRA planners are wised up to.

Point (ii) is a strange one. A number of polls were reported on 18 February – most notably The Herald (Michael Settle, 2013) and The London Evening Standard (Press Association, 2013) – which were remarkably consistent in reporting that around 25% of the sample groups questioned will now buy less processed meat, with a further 15%+ saying they would do so if they could afford to. Around 20% have already started buying less meat per se. Just short of 70% trust food labelling less and a little over 60% will buy more unprocessed meat from local butchers. Of course, these are self-reporting surveys and subject to all the usual caveats about results from this research method. In terms of whether we have a full-scale ‘moral panic’ on our hands in the way Cohen meant when describing media reaction to and manipulation of the ‘Mods vs Rockers’ conflicts that blew up in several English seaside towns in the early 1960s, it’s difficult to conclude from the polls reported. A 25% change in meat shopping habits – assuming it’s both enacted and sustained – is certainly significant and would seem to give the lie to Angela McRobbie & Sarah Thornton’s (1995) contention that the very concept of a ‘moral panic’ is now outdated. Nonetheless, the fact that 75% of people seem to be willing to carry on buying meat as they did before…while being very suspicious of what the label actually specifies…could be said to lend some support to McRobbie &Thornton’s view that the public are just a little too sophisticated nowadays to be taken in in quite the way they used to back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s also worth noting that investment in the food retail sector has actually risen since the start of the year, with shares rising 6.2% in total and 1.2% in the week ending 16 February, the worst week of the scandal. (James Davey & Neil Maidment, 2013) Clearly such people are not panicking!

Why don’t we kill folk devils in Britain?
As a sociopsychological commentator, I’m fascinated by the ‘monster story’ the media has created, the public uproar that results and the pressure this puts on politicians to ‘do something about it’ – all classic features of Cohen’s moral panic concept. TV, radio and the internet all attract greater numbers of viewers wanting to learn more – especially if there is a possibility they and their loved ones may be at risk. As for the printed media, they can bask in a boost in newspaper sales – short-lived though the boost may be. Meanwhile pertinent politicians, civil servants and local government officers desperately look for someone else to blame and to be seen to be either doing something about it (if you’re part of the government machine) or harassing Government to do something about it (if part of the opposition).

Moral panics, of course, illustrate the power of certain memes to spread virally, through the media, and infect our schemas. So the issue becomes personal to us: it matters. To borrow from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs concepts, the lower down the Spiral the vMEME which is engaged by the issue, the more powerful and emotive the response and the more people are likely to be activated to respond. Thus, a scandal about food products consumed by millions touches a BEIGE nerve – it can comprise the evolutionary driver to survive – possible even the evolutionary driver to reproduce.

A BEIGE/PURPLE vMEME harmonic comes into play if we have children of our own or just generally value children. Now, it is not just our own survival which may be compromised but perhaps that of the next generation. There is a risk to the replication and carrying forward of our genes.

Thus, even though the real risk to public health seems very small in the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’, it touches upon fundamental (evolutionary) values shared by most people at a very deep emotional level.

In 4Q/8L terms, the BLUE structure and processes of the Lower Right Quadrant that consumers trust in have failed. In Functionalist terms, a vital ‘organ’ of society (the food supply) has been compromised. Thankfully, the failure is small but the hullabaloo is huge, with the media running it as a headline story for over a month now. The ORANGE vMEME of the newspaper and the news programme editors has jumped at the opportunity to sell more newspapers and attract more viewers. However, as noted earlier, while the headlines have got the politicians performing on every news bulletin, either condemning the latest revelation or promising some new action, the response from the general public has been relatively muted. There have been no abattoir owners lynched for putting children at risk; not even a boycott of Tesco or Asda for retailing contaminated food!

But then, apart from a potshot through the window of one of the homes of disgraced ex-NatWest boss Fred Goodwin, no bankers were killed or even assaulted in 2008-2009 – and they were the catalyst for the financial meltdown which did real and lasting damage to the economy of this country which the people will pay for over perhaps the complete decade to come. And this despite the media pillorying bankers on and off for several years!

In some parts of the world, mobs would have formed to kill the folk devils – eg: in Jamaica last year a spate of mob killings of men suspected of child abuse and other sex crimes was reported (Michael Aitken, 2012). But this kind of mob violence against people is a rarity in the modern UK. (Riots damaging property and challenging the police are more common – from the Toxteth and Brixton riots in 1981 through to last Summer’s riots across England.) Perhaps it’s something to do with being ‘British’ – eg: it’s just not ‘cricket’ for a mob to hack a man to death or torch him with a ‘flaming necklace’.

Certainly there seems to be something in the collective psyche that by and large inhibits people from forming vigilante mobs.

And this presents  an interesting conundrum in analysing responses to the ‘Great Horsemeat Scandal’. Spiral Dynamics orthodoxy has it that, as Life Conditions in the Environment change (Lower Right Quadrant), so there should be a vMEMETIC adjustment in the collective cultural (Lower Left) and individual psychological (Upper Left). Yet, despite a clear failure of BLUE systems in the Lower Right, there has been little change in the Lower Left or Upper Left. Usually, when BLUE fails, there is a regression to the RED vMEME. Certainly this can be read as a factor in numerous civil conflict situations in the UK, from the Catholic communities in Northern Ireland in 1969 calling for the IRA to protect them when police failed to prevent Protestant gangs burning them out of their houses to the spread of looting riots last Summer when the police were widely perceived as unable to protect property. But, when it comes to mob attacks on individual folk devils, it seems the Brits just don’t do that sort of thing.

It will be interesting to see how the growing ethnic diversity in Britain affects such behaviours in the coming decades.

Resolving the Great Horsemeat Sandal
“The consumer cannot be left to face a Catch-22 where they can either pay for food that complies with the highest standards of traceability, labelling and testing or accept that they cannot trust the provenance and composition of the foods they eat,” Anne McIntosh, cross-party chair of the Commons Food & Rural Affairs Committee, said last week. (Davey & Maidment)

However, the British Government is locked into the European Union Food Information Regulations (2011) which means food and labelling standards could not be lowered legally even if the Government was inclined to do so.

To comply, therefore, there will have to be more tightly-controlled processes carried out, audited and enforced by highly-trained specialists. The BLUE vMEME will naturally drive these processes but getting it right to the perfectionist standards BLUE will aspire to will not be cheap. DNA testing can cost up to £500 per sample. As Peter Garbutt, chief livestock adviser for the National Farmers Union, puts it: “Producing high quality, fully traceable, high welfare standard livestock costs money to put on peoples’ tables.”

According to Davey & Maidment, analysts believe value lines, such as frozen beefburgers or spaghetti bolognese ready-meals, are currently so cheap and profit margins so thin that supermarkets have little room for manoeuvre. That means increased margin pressure for already squeezed suppliers and price rises for consumers.

Neil Saunders of the retail research agency, Conlumino, comments: “I don’t think there’s any way that we can escape the viewpoint that the price of having guaranteed food in terms of it contains what it says it contains is ultimately higher prices. We might be speaking about a couple of pence on an item, because this is a game about volume.”

Davey & Maidment cite market research agency Kantar as stating this will accelerate food price inflation, already running at 4.9% in the 12 weeks to January 20 as a result of high commodity prices.

So the moral panic the media have attempted to create will cost us all dearly. The likelihood is that, as living standards in general have declined since 2008-2009 and, in particular, since the Coalition Government introduced its austerity programme in 2010, paying more for food will come to be accepted by most people as just another element in that decline.

The irony, as Fergus Walsh points out, is in the question: “How many of us have unwittingly eaten horsemeat and how long has the mislabelling of products been going on?” Walsh goes to note: “Horsemeat is popular in mainland Europe, in countries like Italy, France and Belgium. It is a lean meat…widely used overseas to build the strength of patients who were convalescing.”

So, while the labelling should reflect accurately what’s in the packet – and something does need to be done about that – we’re now going to pay higher prices to avoid mistakingly eating a perfectly healthy meat product.

Oh, the power of memes and moral panics!

Nadine Dorries: People’s Champion or Drama Queen?

 celebrity, government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, Psychology, religion, Spiral Dynamics, spirituality  No Responses »
Dec 132012
 

Earlier this year Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, told BBC 1’s Daily Politics show that David Cameron and George Osborne were “…two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk – who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others.” (James Orr, 2012) It was a stunning, biting barb that left Cameron and Osborne flummoxed, with the former desperately stating that he paid just under 50p for a pint of milk.Just a few weeks earlier Dorries had gunned down Cameron and his Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in a Financial Times interview with a similar cutting comment: “The problem is that policy is being run by two public school boys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it for their children’s lunchboxes. What’s worse, they don’t care either.” (George Parker, Elizabeth Rigby & Kiran Stacey, 2012)

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons - Copyright © 2012 Press Association

Nadine Dorries in her more usual role in the House of Commons – Copyright © 2012 Press Association

In those remarks, Dorries summed up so perfectly the frustration and anger of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who have been disenfranchised by the Coalition Government’s austerity programme. For everyone who’s lost their job and/or their house (and possibly their relationship and possibly their children and their self-respect) as a result (direct or indirect) of government policy, for a few weeks at least Dorries was their champion. She expertly exposed the hypocrisy in Cameron’s oft-repeated mantra that “We’re all in this together”. By the ‘we’ in “we’re all in this together”, Cameron seems to mean everyone who’s not part of the 1% wealth-owning elite – who have become so prominently the targets of the ‘Occupy’ movement – and their sycophantic puppets like Cameron and Osborne. (Though there is an argument for it as a strategy, Osborne has actually made the British elite wealthier this Autumn by cutting the very top of rate of tax, for those earning more than £150,000 per annum, from 50p to 45p.)To bring out the bitter irony in this, Osborne admitted formally in his Autumn Statement on Wednesday 5 December that the Government will not make its deficit reduction target and that the so-called ‘Age of Austerity’ will have to be extended from 2015 to 2018. In other words, how ever much Cameron and Osborne want to blame the 2008 global crash and the ensuing worldwide recession, the inescapable fact is that their policies are not successful in dealing with the problems. (Governments are supposed to develop policies that deal successfully with what ever problems their country faces. When they fail to deal with the problems, they effectively declare themselves to be incompetent.) So, while they make the poor poorer and the rich richer, the Government has to admit its policies aren’t working.

For their part in blithely acquiescing to both the incompetence and the greed of the Tories, the Lib Dems can expect to lose so many deposits in 2015 that they will be in danger of being wiped out of Parliament. (On the assumption that they somehow keep their seats, it will be interesting to see whether Clegg and Danny Alexander, Osborne’s number 2, abandon the what’s left of the parliamentary Lib Dems and formally join the Tories….)

Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, influential elements of the Conservative Party have been driven by the ORANGE vMEME. (While there were totally-unforgiveable costs to Thatcherite policies in terms of damage done to the social fabric of our communities, especially in Wales, the Midlands and North of England, and the Scottish Lowlands – see The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain? – they nonetheless restored Britain as an economic giant. Ironically it was Labour prime minister Tony Blair who, by essentially continuing Thatcher’s policies, took Britain to the position of second richest country in the world in terms of gross national product. (World Bank, 2007) Tragically, there seems little ORANGE in the current top Tory mindset. Rather, it seems to be driven by the RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic of zealotry. BLUE in that there is only one way – austerity – and it must be taken, no matter the cost to human beings. RED in that it is short-sighted and concerned only with increasing personal wealth and power and the wealth and power of its in-group, the 1%.

So, when Cameron and Osborne and their hapless lapdogs Clegg and Alexander are revealed so clearly in their incompetence and greed, where’s Nadine Dorries to put the knife in, puncture some over-inflated selfplexes and talk some much-needed home truths?

I’m a celebrity…
Unfortunately, when Dorries should have been skewering Cameron and Osborne (in the Autumn Statement) for the increased tax load they expect the middle class ‘strivers’ to shoulder, her own RED vMEME had led her away from Westminster in an all-too short-sighted pursuit of wealth and power as a contestant in I’m a Celebrity…get me out of here!

With her (partly-plastic) sculptured good looks and a genuine talent for quick-fire put-downs, it must have seemed to both the show’s producers and Dorries herself that she was a natural for I’m a Celebrity. So the antagonism her participation has produced in the Conservative Party ranks, in the media and amongst her constituents appears to have been largely unanticipated. According to a poll conducted by ex-Tory Party Deputy Chair Lord Ashcroft amongst 1500 of the Mid-Bedfordshire constituents, 58% disapproved of her being on I’m a Celebrity,  with 42% disapproving strongly. As for the programme’s viewers, they voted her to undergo the most gruesome tasks (such as eating an ostrich anus) and voted her off at the first opportunity.

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle - Copyuright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

Dorries relaxing in the celebrity jungle – Copyright © 2012 ITV/Rex Features

As partial justification for appearing on the show, Dorries claimed that, in conversation with other participants, she would be able to get across to 16 million viewers her controversial views proposing lowering the time limit for abortion and school sex education lessons explicitly teaching teenage girls to abstain. This proved to be hopelessly naïve. Those conversations were simply never included in the broadcasts.  The RED vMEME, of course, has no sense of future or of consequences. So it seems Dorries had little notion that her foray into the jungle would enable David Cameron’s RED to have its revenge. Inevitably she was suspended from the party by Conservative Party Chief Whip Sir George Young as soon as it was learned she was heading for Australia. On 27 November, the day after returning from Australia, Dorries met with Young to discuss the situation. A spokesman for Young was quoted after the meeting as saying: “The whip has not been restored and nor will it be until she proves she can rebuild bridges with her constituents, her association and her parliamentary colleagues.” Dorries, it was said, had a fortnight to mend fences with her constituency association. On 10 December BBC News reported that she had indeed secured the unanimous backing of local members. As legally Dorries is the sitting MP until the next election, whether as a Tory or not, the local party felt it was better the constituency had a Conservative MP representing it. However, Paul Duckett, Chair of the Mid-Bedfordshire Conservative Association, added the rider that there was no guarantee Dorries would be selected to stand in 2015. The same BBC News story also carried Cameron’s latest comments: “I believe MPs should either be in their constituencies fighting for their constituents or at Westminster standing up for their area. A lot of MPs were angry that she just waltzed off to the jungle….She has got to earn her way back into the affections of her colleagues.” On 24 November, just before setting back from Australia, Dorries repeated her earlier support for Boris Johnson replacing Cameron, telling The Sun’s Laura Armstrong: “I long for the day Boris Johnson is Prime Minister. Boris is my King of the Jungle.” She also attacked the degree of control exercised by the whips: “There is a real control mechanism under Cameron in Number Ten now. MPs and how they vote are tampered with.” Since the meeting with Young, Dorries has refrained from such inflammatory comments…but no wonder Cameron says she has to win his affections!Whether Conservative Central Office would actually continue to deny Dorries the whip in face of the constituency association’s request for it to be reinstated is a moot point but Central Office does have a history of imposing its will on local party organisations. Such a course could have some justification in a report in The Times on 10 December that a petition calling for a by-election in Mid-Bedfordshire had already collected 700 signatures. (Michael Savage, 2012)

If Dorries continues to be denied the whip, there is speculation she could defect to UKIP, giving them a high profile, glamorous MP with a penchant for publicity for a honeymoon couple of years – after which she would almost certainly lose Mid-Bedfordshire and could be sidelined from frontline politics before she turned on their leadership. If she is reinstated to the Tory whip, what price would Cameron extract and what measures could the whips take to control her?

Dorries’ sheer impulsiveness is reflected in her attacking Labour MP Stephen McCabe on Twitter for reporting her to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, pointing out his own attendance rate was just 63%. McCabe responded by pointing out that he had taken time off to recover from having open heart surgery.

People’s champion…or drama queen?
Nadine Dorries would make a great people’s champion, being very much a working class Tory – unlike the public school boys currently running the Government. She was raised on a council estate on Merseyside, with her parents among the first tenants who bought their council house under Thatcher’s 1980 ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. She worked as a nurse in the days when nurses were not considered the elite professionals they are now but changed dirty sheets and cleaned up vomit amongst their more ‘medical’ duties.

So Dorries understands the ordinary person in a way Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, with their moneyed upbringings, almost certainly don’t.

However, she is also a very astute woman who ran her own childcare business for 11 years and then sold it to BUPA, with part of the deal being that she became one of that company’s directors. It’s unlikely anyone could do that without a well-developed ORANGE vMEME governing their thinking.

As a self-made woman with working class roots, Dorries has the potential to become a centre of gravity for those on the Conservative benches who are unhappy with the make-the-rich-richer-and-the-rest-poorer policies pursued by Cameron and Osborne. An internal opposition that could exert pressure to ameliorate some of the Government’s more extreme policies.

Unfortunately, Dorries often seems to put her immediate self-interest before duty and then justifies her choices in a manner that seems almost deluded. As with the delusion that the producers of I’m a Celebrity were going to air hours of technical debate about whether the time limit for abortions should come down from 24 weeks to 20.

Dorries also has a history of altering her history to make it seem more dramatic and glamorous. For example, she reduced her age by 10 years when contesting (unsuccessfully) Greater Manchester’s Hazel Grove constituency in 2001. Her 2009 autobiographical account of her 2005 selection in Mid-Bedfordshire reads: “That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high …” However, The Times account paints the selection process as much less of an achievement: “Mrs Dorries…easily beat her 11 rivals and won the plum safe seat on the first ballot at the selection this weekend…. Senior party figures had made clear to local dignitaries that they would like the seat to go to a woman and presented the constituency with a shortlist of seven women and five men to underline the point.” (Rosemary Bennett & Helen Rumbelow, 2005)

Even the degree to which Dorries presents herself as a Christian varies significantly. She told the Salvation Army’s The War Cry: “I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. There is nothing I did that got me here; it is what God did. There is nothing amazing or special about me, I am just a conduit for God to use.” (Nigel Bovey, 2007) Yet a few years later, when asked if it was her Christian faith driving her campaign to lower the abortion time limit, she responded: “Not at all. Not even a shred.” When asked about her faith, she said: “I believe in other people’s Gods as well.” (Mehdi Hasan, 2012) To be fair to Dorries, people do change their minds and just a few days before that interview, she told Charles Maggs that she was struggling to keep to her Christian faith in the culture of Westminster.

Nonetheless, such inconsistencies indicate a lack of strong BLUE in her selfplex - and that may help explain why she apparently failed to anticipate such a strong antipathy to her participation in I’m a Celebrity.

What now?
There’s one sense in which Dorries clearly has the upper hand. She’s the sitting MP for Mid-Bedfordshire - and that simply cannot be taken away from her until 2015. How she plays that hand could influence politics in the UK for years to come. She could choose to become a key figure in a constructive opposition within the Conservative Party or she could defect to UKIP and play a prominent, if possibly short-lived, role in their growth strategy. Dorries’ ORANGE can certainly weigh up the strategic options but she will need to develop her BLUE much more to give her the discipline to tow the line when necessary and restrain her impulsiveness. (She’s so impulsive that, if she were a male, she would easily fit many of the criteria for the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism. Unfortunately neither Dorries nor anyone who knows her well is on record as commenting on her sex drive!)

Or she could simply exploit her celebrity. But what a waste of a potential people’s champion that would be!

Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?

 civil unrest, community, cross-cultural, government, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

Written by GERALD BUTT

Annotated by KEITH E RICE

Gerald Butt wrote ‘Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?’ as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. It was published on the BBC News web site on 16 August 2012.

Reading it, I was mightily impressed that Gerald’s understanding of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ effectively provided a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the phenomenon - though without the jargon and the concepts. Accordingly I contacted both Gerald and the BBC who gave me permission to republish his piece here, annotated with a Spiral Dynamics/Integrated SocioPsychology commentary. (The text of my commentary is in red.)

Gerald’s piece is timeless in its analysis of conflict between different value systems and the sheer lack of other value systems - vMEMES - hindering the progress of peoples – in this case, the Arabs – in achieving Democracy as we in the Modern West understand the term.

 I am deeply indebted to Gerald and the BBC for their permissions.

________________________________________________________________________

 Arabs in several countries around the Middle East are relishing the prospect of a new era built on political reform and democratic rule.

This craving for democracy was motivated by a desire to throw off the shackles of the past and finally achieve independence in every sense of the word.

As Gerald, to all intents and purposes, reveals later in the piece, it has to be queried just how much many of those thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or skittering about in the Libyan desert on the back of machine-gun mounted rebel pick-ups really understood the spirit of Democracy beyond the trite motif of one man/one vote. (Then again, clearly not all Westerners truly understand the concept either!)

This is hardly surprising. For decades, Arabs’ self-esteem had been smothered by the totalitarian rule that followed colonial occupation. Colonialism itself had been preceded by centuries of Ottoman domination.

This long legacy is enduring and invidious. For all the euphoria and the undoubted bravery seen on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, there remains a fundamental and persistent doubt amongst Arabs that democracy can work for them as free-thinking individuals.

And these doubts are prompting voters to seek the reassurance of religious or ethnic affiliation. This trend, by definition, limits freedom of choice, which is a pillar of independent, democratic life.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) hold that, often, the first response to the challenges, pressures and opportunities of change, is to slip down the Spiral. Thus, when confronted with the what next? of revolution, the BLUE/ORANGE thinking required for Western-style Democracy is too complex – and, because of that, too scary – for many whose thinking has been driven by the vMEME harmonic of PURPLE/RED. Grinding poverty (BEIGE), ethnic and/or regional tensions (PURPLE) and a stubborn refusal to obey and conform anymore (RED) have played their part in all the Arab uprisings. But, for many such people, used to being governed by ruthless RED/BLUE dictatorships, the jump up the Spiral to BLUE/ORANGE thinking simply cannot develop quickly enough to fill the void left by the collapse of the dictatorship. Therefore, a sideways retreat to the PURPLE/BLUE of safe and orderly institutionalised religion is attractive.

‘Not fair’
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, post-revolution politics has been dominated by Islamist groups.

The electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists has set a pattern that will not be easy to break. President Mohammed Mursi’s promise to create an inclusive society will be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, on forming a new government, said it was time for Egyptians “…to stop asking who is a Copt, a Muslim or a Salafi. I don’t see that. All I see is that we are all Egyptians and this should be the main principle.”

This might be the ideal. But the overwhelming desire thus far in democracies in Arab countries has been for representation, first and foremost, on a sectarian or ethnic basis. This has been the case most obviously in Lebanon and Iraq.

Egypt looks like following suit, as the reaction to the formation of a technocrat-dominated cabinet has illustrated.

Egypt’s Salafists complained that their strong showing in the parliamentary elections was not reflected in the apportioning of cabinet posts – they received none.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters felt aggrieved that only two of their members had become ministers; and the Copts were unhappy at the appearance of only one Christian in the cabinet.

“It is not right that Copts get treated in this way,” Bishop Bakhomious, the acting head of the Coptic Church, told a Cairo newspaper. “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts. The way the cabinet has been formed is not fair on us.”

Egyptian Christians’ unhappiness at the cabinet composition is an indicator of their lack of confidence in the new democratic system.

They feel that only their own strong representation in government would safeguard their interests. As a result, Copts are seeking to form political parties, thus strengthening further the grip of religion on democratic life.

What Gerald is identifying, to all intents and purposes, is the effects of the PURPLE vMEME seeking safety-in-belonging - and belonging requires you to know who you don’t belong to as well as who you do know. Thus, PURPLE emphasises and drives differences. Copts, for example, identify with each other as the in-group and make Muslims and Salafis the out-groups. The other tribalist groupings do exactly the same. In Iraq, Sunni vs Shia conflict has severely restricted post-war reconstruction and destabilised attempts to form a government representing all communities.

As I point out in the Global feature, Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory, attempts to imposed Western-style Democracy on tribal societies are doomed largely to failure unless PURPLE, RED and BLUE needs are tackled in sequence, thus enabling people’s capacity for ideas to move up the hierarchy of the Spiral.

Political Paralysis?
The problem that President Mursi and other newcomers to Arab leadership will find is that democracies are being created in countries lacking political institutions and political parties that cut across sectarian and ethnic lines.

Secular parties, such as they are, were emasculated and discredited during the era of totalitarian rule and offer few attractions to first-time voters.

Give it time, one might say. Europe needed centuries to fine-tune its democratic traditions.

Perhaps new political parties might be established, rooted in Islamic traditions but espousing modern economic and social policies that could appeal to voters from all backgrounds.

Is Gerald asking for a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Church of England where the fundamentalist approach (RED/BLUE) to the religion is largely washed away by scientific rationalism (BLUE/ORANGE) and an increasing valuing of the human spirit freed of restrictions (GREEN)?

Looking at these ideas in terms of vMEMES shows vast gulfs in values and understanding between the different ways of thinking.

But can this process be fast-tracked? The evidence in Lebanon and Iraq points unequivocally to the fact that turning the political machine around, once it has headed off down the sectarian and ethnic route, is well nigh impossible.

Sectarian conflicts can burn themselves out if more complex vMEMES gain influence. An example of this was the withering of the PURPLE/BLUE passion in Eire to recover the ‘6 Counties’ – as the Irish Republic’s economy boomed in the early-mid 1990s and ORANGE’s focus on wealth creation and personal advancement became stronger. But, almost always, the ending of sectarian conflict requires a combination of war weariness and the emergence of more complex vMEMES to change thinking.

As many as 80 parties were formed after the ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

The Taif Agreement of 1989 was supposed to bring an end to political sectarianism in Lebanon. But cross-community politics is as elusive as ever.

Iraq, for its part, has slipped into a political system where Shia, Sunni and Kurdish loyalties are paramount. Iraqi national politics, as a result, is paralysed, while the major sectarian and ethnic groups vie for ascendancy.

Iraqis today face the unwelcome realisation that the removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent departure of the US military have failed to bring them true independence as free citizens of Iraq facing a range of political choices that are free of religious association.

Against this background, liberal and secular Arabs are bound to feel uneasy. For them, the euphoria experienced during those early days of protest has passed.

 Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham, writing in November 2011, observed: “We are on a swing of uncertainty, going up in celebration of the ouster of regimes that monopolised power for 30 or 40 odd years, then down in frustration over the alternative that is now coming to monopolise power with theocratic authoritarianism.”

The Arabs, therefore, may have to wait for the next awakening before they can achieve true independence.

 Such an awakening will need to have more complex vMEMES in the mix if a sustainable path to Democracy is to be achieved.

Austerity and the Euro – an Appalling Lack of Quality Leadership

 business, civil unrest, cross-cultural, Europe, government, politics, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
May 202012
 

Well, the Eurozone crisis has certainly dominated the news this past week or so – and the Greeks are once again at the centre of it. But this time it’s different. This time it’s not so much the ORANGE vMEME of the ultra-rich financial speculators effortlessly wrongfooting the BLUE-dominated fiscal technocrats in Brussels and Berlin which is causing the problem - though the speculators are still making plenty of money! Rather, it’s the people - the newly-poor, crushed and deprived by the austerity measures wreaking havoc with lives right across Europe - who are democratically electing populist politicians and extremist politicians promising them relief from the austerity. (21 of the Golden Dawn’s neo-Nazi candidates made it into the Greek parliament in the 6 May election.)

New Greek elections in mid-June are tipped to give an outright victory to the leftist Syriza bloc which, if Syriza’s leaders stick to their guns, means forcing the European Union to renegotiate the second bailout deal agreed in March, so the austerity measures the Greek are forced to endure are that much less severe. That or Greece tears up the agreement and effectively leaves the euro.

Merkel meets Hollande, 15 May. Copyright © 2012 John MacDougall/AFP
Merkel meets Hollande, 15 May. Copyright © 2012 John MacDougall/AFP

In trying to predict what will happen – or what should happen – the pundits are all over the place. And so are the politicians! German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble hinted as far back as early March – before the second bailout deal was finally agreed – that Germany might be prepared to see Greece leave the euro. In their first somewhat-underwhelming summit on Tuesday (15 May), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President François Hollande made it unequivocal that they wanted Greece to stay in the Eurozone…yet only days before Merkel had been backing Schäuble’s position. The 2 positions are not, of course, mutually exclusive: it’s quite possible to want Greece in the euro ideally but be prepared to see the country leave if it doesn’t fulfil the criteria to continue to be a member.

The Foolishness of the Austerity-Alone Agenda
Hollande is being portrayed in some quarters of the media as a naïve simpleton who thinks, in Ed Balls fashion, that you can spend your way out of the kind of massive debt crises befuddling much of Europe. If Hollande does think that way, it’s not clear from his public policies that is what he believes. In public at least Hollande isn’t saying No to austerity; he’s saying let’s have less austerity on one hand and develop growth strategies on the other. We’ve yet to have any evidence Hollande knows how to grow an economy…but at least he understands the importance of growth. For all my initial enthusiasm for the Coalition in the UK – see: ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’ (May 2010) - it quickly became apparent that the new British government had little vision beyond its dogma of introducing swingeing public sector cuts - see: ‘Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?’ (July 2010).

In retrospect it’s astonishing - and can only be attributed to BLUE’s myopic determination to do ‘the right thing’ - that the likes of Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron really believed their national populations would passively accept having their living standards decimated.

People have lost their jobs, their homes and sometimes their marriages and families as an indirect – and sometimes direct - consequence of the austerity programmes introduced by these leaders. Imagine: your BLUE has done ‘the right thing’ your country expects of you (obeyed the laws, done your job to the best of your ability, paid your taxes, got married and produced children, bought a house with the biggest mortgage your salary can justify and consistently maxed out your credit cards in the name of consumerism and supporting the retail economy)…and then you lose everything because the government or a government-funded agency has taken your job away. Meanwhile, you see that ‘1%’ allowing servile politicians - hey, George Osborne! - onto their yachts and into their mansions and those same servile politicians then increasing tax allowances for the mega-rich – hey, George Osborne! - so they get even richer! No wonder BLUE subsides, betrayed, and RED takes to the streets and the barricades. Syriza saying No to the second bailout deal - and all the trauma that will produce – may yet be a preferable alternative to a people’s revolution and/or an Army takeover. (Greece is no stranger to either!)

Sarkozy is, of course, now consigned to the dustbin of history by an electorate not prepared to accept more and more years of austerity. (If he is remembered at all, beyond having a wife distinctly more glamorous than him, it will be for leading the West into the dubious but nominally noble role of being the Libyan rebels’ airforce in their 2011 struggle to oust Mouammar Gadhafi.) As for Cameron, the violence of last Summer’s riots - see: ‘The Riots – who’s right: Cameron or Blair?’ - may just have given him the ‘reason’ to turn the police loose Gadhafi-style on the next lot of anti-Government protestors rampaging through the streets of London, judging from the astounding amounts of rubber bullets the Metropolitan Police are reported to be stockpiling. Even Merkel is no longer looking so invincible, with her Christian Democrats suffering heavy defeats to anti-austerity parties a week ago in the their once-safe region of North-Rhine Westphalia.

It’s a 2-dimensional view, worthy of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, to think that a single strategy can solve what, in reality, are multi-faceted problems. Thatcher thought that freeing up the financial services to generate wealth while doing away with the old ‘heavy industries’ and the trades unions that went with them would solve the UK’s lack of competitiveness. What those policies resulted in was a fabulously wealthy south-east of England - so rich it pulled Britain into the Top 4 richest nations on earth (as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP)). Yet much of the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the lowlands of Scotland were turned into industrial wastelands characterised by high unemployment, broken communities and broken marriages, failing schools and sky-high truancy rates, widespread alcoholism and substance abuse, and rocketing crime rates.

As Britain is now statistically in a ‘double dip recession’, I can’t help having some sympathy with Ed Milliband’s repetitive chanting that this is a recession “made in Downing Street”. While just about everyone on the Labour front benches, from Alistair Darling, Labour’s outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, through to Milliband - with the exception of Balls - recognised the need to take radical action to cut the deficit, they also warned continually against cutting too fast and too deep. They recognised the dangers both to the economy and to the social fabric of the UK. Cameron and Osborne took no notice of such warnings - even when this February 2 credit rating agencies, Moodys and Fitch, warned that the UK’s austerity programmes were so severe that they risked strangling any putative growth. Even this Friday, in a speech to business leaders in Manchester, Cameron was defending the government’s economic and fiscal policies, without accepting any criticism of them. In the same speech he paid only a fleeting, cursory recognition that a second policy of stimulating growth might also be necessary.

So, for the time being at least, Britain is stuck in austerity, thanks to Cameron; while Greece and other parts of Europe are stuck in austerity, thanks to Merkel and Sarkozy. If growth policies do emerge to balance out the austerity programmes, they are unlikely to come from such leaders - their BLUE thinking is too limited to the single strategy of public sector cuts: the ‘one true way’. Osborne epitmoises this BLUE-derived cut-and-do-nothing-else railroad thinking. From his first financial statement in 2010, he has done almost nothing to encourage business growth.

It seems it may need new leaders to bring in new multiple strategies which can combine reducing public sector profligacy with fostering private sector growth. So far at least, the Greek Syrizans are vehemently anti-austerity but have not voiced any viable alternative. Hollande was elected on an anti-austerity/pro-growth manifesto. The realities of being in power and having to negotiate with Merkel (who openly championed Sarkozy’s re-election bid) seem to have tempered Hollande’s rhetoric in the short time since his victory. While he wants a new focus on growth - but doesn’t say how he will stimulate French private sector growth - he is now giving more credence to the idea of some degree of austerity in Europe as a whole, at least.

With the BLUE conformity to society’s expectations failing to maintain stability and security, people’s PURPLE gets frustrated and bewildered, leading to a partial breakdown in social norms - what Émile Durkheim (1895) termed ‘anomie’ – which allows RED to self-express in what can often be a quite dangerous way. Beliefs about what is appropriate behaviour start to morph and change. As Susan Blackmore (1999) has shown, when old memes start to become dysfunctional, new ones rapidly take their place.

The riots and looting in Britain in August 2011 illustrate only too well the dangers of austerity programmes leading to widespread anomie in the specific sense that Robert K Merton (1938) used the term. When ORANGE-driven consumerism continues to promote high-value goods as socially desirable and indicative of status but there are fewer and fewer legitimate BLUE/PURPLE routes to obtaining those goods due to austerity measures, then it is predictable that RED self-expressive and self-indulgent thinking will dominate in the minds of some and they will then ‘acquire’ those goods by whatever means available to them.

By its very nature Capitalism cannot stop producing/providing and selling what it produces/provides. Otherwise there is no revenue from which to pay wages and overheads and derive profit. Austerity is, in a sense, anti-capitalist because it limits the legitimate ability of the market to buy what the Capitalists produce/provide. The only way to then get what the Capitalists tell you should have is through anomic means. Just one small example of what Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848) were getting at when they talked about Capitalism having sown within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Beneath the Surface of the European Union
On the surface, the Eurozone crisis and the controversies about austerity are about European countries racking up unsustainable amounts of debt - hence the austerity programmes to reduce the debt. Additionally, certain countries - most notably Greece but Eire, Portugal, Italy and Spain are also in similar messes - allowed their debts to build up to the point where they no longer could generate the revenues to service those debts as the markets lost confidence in those countries and interest rates rose. (Friday’s downgrading of Spanish banks by Moodys illustrates this perfectly.) Hence, the need for bailouts from the EU and the International Monetary Fund for these countries just to keep going.

But why are there such discrepancies amongst the countries in the EU? How come Germany is the only nation in the EU with really solid growth (in terms of GDP), the Italian economy hasn’t grown in 10 years and Greece is effectively bankrupt?

It’s about far more than differences in geographical location and natural resources, as some commentators would have it. It’s deeper and more fundamental than that. It’s about values. Alan Tonkin (2010), in his Global piece, The EU: an Organisation divided by Values, presents a basic overview of the values mix in the different member states and shows that there are clear values faultlines in the composition of the EU. Germany, Britain and, arguably to a lesser extent, France are driven by what Alan terms ‘BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise’. In contrast, he sees the Mediterranean nations of Italy, Spain and Greece as rather more relaxed, with PURPLE and RED more to the fore.

Of course, such ‘broad brush’ analyses are vulnerable to criticisms of playing to stereotypes. Yet there may well be some accuracies in such national stereotyping - how ever ‘politically incorrect’ the GREEN vMEME may make that seem.

A personal anecdote…Krissy is a young German woman working as a nanny in the Harrogate area of the UK and currently a participant in my latest ‘Introduction to Psychology’ adult education class at Rossett School. One ‘homeplay’ I set the class was to observe over the following week instances of each of the vMEMES as they went about their daily business. When they fed back at the next session, Krissy spoke at length about how much BLUE she saw in herself and in her friends and relations back home - indeed, in German culture as a whole. In effect, Krissy was confirming the stereoptypes of Germans as being:-

  • Ordered, disciplined and hard working
  • Highly procedural and efficient
  • Intolerant and punitive of people who are not like them or their values

- all characteristics produced in the selfplex by the BLUE vMEME.

Of course, one case study proves nothing. Nevertheless, Krissy’s thoughts do appear to support the basic stereotype of Germans. In which case, there may be some degree of accuracy in stereoptying of national groups. However, as Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrated in South Africa in the early 1990s - see: Don Beck & South Africa - it’s not being in a certain racial or ethnic group per se which produces attitudes but it is the vMEMES which dominate in the culture of a group.

Accept the broad brush stereotypes Alan Tonkin points to and accept that these come from vMEMETIC cultural domination as a ‘working hypothesis’…and it becomes possible to use 4Q/8L as an instrument to identify key factors contributing to the malaise afflicting the EU.

The rules and structures of the EU are located in the lower right quadrant and are largely derived from over-mature BLUE with some strong mixes of ORANGE and some fewer but nonetheless influential splashes of GREEN. The overall culture of Germany is in the BLUE-ORANGE zone - lower left quadrant – and, thus, is well-equipped to take maximum benefit from the EU structure. Greece, on the other hand, if dominated in its culture by the less-complex vMEMES of PURPLE and RED, is very ill-equipped to cope with the structures, procedures and demands of the EU.

Evidence of the weakness of BLUE and the strength of RED comes from the problems the Greek government has with tax collection. Greek culture is not heavily imbued with memes about ‘doing the right thing’. Evidence that ORANGE in Greece is in short supply comes from the fact there are such low levels of enterprise and business growth activity.

As Alan Tonkin hints, a key threat to the EU is that fact that more member countries are centred lower down the Spiral than are centred in the BLUE-ORANGE zone. In part, this explains why so much responsibility for the success and sustainability of the EU falls upon those countries centred higher up the Spiral – especially Germany.

Memetic and vMEMETIC changes can also be seen in attitudes amongst German electors. Once the staunchest advocates of European integration, resentment is growing at German wealth being risked to bail out a country with little or no short-to-medium term prospects of economic growth. At a cultural level, there is a longer-term danger of Germany becoming exhausted with supporting the European project and sliding into BLUE/PURPLE protectionism.

Hollande, Obama, Merkel and Cameron at Camp David, 19 May. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press
Hollande, Obama, Merkel and Cameron at Camp David, 19 May. Copyright © 2012 Associated Press

Whither Europe?
Yesterday the leaders of the G8 met at Barrack Obama’s Camp David retreat in Maryland.

Briefing the press afterwards, Obama said there is an “emerging consensus” that European countries must now focus on jobs and growth. That isn’t quite the tone of the official communique which stated  that the G8 leaders had committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility. The communique also added that, with regard to what strategies might put be put in place, “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

In other words, despite Obama’s disengenous optimism, there is no real concensus among the leaders. Cameron appears to have come around a little bit to the view of Obama and Hollande that there must be  a new focus in the Eurozone on growth. However, reducing the deficit remains his overrriding concern at home. Merkel is still wedded to austerity and is said to be concerned that the German viewpoint wasn’t given adequate consideration at the summit.

When the world is said to be on the brink of financial meltdown, this is a demonstration of an appalling lack of qaulity leadership. And it shows all too clearly that most of them don’t ‘get it’.

The botched manner in which the EU has allowed the Eurozone crisis to rumble on for over 2 years, with austerity put forward for most of that time as the only possible solution is an appalling indictment of the lack of higher level thinking of the leaders.

Even more telling is that they treat the Eurozone crisis as the issue: if they could only stabilise the euro, things would be OK! Unfortunately, that is a ‘sticking plaster’ solution to a gaping wound which the crisis has exposed. It is a failure to recognise that the problems with the euro and the ‘debt mountains’ accrued by many member states are symptomatic of more fundamental problems. As we considered earlier, it is the values differences created by different vMEMES in the 4Q/8L lower left quadrant which is the real source of many of the EU’s problems - as Alan Tonkin identified 2 years ago.

Acknowledging this, of course, means facing up to the stark reality that not all member states are equal and, therefore, cannot all be treated the same. This is anathema to the GREEN vMEME which has influenced certain elements of the German political intelligentsia for many years - a factor which may help explain why Germany has allowed itself to get sucked into some very unnatural and unequal partnerships.

In understanding how this mess has come about, it is necessary to keep in mind the original aim of the EU: to contain West Germany (as it then was), increasingly resurgent economically (after the country was devastated at the end of World War II) and to minimise the likelihood of Germany and France ever going to war again. On the basis that countries which are economically interdependent rarely end up going to war with each other, the original European Coal & Steel Community was launched in 1951. The economic aim was to serve the political aim.

Again, when many of the former Soviet bloc countries joined the EU in 2004, it was politics driving the agenda - with economics having to meet the political needs. The political aim was to safeguard these countries from either disintegration and social chaos and/or to minimise lingering Russian or Communist influence. But, of those countries, only Poland so far has shown the potential to be a significant European economic power on the same level as Germany, France and the UK.

Yet, although the EU is driven by political agendas, the politicians, if indeed, they have the will, are unable to persuade their electorates that direct political controls - ie: some form of federalism - are necessary to manage some level of EU-wide fiscal and economic policies. Without that, we get exactly what we’ve got: Greece ‘cooking its books’ and running up vast quantities of debt, dependent on German hard-won wealth to bail it out.

Once you consider it from a 4Q/8L perspective. a straightforward union of nations containing Germany at one extreme, dominated culturally by BLUE and ORANGE with some GREEN, and Greece at the other, dominated by PURPLE and RED with some BLUE, was never going to be an easy match-up. Even with federal controls!

It may indeed be that some form of federal Europe is not acceptable to the peoples of Europe - but that has yet to be tested electorally, so  we don’t know for sure it isn’t. However, if centralised control isn’t acceptable, then Europe has to find another means of managing the divergent cultural values of its member states.  On Friday David Cameron said: “Decisive action is needed by the Eurozone. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road.” While Cameron’s superficial analysis appeared to go no deeper than the woes of the euro, his criticism of the inertia of the EU leaders was spot on. They cannot go on kicking the can down the road – but the can is more than the problems of debt and the common currency: the can is the fundamentally-flawed structure of the EU which gives equal status to countries with wildly-divergent values and, therefore, wildly-divergent aims.

It may be that the EU, instead of treating its members as if they are all the same, has to apply differentiated strategies to them. It may even be that there needs to be differentiated tiers of membership whereby Germany, France, the Benelux countries, the Baltic states and perhaps Poland form one tier; and perhaps the others are split between 2 other tiers, based on a banding of GDP:debt ratio? Each tier would have a different set of obligations and a different set of benefits? EU members which don’t use the euro would form a totally different category of membership?

What ever steps are taken- undoubtedly, tentatively! - to do something about the present crisis – and it’s hoped it is at least a sticking plaster job! - the EU needs fundamental reform. Cameron has talked about ‘bold initiatives’ being required with regard to the Eurozone. In that respect at least, he is right. But any intiative – no matter how ‘bold’ – will only work to a degree unless the EU tackles the values divergences within its membership.

Martin McGuinness for President?

 government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, prejudice & discrimination, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
Oct 042011
 
Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, always good for a soundbite, is certainly making some interesting news stories these days.

His effective admission yesterday (3 October) that the Provisional IRA did commit murder when innocent people died as a result of their activities is another – major? – step forward in Northern Ireland’s unsteady and decidedly volatile route to a lasting peace. McGuinness told The Independent: “The IRA were involved in quite a number of incidents which resulted in the accidental killing of innocent people and the term used by the relatives of those people who were killed was that they were murdered. I wouldn’t disagree with that. I’m not going to disagree with their analysis of what happened to their loved ones…. I accept that, in the circumstances where innocent people lost their lives, then it’s quite legitimate for the term murder to be used.”

Of course, McGuinness maintains that the army and police personnel and Unionist paramilitaries blown up or gunned down by the IRA were legitimate targets in a ‘bitter war’ - to say anything other would be to disrespect both his own past and the hundreds of IRA members who died or served jail sentences for their cause. Much as his ORANGE ambition is driving him in his quest for the Irish presidency, his PURPLE loyalties and BLUE devotion to the cause will not let him go that far.

Nonetheless, at a rally at Free Derry Corner a few days earlier (29 September), the deputy first minister, after telling a crowd of some 2,000 that his heart went out to all those who lost loved ones as a result of the conflict, added: “I am also conscious of many British soldiers, members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, and my heart goes out to all their relatives.”

It’s easy to dismiss his remarks as the kind of crass manipulation typical of the ORANGE vMEME. McGuinness, however, claims the remarks were genuine and unscripted. If so, then maybe there’s some 2nd Tier thinking emerging in McGuinness’ head if he can genuinely empathise with the former enemy…?

McGuinness the Reconciler?
As  he gets serious about his campaign to become the Republic’s president, McGuinness is presenting himself more and more as a peacemaker, someone able to bring reconciliation to the still-divided peoples of Northern Ireland.

Certainly the close working relationship he formed with the once-hated Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government of 2007 - they were lampooned as ‘The Chuckle Brothers’ by some of those close to them! - is an indicator of how much McGuinness wanted  the devolved government of the province to work. When Paisley’s successor as  first minister, Peter Robinson, had his career rocked by very public marital problems, McGuiness was one of the first to offer personal support.

McGuinness  has even reached into the thorny realms of the religious schisms fuelling much  of the suspicion, distrust and outright contempt between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists.

“]
Martin MgGuinness and David Latimer at the ard fheis, September 2011 [Copyright © 2011 BBC

This  September he got the Reverend David  Latimer of the First Derry Presbyterian Church to be a guest speaker at Sinn  Fein’s ard fheis (annual conference)  in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. It was a ground-breaking event on 2

accounts. Firstly, it is the first time Sinn Fein’s ard  fheis has been held north of the Irish border. Secondly, it is the first  time a Protestant clergyman has been a key note speaker at the ard fheis. McGuinness told the ard fheis: "In my experience of recent years, many within the Unionist  community are up for a journey of reconciliation and dialogue." Latimer  referred to McGuinness as his ‘brother’ on that journey.

Both  the bravery of the move and the complexity of the issues involved are reflected in the vociferous criticisms of Jim  Allister, MLA for North Antrim and leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice. He called Latimer a ‘latter day Lundy’. (Robert Lundy was the Governor of Derry in 1688 who tried to persuade his Protestant ‘Orange’ forces that resistance to the Catholic Jacobites was  useless - acts portrayed in Unionist tradition as outright treachery.)

This  weekend Latimer endorsed McGuinness’s candidacy for the Irish presidency, saying McGuinness is a man on a journey, able to bring a community attached to the gun and bomb in the direction of democracy and peace. Given the reverend probably doesn’t have the Special Branch bodyguards the deputy first minister has, it’s to be hoped he doesn’t become the victim of some extremist Unionist gunman!

McGuiness the Terrorist?
McGuinness told The Independent most people don’t care if he was in the IRA. This, unfortunately, seems to be a cack-handed  attempt at disingenuity.

It  certainly matters to Jim Allister and others like him. "This latter day Lundy [Latimer] may see McGuinness as ‘one of the great leaders of modern times’, I see him as one of the most unrepentant terrorist godfathers of modern times.”

Which begs 2 questions:-

  1. is McGuinness a terrorist?
  2. can McGuinness be trusted by Unionists?

Martin McGuinness, 1972

McGuinness  doesn’t deny he was once in the IRA. It is claimed by British Intelligence that McGuinness was an influential member of the Provisional IRA Army Council. The Saville Report (2010) indicated it was likely McGuinness had a Thompson submachine gun at the ‘Bloody Sunday’ demonstration on 30 January 1972 but was unable to establish whether he had used it against British soldiers. He was jailed in the Republic for attempting to transport explosives across the border. It is rumoured McGuinness pulled the trigger on several executions – though no credible evidence has ever been produced.

While McGuinness undoutedly saw himself as a ‘freedom fighter’, the actions he undertook, in the eyes of the British state, were undoubtedly terrorism. Directly or indirectly, it is almost certain he is responsible for deaths - murders?

We don’t know for sure, but let’s assume he does have ‘blood on his hands’. Does that mean he hasn’t proved  a very capable deputy first minister? Does that mean he doesn’t now want a form of reconciliation and dialogue between Republicans and Unionists? Can people change?

According  to Sean Kay (2011), McGuiness told him anyone wanting to go back to violence in Northern Ireland would have to go through him.

Nelson Mandela: an example of change
It’s  instructive here to look to South Africa. Nelson Mandela, now regarded as one of the greatest statesman of the 20th Century was jailed in 1962 for conspiracy to carry out a bombing campaign in opposition to the ruling whites’ policy of Apartheid. It is rumoured that, from his prison cell, he helped organise the Church Street bombing in Pretoria on 20 May 1983 in which 19 people died and more than 200 were injured - though insufficient evidence has been produced to substantiate such claims.  However, it is unequivocal that Mandela’s then-wife Winnie endorsed the practice of ‘necklacing’ - ie: placing a tyre around a suspected collaborator and setting it alight to burn them to death. This was stated in a speech on 13 April 1986 as an explicit follow-through of Nelson’s declaration that some hideous punishment must be found for ‘traitors’, exposed during the 1962 trial.

Like McGuinness, it is likely that Mandela had ‘blood on his hands’…yet he became, with the help of Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (among others), one of the staunchest advocates of peace and reconciliation the modern world has ever seen. He is a true visionary that people around the world call for time and time again, even though his age and health problems clearly limit his potential to nothing other than the most nominal involvement.

So, if Mandela could change, why can’t McGuinness? Mandela never compromised his principle of majority rule for South Africa. But, in changed circumstances and with different voices talking to him, he found a different, more peaceful way of approaching the problem. There is no doubt that McGuinness’ objective is an ‘island of Ireland’, separate from Great Britain. But, if he’s looking at some different ways of working towards that objective than killing Unionists and British soldiers, should we forbid him from pursuing those different ways?

Understanding the milieu
McGuinness and Gerry Adams have, for some considerable time, promoted the view that there is a peaceful - though rather more prolonged - course to achieving the island of Ireland. In promoting that view, they have undermined the hard core who want to bomb and shoot their way to it. In committing themselves to democratic means, McGuinness, Adams and their like are also committed to the principle that they cannot achieve their objective until the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland also want it.

That means patience - the island of Ireland might not happen in their lifetime, if indeed ever. It also means persuasion. Adams has shown himself repeatedly to be a master of persuasion. McGuinness tends to be more straight-talking, with a tendency, in the words of the old proverb, to wear his heart on his sleeve.

That straight-talking could prove endearing if, as he appears to have done at Free Derry Corner, it leads him to an unscripted acknowledgement of the pain and misery of others, of which he is, in some small part at least, a cause. But simply dismissing his past with a bland assertion that most people don’t care about it is either crass disingenuity or a gross misunderstanding of the same PURPLE-BLUE vMEME harmonic driving the core of Unionist thinking that drives Republican thinking. As Derry priest Father Michael Canny has pointed out, McGuinness has a great deal to explain about his relationship with the IRA.

Like Mandela and his aborted bombing campaign, McGuinness has come an awful long way from the IRA gunman who toted a submachine gun on Bloody Sunday. He is one of the true architects of Northern Ireland’s fragile peace and he has been a key participant in making it work. As president of the Republic, with his knowledge of Northern Ireland politics and government, he could be an invaluable asset to the governments of both north and south in promoting greater harmony and cooperation.

To progress his campaign, though, he needs to find it within himself to reconcile his own past with the image he wishes to promote of peacemaker.

The Riots: who’s right – Cameron or Blair?

 celebrity, civil unrest, community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, morality, politics, Psychology, science, society, Sociology  6 Responses »
Aug 232011
 

Today what appears to be the final battle to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya is rightly dominating the news - as it probably will for several days, as stories of valour, celebration, desperation and atrocity are told from the streets of Tripoli. There will also be much speculation about what kind of Libya will emerge from the civil war - even whether the rebels can hold off splintering into their own warring factions. And, inevitably, since the West invested so much in the NATO bombs that so potently aided the rebel victory, there will be speculation as to what the West can do to help build a new Libya that is friendly to the West and accepting of its interests in North Africa and the Middle East.

In and amidst this focus on Libya, we also need continue the debate about what brought violent rioters and looters onto the streets of London and other cities just a fortnight back and what we should do about these issues.

Both David Cameron and Tony Blair had key articles in this weekend’s Sunday newspapers, setting out their positions.

Moral decline, moral panic and folk devils
As you might expect for a piece in the Sunday Express, Cameron was aiming squarely at the traditional grass roots Tories who make up a substantial element of the Express’ readership. In a piece so right wing, he’s almost certainly not comfortable with it, Cameron wrote: “…a social fightback means instilling in our children and young people the decency, discipline and sense of duty that make good citizens.

The first place people learn these values is in the home. That is why I make no apology for talking about the importance of family and marriage. Every government policy must pass what I call the family test: does this make life better for families or worse? Does this make it easier to bring up well-behaved children or harder? Family is back at the top of the agenda.

Children also learn values in schools. Every school should be a place where children learn manners and morals but that is only possible when there is order in the classroom. So we are taking action to restore authority and boundaries, with teachers able to discipline pupils as they see fit and heads having the freedom to set uniform and behaviour policies and enforce them.

But I believe we can and should do more. When we see events as shocking as the riots and so many young people whose lives have no shape beyond the shape of their gang, no purpose beyond the next time they get smashed on drink or drugs, it is clear that the need to restore values calls for something new. That is why this Government is establishing National Citizen Service.”

Though he doesn’t actually use the term ‘moral decline’ in the Express, the tone of the piece is about reversing it and the term is being widely attributed to him and other senior Tory ministers, particularly Iain Duncan Smith. Attributing the term to Cameron and Duncan Smith in the context of blame for the riots fits with the ‘broken Britain’ theme which the likes of Cameron and Duncan Smith have been playing since at least 2007.

With their emphasis on broken - even ‘sick’ – Britain, Cameron and Duncan Smith are playing the old ‘moral panic’ card, first named by Stanley Cohen (1973) in his famous study of media reaction to events like the mods-‘n’-rockers beach fights in the early 1960s. And when Duncan Smith goes on about gangs and gang culture, he’s making them into what Cohen terms ‘folk devils’.

Cohen identifies the process as the media whip themselves up into a frenzy, creating a moral panic and exaggerating the menace of the folk devils so everyone is terrified o them - and this forces the police, local authorities, central government, etc , etc, into strong action to tame the folk devils and quiet the moral panic.

Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a change in morality and attitudes towards “decency, discipline and sense of duty”. As I pointed out in the Blog post, ‘Is Britain really broken?’, in January last year there have been considerable changes in public morality and consequent behaviour over the past 50 years, with the result that many institutions of society - especially the family and education - have changed considerably. Behaviours that were once relatively rare - eg: taking recreational drugs, men and women cohabiting as an alternative to marriage, young women having children outside of marriage, people conducting same sex relationships openly - are now fairly common and some of these changed behaviours are now so accepted they have become the norm.

Nor is this to deny that there is a problem in a number of areas with gang culture. Much of London’s rise in gun crime over the past 5 years has been unequivocally linked to gangs. Clearly there were organised gangs at work carrying out some of the looting during the riots.

Nor is this to belittle any of what went on during the riots. A handful of people died, many more were injured - some very seriously - and many, many more were traumatised by their experiences. Property was damaged and, in some cases, destroyed; and livelihoods were wiped out.

But were the riots really just the result of a changed public morality? If so, why hasn’t the whole country descended into arson and looting anarchy?

Blair and the Underclass
Writing in The Observer allowed Blair to present a more reasonable and reasoned argument to the so-called ‘chattering classes’. His article, ‘Blaming a Moral Decline for the Riots makes Good Headlines but Bad Policy’, is clearly aimed at presenting the Cameron-Duncan Smith approach as over-simplistic. He writes: “The big cause is the group of alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here’s where I simply don’t agree with much of the commentary. In my experience they are an absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution.

The left says they’re victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won’t help them; neither – on its own – will tougher penalties.

“The key is to understand that they aren’t symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis of what has gone wrong. Britain as a whole is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’…

This is a hard thing to say, and I am of course aware that this too is generalisation. But the truth is that many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, either middle class or poor.”

Though he never actually uses the term, Blair is clearly referring to the ‘Underclass’ - those of (usually petty) criminal attitudes and behaviour, living beyond the fringes of society. Benefit cheats, prostitutes, small-time drug dealers, burglars, etc, etc, – the kind of characters you see on Shameless - are the kind of people who fit Charles Murray’s (1989) criteria for the Underclass. (See: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism in the Society section of the main web site.)

The fact that the looting was largely of luxury goods, not basic essentials, indicates that those looters were not the desperately poor; they already had the basics of life sorted - perhaps through fraudulent benefits claims and/or ‘black market’ jobs and/or petty criminal activity. These looters were people who wanted more and had no hesitation in using serious criminal means to get it.

So far so good for Blair’s theory of the Underclass being a large element in the rioting: the profiles fit.

That is, until you start looking at the statistics on the occupations of those who were processed through the courts in the week after the riots. The most common occupation cited was ‘student’. Despite the best efforts of Lib Dem Deputy Leader Simon Hughes to point out that there are some benefits in the way university tuition fees are to be funded from 2012, undoubtedly the next tranche of potential university students do feel pretty aggrieved. But what excuse do the current ‘students’ have for causing such mayhem? Other occupations noted included soldier, scaffolder, chef, lifeguard, postman, hairdresser, forklift driver, electrician, journalist and an Olympic ambassador. There was even the 19-year-old daughter of millionaire parents in the dock!

An estimated 1 in 5 of the rioters were under the age of 17.

Sorry, Tony! While there can be little doubt a sizeable percentage of the rioters were from the Underclass, there were many who weren’t.

Andrew Gilligan, in the previous week’s Observer, wrote: “There were broadly three groups of rioters – organised career criminals targeting specific high value merchandise; semi-organised youths wanting ‘pure terror’ and whatever they could lay their hands on; and those who got carried away in the excitement. Many of those turned out to be very far from the stereotype of the hopeless underclass.”

A context for the riots
To explore the issues of who and how further, let’s do a bit of scene setting - because, as Gilligan illustrates, it’s a hugely complex issue which neither Cameron’s article nor Blair’s get to grips with successfully.

The country is still struggling to emerge from recession. Public sector cuts are beginning to bite deeply, with hundreds of thousands having either lost their jobs already, about to lose them or worry they are likely to. The private sector, which was meant to pick up the slack of the unemployed from the public sector, is largely not doing this. The rate of business liquidation is still high and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are being wiped off the stock markets virtually each day. Some ministers, like business secretary Vince Cable and justice secretary Ken Clarke are warning this misery could go on for years and years.

Everybody it seems who understands anything of finance and economics - except Ed Balls! - agrees the cuts are necessary. It’s just the details - how far, how fast - on which most of the major politicians quibble. David Cameron (and Nick Clegg), when first announcing the cuts, promised that everyone would feel the pain equally - that we were all in this together. Except now it seems the bankers who are widely perceived to have precipitated the whole crisis in the first place. They’re back to getting enormous bonuses…even when their banks are mostly-owned by the taxpayer! And then what about the ‘super rich’ - including the multi-six-figure salary civil servants? (Especially those who buy their groceries on their department credit cards!?) There aren’t many stories of 16-bedroom mansions being repossessed or Ferraris and Bentleys being returned to the showrooms because their owners can’t keep up the repayments….

And George Osborne talks of reducing the top rate of tax from 50p in £1 to 45p?!? Has the man no common sense at all? Osborne may well be right when he says that, in the grand scheme of things, the amount recovered by the Exchequer in that 5p difference has little real effect on the country’s finances but that it does scare off many top wealth generators to other more tax-friendly countries…but, George, it’s a matter of perception! While the common folk suffer, the Tories are seen to look after their rich pals and the Lib Dems are seen as weak wimps unable to restrain the Tory greed.

Of course, it’s not that simple; but that’s the kind of message that takes hold not just in the real Underclass but among both those who are genuinely disadvantaged by the cuts and those who aren’t but perceive the way the Government is handling things to be grossly unfair. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, the club of the ‘Seduced’ is becoming more and more exclusive while more and more of us, even those don’t sink completely into the Underclass, join the ranks of the excluded ‘Repressed’, no longer able to afford a foreign holiday or buy the kid the latest PlayStation. While we suffer, through the likes of OK! and Hello! and various TV shows about celebrities and the wealthy, we can wind ourselves up with seething jealousy of those whose opulent lifestyles are not in the slightest compromised by the cuts.

Everyone sharing the pain equally…? I don’t think so, Dave!

In vMEMETIC terms, BLUE is disillusioned because people who pay their taxes, conform to the best nuclear family tradition, try to bring their children up ‘decently’ and vote Conservative - in other words, they do everything they’re meant to - only to lose their job through no fault of their own. That destabilises PURPLE, with money worries and a lack of purpose for the newly unemployed putting immense pressure on family life.

And, as anyone who has studied Spiral Dynamics knows, when BLUE order falls apart, the RED vMEME comes roaring through which means power, not order, determines what happens.

An explosion of RED
So now locate yourself, reader, in the late afternoon of Saturday 6 August outside Tottenham police station as the peaceful protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan turns nasty, just as it seemed to be petering out. Undoubtedly there was real anger at the shooting of Duggan - rumours were flying around that he had been effectively executed! - and at the police being unable to give the protesters the information they wanted about the investigation into the shooting. From reports about him, Duggan’s profile would fit ‘Underclass gang member’ and the protestors could probably be categorised as a mix of Underclass and community/political activists.

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Burning police car, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 ITN/Channel 4

It’s not yet been revealed who it was set the 2 police cars on fire; but, as soon as the police failed to deal with those incidents, they signalled the weakness of BLUE. What followed over the next 3 nights in London was an orgy of RED destruction, self-indulgence and wilful criminality. The more the police failed to control it, the more RED felt free from BLUE’s shackles and able to do exactly what it wanted.

With the ORANGE instant and mostly monitoring-proof technology of Blackberry Messenger (BBM), rioters and looters were able to organise incredibly quickly, easily outstretching those police units that did deploy. Other units failed to deploy properly, watching impotently from hundreds of yards away as rioters and looters tore apart and burned shops.

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Police watching a burning bus, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Through BBM, the Internet and TV news, the ineffectiveness of BLUE to contain RED was flashed around the country. By the third night, there were copycat riots in various other parts of England - although in Birmingham and Manchester, there appeared to be little burning - more, it was just outright smashing and looting.

Where the BLUE vMEME appeared strongest in some of the London riots was not in the police attempting to maintain order but in the meticulous planning with which some of the looting was carried out.

In the week afterwards the Metropolitan Police came in for considerable criticism. Clearly the Met were caught out by the scale of the violence and there was confusion in their command - journalists David Barrett & Patrick Hennessy claim they were told by some frontline officers that they were instructed not to advance on rioters. Barrett & Hennessy also offer evidence that some officers were reluctant to battle the rioters without assurance that they would be immune from prosecution and/or being sued if rioters were seriously injured in the confrontations. That assurance was not forthcoming apparently. The bizarre situation where police officers were reluctant to do their job through fear of being suspended or sued by violent lawbreakers is the work of the GREEN vMEME, with its positive discrimination to protect the rights of all, including lawbreakers.

The short-term fix: stopping the violence
If we want to make sure nothing like the Tottenham riot of 6 August escalating into a series of riots and looting sprees over 4 days ever happens again, then policing needs to be much more robust. For a start, that means intelligence on those in both the Underclass and the professional criminal networks of whom there is serious reason to believe would jump at the chance of exploiting a riot to loot high value goods. As soon as something like the protest of the 6 August starts, they need to be picked up and held in cells until the protest is over

Then the police response to violent protests must be able to curtail them. Standing back while shops and homes are looted and burned is not an option. As soon as they do that, they signal BLUE has failed and liberate RED to do whatever it wants. If water cannon and rubber bullets are needed, they must be used. In the extreme, when the lives of innocent people are clearly at risk, then the police must be authorised to use live ammunition. If the police cannot curtail the violence, then the army should be brought in.

BLUE must not be perceived to have failed. If it has, then not only does it liberate RED to commit wanton mayhem – but those who are threatened by the mayhem are given the de facto right to take the law into their own hands to protect their families and their property. Vigilantism. When BLUE fails to protect, RED can also dominate in those who seek to fight off the lawbreakers – even though they may trash the law themselves in the way they defend themselves. (See the Society feature ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ ) We saw proto-vigilantism in the Turkish men who defended their shops with baseball bats and knives and in the Sikhs who rushed to defend their temple from rioters and looters. If not for the calming appeal of the magnificent Tariq Jahan, father of one of the 3 young men killed by a rioter’s car in Birmingham, vigilantism may well have led to some very ugly reprisals and further escalation of the violence.

Do the kind of tactics I am advocating impinge upon the human rights of individuals? Most certainly…but the protection of the community has to be of greater importance than several hours inconvenience for a handful of individuals. Would the kind of tactics I am advocating require additional legislation? Most certainly…then get on with it!

Do police officers still need to be accountable for their actions in what might effectively be a pitched battle? Of course…but, in the heat of battle, you need RED daring much more than BLUE caution. And it must be remembered that the rioters and looters deliberately put themselves in harm’s way. Police officers committing abuses on prisoners after a battle would need to be prosecuted in the usual way.

Would such tactics cost extra money? Of course; but as London mayor Boris Johnson has pointed out to David Cameron, he urgently needs to rethink the Coalition’s policy on cuts to the police forces.

BLUE order must be maintained.

The longer-term: healing sick Britain
Firstly, David Cameron has got to get his head around image management. As was illustrated last May-June by 10 Downing Street hiring a personal photographer for Cameron in the same week he first talked about just how savage the cuts were going to be, he doesn’t always think about how his behaviour may be meta-stated by others.

Allowing Osborne to propose lowering the top rate of tax in the same week as the riots was a public relations blunder of epic proportions!

People in general are much more likely to ‘grin and bear it’ if they really do think everyone is feeling the pain equally. Bankers’ bonuses and ‘fat cat’ public sector salaries being seen to be protected or even championed by government ministers is to invite dissent!

Secondly, as discussed in Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism, we need to develop 2nd Tier perspectives on how Capitalism operates in the Western world because ORANGES’s combination of drive for profits and labour-reducing technology is putting more and more people out of work or into low-paid menial jobs - with some of those people sinking into the Underclass and swelling its numbers. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor is a recipe for violent disorder. As Gadhafi’s regime enters its death throes, it’s worth remembering that the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions were initially ignited by poverty and economic hopelessness. Allowing that gap to widen ever further could well lead to more and more violence in the UK.

We need a country where reward in life is related fairly to contribution to society, where there are opportunities for everybody to contribute and where there are clear routes for social mobility. The Underclass then should be small in size, despised by the vast majority of citizens and relatively manageable.

Using the 4Q/8L model, we can see that addresses the lower right quadrant but we also need to address the left quadrants, focusing on culture and individual responsibility.

It’s not possible to turn the clock back to the 1950s and restore those values but we can - indeed, we must – restore the strength of the BLUE vMEME at a cultural level so that it is perceived as a good thing to take responsibility and to support the structures of society. That support should not be unquestioning but, if we are working towards a fair society, then questioning and drive for change should possible from within. As Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) point out, when discussing spiral wizardry, in managing any kind of institution, you need to scan constantly for change - because change is inevitable. Therefore, you need to have strategies to accommodate and incorporate change, rather than suppress it.

In the UK we have a mixed message culture - typified by The Sun regularly engaging in moral panics and calling for draconian measures to deal with the folk devils (RED/BLUE zealotry) while also showing topless girls on Page 3 and female celebrities flashing their knickers in the Entertainment section (ORANGE unashamedly milking RED’s thirst for ‘naughtiness’ and excitement). If we are to change people’s values, then we need to be crystal clear in the messages that are sent out. If the mindset of many is governed by RED, then we can’t demand it instantly change it to BLUE. Clare W Graves showed years ago that changes in motivation don’t work that way. But there are things we can do to encourage vMEMETIC change. Eg:-

  • Reward those who marry – Cameron’s idea of tax breaks for people who marry is one way of doing it
  • Show in simple, layman’s terms the psychological science which demonstrates time and time again that, generally speaking and exceptions apart, people in long-term relationships with a partner are happier (overall), usually healthier and often live longer – and their children tend to do better emotionally, socially and academically
  • Make it cool to conform to ‘family values’ by getting the media to focus on public figures and big name celebrities who do exactly that – thus, making them role models for younger people

Designing the future of the United Kingdom – which is what we’re really talking about - is, however, a remit way beyond this Blog. That’s for the Centre of Human Emergence UK , the academics and the various think tanks, using a MeshWORK process. But what is needed is a common understanding of the sociopsychological forces which have brought us to this present state of being.

In their key articles in the Sunday newspapers, David Cameron and Tony Blair each saw some of the problems; they didn’t see the complete picture. Consequently they could only offer partial solutions which may not work much, or even at all, because the problems are all so interconnected. As Ken Wilber (1996) says, we must ‘transcend and include’ the partial views and solutions to create the full picture of what is going on. Only then can we create sustainable long-term solutions.

Lose a cat, lose a father….

 heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, NLP, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 082011
 

Yesterday we – my wife, Caroline, and I – attended a service for the interment of my father’s ashes. A few hours later we picked up a new cat, a 6-week old male kitten we’re calling Basmati - ‘Basmati Rice’, geddit?! Baz, as we tend to call him, is settling in remarkably well and is a real delight after what seems to have been 6 months of loss.

Personally I would never admit to being religious or, in any sense, ‘spiritual’ beyond having a strong but rather vague conviction that there is something bigger than me ‘out there’.  On the odd occasion I do think about it, I tend to think of this ‘something’ in God-the-Father/Allah-the-Compassionate terms – which I attribute to cultural memes rather than any spiritual intuition. And I certainly consider myself far too rational to entertain anything superstitious!

Yet, for several years now, I’ve had the thought that I would lose Artemis, my cat, and Ted Rice, my father, within a very short time of each other. Of course, I could rationalise this by arguing that both were approaching the end of their natural life and had already lived significantly beyond the average age of their sex and species. (Artemis was 19 years old and my father 83.) Or maybe the PURPLE vMEME’s tendency to believe in signs, omens and superstitions was simply tuning into something that rational science can’t comprehend…? Certainly, it would appear from studies of primitive peoples such as the Kalahari bushmen (eg: Richard Katz, 1982) and Australian Aborigine tribes (eg: James Cowan, 1993) that at least some of their number can ‘tune into’ and be informed by something way beyond the ken of conventional modern science.

PURPLE was certainly the dominant vMEME in terms of giving meaning to both relationships…so maybe, just maybe, there was something intuitive in that thought that I would lose them pretty much at the same time…?

Artemis
I acquired Artemis on 5 October 1991. I already had a 7-week-old black male, Merlin, I wanted company for since (just like today!) I worked long hours. My girlfriend of the time knew I was looking for another kitten and alerted me to a kitten some friends of hers had found in a barn on their farm in the hills above Keighley. When I saw this (approximately) 4-week-old kitten, apparently abandoned by her mother, I thought she was the ugliest kitten I had ever seen: a blobby belly on short stumpy legs, ears bigger than her head, bulging eyes, a coat that looked like someone had thrown a range of creams and browns over her in totally random fashion and one half of her face a totally different colour than the other. (Split straight down the middle, like the villain, Two-Face, in the Batman comics!) But, as long-time friend Linda Scurrah commented many years later: “Artemis has grown into her looks. She’s quite beautiful now she’s older.”

Merlin, sadly, didn’t last that long – getting knocked down when he was just over 6 months old. But Artemis survived illnesses, sequential girlfriends and multiple moves, to become a true companion. I talked to her and, to some degree at least, I thought she understood my mood, if not the content of my words.

Pure Behaviourists take the view that animals don’t have cognitions but I am in no doubt that Artemis had certain basic expectations – schemas. She expected stroking if she made certain noises or approached us in a certain way. If she went and sat by her bowl around about evening meal time, she was indicating clearly that she expected feeding.

Some would say I am anthropomorphsing but I am convinced something akin to the PURPLE vMEME functioned in her brain. Throughout all the moves and all the girlfriends, Artemis coped with it all as long as I was there; but, if I had to stay away overnight, I’m told she would prowl the house looking for me and acting distressed. Sometimes, if I just looked at her when I had been ignoring her for a while, she would purr – apparently pleased that I was giving her attention. It appears I mattered to her – that, from her side as well as mine, there was some kind of desire for mutual affiliation. Indeed, I would be prepared to stick my kneck out and say Artemis craved affection. Eg: as she got older, I could still tempt her to a bit of play occasionally…but then she would lick the hand she’d just pawed, look at me in what I meta-stated to be a pleading way and start purring.

Artemis, 2006

I’d also speculate that there was some degree of RED operating in her very basic selfplex. Eg: if I was eating chicken, she would howl at me until either I gave her some or she would get frustrated and try to snatch it from my plate – even though she had her own food down that she was usually quite content with. She knew what she preferred and she would try to intimidate me in to giving her what she wanted.

Artemis was also choosy as to which of my girlfriends she was prepared to associate with…or not. Around 7 years ago Caroline and I were decidedly relieved when Artemis did take to her.

Other prominent temperament traits Artemis displayed included great caution and  nervousness – which may have contributed.to her longevity. Tied in with that,  she was a coward and would never defend her territory. That is, until she  started displaying mild signs of feline dementia and seemed to forget she was a coward, charging at much larger cats and succeeding in driving them out of the garden!

Like most higher mammal pets with their owners, Artemis would not hold  my gaze for more than a second or two – indicating that she accepted I had greater power. However, in the last 6 months or so of her life, Artemis did  take to holding both mine and Caroline’s gaze from time to time. But we  meta-stated it was not in an aggressive way but more as though she was  searching us for something.

Ted Rice
My father was proud of being a right-wing racist who thought the sun shone out of Margaret Thatcher’s backside. He considered the trade unions to be the single biggest threat to the wealth and prosperity of the British people and wanted them tamed again – like Maggie had done 25 years previously! Being a classical music man, he despised The Beatles and the long hair hippie culture of the 1960s. He thought young women should still be virgins when they married and that young men should have short back & sides and wear suits. So when my teenager self grew my hair long, wore jeans, listened to Jefferson Airplane and espoused many of the more idealistic tenets of the hippie culture….!

BLUE was so strong in his selfplex that he considered everyone should listen to the TV news every night because everyone should be informed – it was ‘the right thing to do’. My  mother’s PURPLE village gossip mentality seriously irked him and they had  numerous rows about her finding the housewives’ gossip on the street more  interesting than the state of the British economy or the progress of the latest war in Africa.

There was some partial emergence of ORANGE in that he had ambitions to be a director of the company he worked for and was then able to reinvent himself very succesfully as a health & safety consultant after he was made redundant.

But of GREEN there appeared to be no trace. As said, he was a racist…of the England-for-the-English variety. He was a sexist in that it was understandable if men were unfaithful to their partners but women had to be totally faithful. He had no truck with the idea of human rights, believing criminals deserved to be beaten up by the police and that prisons should be such harsh places that offenders would be terrified of going back to jail. Unsurprisingly he was a staunch advocate of capital punishment and believed corporal punishment should be reintroduced to schools. His limited view of social mobility was that only those who, by virtue of intelligence and/or sheer hard work, could rise above their birth class status should be allowed to get on with it; the state should certainly not award benefits to create positive discrimination for the socially disadvantaged.

For all our cultural and political differences, I was close to my Dad…arguably closer to him than I was to my Mum. Though many of our discussions ended in rows – because of the cultural and political factors! – I could talk to my Dad about the world and what was going on. (Any time I raised anything like a problem with a girlfriend, though, it was immediately passed on to Mum – it was her job to do the emotion work!) But problems at work, too, he would listen and offer his advice. He was immensely skilled in management techniques and provided a very useful sounding board as I tried to fathom my way through various issues. My career and the social, economic and political implications of the news formed the basis of most of our conversations – though increasingly his health problems became a pressing topic of conversation after my Mum died.

Ted, celebrating his 80th birthday

My mother, Betty, died in 2000 (from cancer). For a year afterwards, my Dad was depressed, becoming a virtual hermit and dropping almost all social contacts. Then he developed Myasthenia Gravis, a neurological illness which inhibits the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from working in the  synapses at the muscle platelets, effectively preventing the efferent neurons from sending messages from the motor cortex and the cerebellum to the muscles. A Bell’s Palsy-type face droop in 2001 was followed by a collapse of his lungs the following year, necessitating a 5-month stay in hospital – 3 of them in intensive care. After getting the Myasthenia under control with stupendous amounts of medication, mobility problems and excruciating arthritic pain led to 2 hip transplants. Dad then had a couple of reasonable years before gallbladder problems led to a series of collapses and stays in hospital. By January this year it was clear he was deteriorating, with kidney and liver problems eventually triggering the long, slow, downward spiral to the end. I doubt I’ll ever forget seeing him 2 days before he died, screaming in pain and the hospital staff not able to get the morphine into him fast enough.

For all my ‘psychology tricks’, as I call them, that experience has left a deep wound in me. If it was bad for me, what must it have been like for him?

The downward slope and the aftermath
Already on major medication due to her Arthritis, Artemis began fitting late last year. The fitting may have been a by-product of a botched operation to remove bad teeth that left her temporarily blind and paralysed…but it would have been very difficult to prove. With even more medication, we thought we had got the fitting under control. However, a really severe and distressing fit at Easter, with medication at maximum levels, left us with no other real choice. As Caroline said: “What would happen if she had a fit outside? She’d be at the  mercy of any predator that was nearby – foxes and so on.”

Artemis hated going to the vet’s in a cat carrier. For all the steep extra cost, I got the vet out to our house. It was important to me that Artemis died in her own home, with as  little pre-procedure distress as possible. As she went under, in the conservatory in which she spent so much time, with me stroking her…did it actually make the experience of her passing any less traumatic for her? If I’m honest, I have no idea…but she seemed peaceful. And it helps me…whether or not it helped her.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t give the same consideration - euthanasia – to my Dad. He took another 2 days to die. By the last few hours, they had finally gotten the morphine levels right and he did appear to die in peace…but the 48 hours before must have been a horrendous experience for him.

I was at my Mum’s death bed in 2000. I saw and heard the final intake of breath. (The first time I had seen somebody die in front of me!) Strangely I cried only once for my mother – on a misty November night in the garden 2 months later. I think my focus was so strongly on trying to hold my Dad together in the following months and years that my BLUE never really allowed my PURPLE the privilege of grieving for a loved one. When Artemis’ executioners left - because, being blunt, that’s what we did to her: execution – I sobbed inconsolably for days. My little companion – who at times had seemed unnervingly human and who I sometimes referred to as “my little furry daughter’  – was gone. Even now Caroline and/or I will break into tears, if something triggers certain memories of Artemis. She was such a huge personality and such a part of our lives….

By contrast, my Dad was much less a part of our lives. We  spoke on the phone at least once a week, I travelled to see him approximately once a month – and Caroline would come with me every 2nd or 3rd visit. Christmas dinner with him was an annual ritual.

So far at least, I’ve cried less for my Dad than I have done for Artemis. Again, as with my mother’s death, it’s been all action. As my father’s only child (and the executor of his will), it’s been my responsibility to arrange the funeral, deal with Dad’s financial affairs and apply for probate, and clear out his house, ready for sale. In and amongst these processes, there have been tears but the focus has been mainly on doing rather than thinking. Certainly finding photos of Artemis amongst Dad’s possessions was a trigger for both Caroline and I to shed some tears!

Mum & Dad, 40th Wedding Anniversary

One photo that certainly brought me to tears was the one of my Mum & Dad’s 40th Anniversary in September 1991. Dad was 5 years older than I am now and Mum just 2. They look to be still in their prime, before the cruelties of old age could tarnish and diminish them. My PURPLE feels a great ache looking at that photo. The end of Summer in 1991 was a good time for my PURPLE. Just a few weeks later I would acquire Artemis.

Maybe I‘ll do more crying for Dad – and for Mum? – once everything is done and there is more time for reflection…?

A change in life
I miss my Dad in some different ways to Artemis.

Artemis was in my life every day, working through a variety of situations, ranging from her being a demanding pain to a purring pleasure. Her suddenly not being there any more left a huge emptiness in our lives. One or both of us still think we see her out of the corner of our eyes from time to time. The schematic expectation is still, to some extent, that she is there – or should be there. Caroline and I still hold each other and say we wish we could have her back, we miss her so much.

But somehow the scope of the relationship with my Dad, while lacking everyday impact, was more. Perhaps because of the greater history…? Perhaps because, according to Dale Hay & Jo Ellen Vespo (1988), parents teach us to love them from a very early age…?

Maybe it was simply the cognitive level of the relationship which made it more…? Bizarrely, at the post-funeral bash, I found myself thinking I would have to tell my Dad how pleased I was that my Mum’s relatives were mingling so well with his…when I suddenly realised he wasn’t there to tell anymore! I will miss talking to him.

Then, of course, you can sort-of replace a cat. Not that we feel we could or would want ever to replace Artemis. She will always have a unique place in our memories. But we can get a new cat. We had talked about this possibility and, after my Dad died, Caroline sourced the little kitten who is now Baz. We deliberately went for a male and one who looks nothing like Artemis because we don’t want to find ourselves drawing comparisons. We want to preserve her importance in our selfplexes.

But you can’t even begin to replace a father. (Or a mother, for that matter….)

UPDATE: 14 July 2012.
2 days ago, on the anniversary of his death, after a days’ teaching, I drove from Harrogate to Garstang, to stand by the marker which is all that remains that is tangible of my Dad (and my Mum). It was a near 5 hours round trip to spend 40 minutes with them…but I’m glad I went. On a rare (for this year!) warm and sunny evening, in the tranquil, almost idyllic graveyard of St Thomas, alone amongst the gravestones and the markers, I found that, for the first time I could remember my Dad, without being disturbed by horrendous memories of those last 3 days of his life.

I found that, for the first time, memories came easily to me of when he was younger and healthier…of things we did as a family as well as when I visited them as an adult. For the first time too, I found I could laugh again at some of the memories – at some of the more outlandish and ridiculous things he had said and done. The horrendous final days were still there if I looked for them but they were fuzzy and indistinct – as if partially repressed - so I left them alone and enjoyed my little graveyard reverie of better times.

Over the past year I’ve often moved away from thoughts of my Dad and tried not to engage with them by distracting myself with something else. Interestingly I found remembering my Mum a more easy and pleasant experience. So I’m pleased and hopeful now that I’ll be able to enjoy my memories of Dad.

My intention is to go back to Garstang every year on or around the anniversary of his death and use that trip as a way of honouring him and Mum.

I guess I’ve found for myself some truth in the old adage that pain eases with the passing of time. (For many months, it seemed like it would never ease!)

As for Artemis, we buried her ashes in a little copse on the cliffs above Robin Hood’s Bay and carved her name into the branch of an overhanging tree. As we love the Bay and usually spend a week in a cottage there most years, as long as we can still climb the cliffs, we can visit that copse.

In a strange way, there’s also a connection to my Dad in her burial place. He had always loved Artemis and often asked after her. When he was no longer well enough to visit us, we bought him a little wooden cat, which had something of her ‘look’, to symbolise her to him. As the carving was of a cat all curled up and seemingly very much at peace with itself, after Dad’s death, we took the carving and half-buried it on top of Artemis’ ashes to serve as her marker.

Of course, the world is a busy place and so often we’re too busy to  give much time to remembering those we’ve lost. But it’s good for our PURPLE to remember those in our personal history who have meant so much and to honour our past.

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