Freedom of speech and other liberal myths

Tonight the BBC's flagship programme of political debate, Question Time will welcome onto its panel the leader of the British National Party, an as yet small but growing party of white supremicists who recently won two seats in the European parliament. Should he be allowed to appear or shouldn't he? Do overt authoritarian racists have the right to a platform or don't they? Is that the issue here, or is this debate a clever ploy to fool us all into believing that we in Europe live in societies where anyone really can express themselves freely? Have we really created a civilisation that is so comfortable with itself that it is not threatened in any way by individuals saying exactly what they think and having access to the means of spreading those beliefs?

To those whose vested interests lie in the maintenance of the liberal capitalist status quo, debating the question of free speech is an exercise in linguistic gymnastics. A couple of centuries of political liberalisation, driven principally by under-represented and disenfranchised groups, have created a loose concensus in favour of everyone having the right to express themselves, free from state control.

This concensus is not just a feature of western civilisation either. You can see evidence of this assumption of free speech as a basic right amongst large sections of every society, whether or not the powers controlling that society allow dissenting voices to be heard. Witness Tiananmen Square 20 years ago; or the anti-electoral fraud movement in Iran; or the opposition to the Chavez take-over of all mass media in Venezuela. That these three countries have severe state limitations on the exercise of popular opinion highlights that a strong belief in unfettered expression does indeed exist amongst large sections of their populations.

In societies where state control of media and political gatherings are most extreme it is in fact quite easy to see the issue. The forces seeking to control what people hear, see and read and what they say, write and show are unsophisticated and often brutal and violent. The battleground is clear and obvious. It's like looking at those diagrams in military history books where opposing forces are represented by variously coloured rectangles with arrows showing how the massed regiments are deployed, contronting one another across No Man's Land. Here are the state-controlled media, the army and the judiciary (with religious authorities/party ideologues in reserve) and confronting them are the numerically inferior, less drilled battalions of pioneers, opposition organisations and "subversive" artists and intellectuals. The World looks on, ostensibly cheering on the plucky Carthaginians but secretly admiring the majesty of the organised Roman legions.

Things become much less clear in ostensibly liberal societies where the responsibility for controlling the behaviour of the citizen has been partially privatised. This privatisation has happened because, in the globalised economy, it is not "The State" that is being defended but the supra-national entities on which the national economies depend. It is thirty years now since the British political establishment decided to base the national economy not on industry or manufacturing but on the service sector, specifically the financial service sector. Since that sector is neither nationally based nor British owned it ceases to depend on the British state to protect its activities, it merely requires that the organs of state regulation get out of its global face. It requires that capital can flow freely between whichever markets show best returns regardless of the social and economic impact of the insertion and withdrawal of that capital in the various markets it uses. Insertion and withdrawal, insertion and withdrawal. What does that suggest about what the corporations are doing to national economies?

Britain is far from alone in suffering at the hands of global capital. Every national economy can and does get f***ed it's just that Britain, having seen its future as the hoe of the financial markets, gets f***ed far more often and far more willingly.

Now, before I'm accused of deviating from the theme of freedom of speech, let's introduce the forces that the supra-national state employs to control dissent. Supra-national organisation clearly requires supra-national means to protect itself. It requires control over expression, the ability to suborn local and regional judiciaries, and the ability to requisition military assistance if and when necessary. I'll leave the latter two for future posts but deal with the former as it is THE way in which the modern, supra-national establishment maintains its claim to legitimacy in the popular mind; it's the way it ensures that the natives don't become restive. It's the way in which it is possible to twist the public debate away from corporate fraud and money-laundering that costs the British economy £39 billion a year and towards a drive to eliminate benefit fraud that costs (at worst estimate) £3.5 billion.

I don't think I need to make much of an argument to claim that most media in western societies (and plenty of non-western and developing societies too) is owned by multi-national corporations. And not that many of them. Here's an example, all Australian national newspapers and every daily newspaper in each of it's seven state or territorial capitals are owned by just two corporations, News International and Fairfax Holdings, one is based in Australia, the other in Delaware, USA.

The big difference between ownership of the means of communication by the state or by global corporation is in constituency. For whom does the media work? Globally-owned media commentators would have us believe that state-owned media is always bad and that state-owned is effectively synonymous with state-controlled. Give 'em their dues, it often is, but not always. They would also have us believe that privately-owned media, by its very nature, ensures plurality of opinion. Well, tell that to the Australian newspaper-buying public. Tell it to those who, in the aftermath of the financial meltdown last year looked in vain for anyone proposing a new economic system not based on unregulated financial markets and the free flow of global capital.

Privately-owned media in developed countries works on behalf of those who own it and will work to maintain the system on which it depends for its profit. State-owned media works on behalf of the state and that state may be authoritarian and undemocratic, or it may be pluralistic and accountable to its electorate. The latter case may have its faults and idiosyncrasies but it does have a basis in the assumption of democratic accountability. Neither privately-owned nor authoritarian state-controlled media make that assumption, whatever they might try to argue.

So, getting back to the BNP. If you agree with me that freedom of expression is as tightly-controlled by private corporations as it is by dictatorial state machines, you might agree with me that the mark of an accountable and pluralistic media is the ability to permit the expression of views that not only go against the majority concensus, but which might actually challenge the very assumption of that plurality and accountability.

We can allow discussion and even the propounding of the ideas of implementing Sharia law; repatriating immigrants; imposing military rule or the overthrow of the monarchy because we can have confidence in the inferiority of the arguments. We should put trust in the fundamental commitment of the majority, freely permitted and able to understand and digest the basic issues, to a lightly governed, pluralistic democracy. We might fear the manipulation of public opinion by religious leaders, authoritarian ideologues and potty demagogues but our only protection from the most extreme views is to fight to free up the access to the means of communication to more plural views. At the same time, surely someone is prepared to stick their head over the parapet, challenge the control of media outlets by commercial vested interests, and supply some much-needed reserve forces to the beleaguered Carthaginians.

What cars tell us about their owners

This is just something that occurred to me this weekend. As some of you may know, this last weekend was one of our major fiestas in the village. It's called Nochevieja en agosto, or New Year's Eve in August. It has been going on for about 16 years and is just what it says... here we celebrate NYE on the first Saturday in August. The fiesta dates back to when the village suffered a power cut on December 31st and no one could celebrate the event properly. It was decided to do it when you could guarantee good weather and when everyone would be up for a party. I digress slightly.

This fiesta is huge and very well known. National and regional TV cover it almost every year. On Saturday the usual population of Los Bérchules rose from 800 to 10,000 for one night only. People come from all over Andalucía and Murcia and we even get foreigners making a special effort to see what the funny Spanish are doing in such numbers in the middle of nowhere.

I spent about an hour sitting on a wall just watching people as they arrived. We don't often get such rich people-watching opportunities up here and one of the things that really caught my attention was the way in which I was able to watch a vehicle drive towards the village and know pretty accurately, before I could even make out the drivers and passengers inside, what they would look like. I knew that a big, well-preserved, old model Peugeot sedan would contain a couple in their sixties with the younger family members in the back. They would most likely park up, open the boot and bring out picnic table, deck chairs and cool box and create their own little back-yard right here. I was right.

I then noticed a new Opel Tigra convertible round the corner by the police station in Alcútar. Big-haired girls with plenty of make-up and clacky heels. Check. Customized 10-year-old VW Golf GTi? Young lads in Capri shorts and mirror shades heading for a botellón (self-supplied, open-air booze party). Check.

More than anything else, it seems that the car you drive says more about you than even the clothes you wear although the two will be easily comparable. It tells the world how much disposable cash you have and your priorities for spending it. It says what you want it to say about your taste, your attitude towards consumerism and the environment. It confesses to your fastidious nature or the absence of it. You can probably tell more about the character of a person by inspecting their wheels than you can by reading their Facebook home page or by knowing someone's age, occupation and marital status.

Reading cars is almost as much fun as people-watching itself. Read, match and digest... and read whatever you will into my 8-year-old, bashed and scratched Fiat Punto base model. It will give you a far more honest answer than I'd ever fess up to.

Culture Shocker

A new book by acclaimed clinical child psychologist, author and journalist, Oliver James puts into words what many people have thought or felt in their guts as they make the move to Andalucía from more northern, urbanized and Anglo-Saxon parts of the World.

The Selfish Capitalist is not, as its title might suggest, a Marxist tract about the exploitation of the masses by Big Business, but it does make you think hard about the assumptions that we all make about modern society and politics. It also sheds light on some of the questions that we’ve all thought at one time or another about the differences between the cultures of continental Europe and those of the English-speaking countries of the West.

For example, as a psychologist, what James tries to fathom is the wildly differing rates of mental distress exhibited by seemingly similar nations. By distress he’s talking about the full range of mental disorders from mild depression to schizophrenia, suicide and a myriad neuroses. He quotes dozens of scientific surveys from universities and the World health Organisation that demonstrate that levels of distress in Anglo-Saxon countries (The U.S.; the U.K.; New Zealand; Canada; Australia) is double that of continental Western coutries such as Spain, Italy, Germany and other developed nations such as Japan. Gene-pool differences are easily dismissed: “For example, Italian-Americans seem to have prevalences (of emotional distress) three times higher that the desendants of Italians who remained in Europe. Likewise, African-Americans of Nigerian origin would appear to have rates six times higher than Nigerians whose ancestors were not taken as slaves.”

His analysis is that the difference between the Anglophone and other parts of the developed World is what he calls the influence of Selfish Capitalism, an influence that developed primarily in the US and, since the late-Seventies, has migrated to Britain and the Commonwealth, but which has yet to fully conquer continental Europe or the developed Asian nations.

It’s a sophisticated theory. Anyone who has worried about the widening gap between the rich and poor, the culture of workaholism, the declining importance of family and community and, above all, the spiraling of society into a cycle of rampant materialism, consumerism and celebrity and status obsession owes it to themselves to read The Selfish Capitalist. James calls this social change Affluenza; it’s a disease that no one is allowed to treat because it is one that serves the interests of the tiniest but wealthiest stratum of society. Those that own the shares, the Media, and the politicians have everything staked on the idea that a “free” market, a privatised state and an ever-less-secure workforce are the essentials of a modern neo-liberal society. The sole driving motivation of such a social structure is that the rich should get richer.

It’s a powerfully made argument but leaves the reader a bit depressed at the lack of hope and ideas for challenging the seemingly relentless tide of big corporations and wealthy oligarchs crushing all resistance like a Star Trek Borg, “Resistance Is Futile!” In the end he places his hope on the likelihood of a cyclical shift in public attitudes and the natural adapability of human beings. He concludes, “Given that the English-speaking world has been hijacked by something as toxic as Selfish Capitalism for the last thirty years, it is always possible that a far better alternative is just around the corner – that... sanity will prevail.”

The book does raise other, less apocalyptic, thoughts too, however. It invites the reader to think past the book’s central concern, that of mental distress, and consider other points of comaprison between the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental versions of modern Western culture.

Close to home, why shoud it be that those people who assimilate better into their adopted communties, who gain a high degree of fluency in the local language, who don’t cocoon themselves in an expat ghetto suffer lower rates of depression, alcoholism and failure to settle? And more fundamentally, why is it that economically similar and geographically nearby countries should have such widely different social cultures. Why do the Spanish place such a strong emphasis on family relationships and are far more sceptical about the role of political authority? Why is Italian bureaucracy the worst in the EU and the French predilection for, at times, violent direct action so strong?

Could it be a question of perspective? Had I been writing in the Sixties or early-Seventies, no one would think that there was a great difference in the way British and French workers pursued industrial disputes, Italian bureaucracy might not have been so exceptional and British or American families might have felt just as close and self-supporting as a Spanish clan. Perhaps it’s not that continental Europe is the odd one out but that Anglo-Saxon culture has changed so rapidly and fundamentally that cultural differences are increasing, not reducing.

Whether you like or loathe the slow pace of life in Spain, the limited opening hours, the interminable waits for official documentation, the huge numbers of public holidays, the anarchic ways of queuing, the laissez-faire attitudes towards the behaviour of children, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, it could be that it is the changes in your country of origin that has created the disparity rather than the backwardness and social conservatism of your new home that is out-of-step.

Is it the materialistic, self-centred, want-it-all, want-it-now attiudes of an Americanised Anglo-culture that is making you discontented with whatever you have or whatever you have chosen. Reading Oliver James, and a number of the writers whose work he cites, it is the increasing materialism of modern Selfish Capitalism that allows for no alternative ways of seeing or behaving in the modern World that is what is causing the record high levels of mental problems, from obesity and anorexia to manic depression, multi-personality disorders and self-harm.

Is there an alternative? A whole string of neo-conservatives from Margaret Thatcher to Nicolas Sarkozy would argue not but, consciously or unconsciously, many of those of us who have decided to leave the Anglo-Saxon society have assumed and opted for something different, something more authentic, less money- and status-driven. Think about it, is that what you have done?

(This article first appeared in The Olive Press in July 2008)

Blog, The First

Speaking to yourself or speaking to the World, what's it to be? I think it is probably best to assume the former and hope for the latter. This paragraph is just the very first of what I hope will be many.

Why am I blogging? I know that there are millions of blogs out there that never get read, or that are virtually unreadable. I don't expect that mine will be one that gets quoted by the New Yorker nor that it will win any awards. None of that is the point. I wanted to find a way of giving my writing some discipline. I write regularly for The Olive Press, but not regularly enough to greatly improve my style and skills to a point where I'm happy with my output. Here I hope to do just that.

For TOP I write fortnightly on cultural matters relating to Andalucía. Here I want to speak about a wider set of subjects: politics; culture; religion; nature; history; life choices; food; and any old thing that pops into my mind. I want to do that in a more thoughtful vein and in a less deadline-chasing haste. I also want to do all this with a sense of place. I don't want to write a blog that feels as if it exists only in a cyber-world. Reading many blogs you could be mistaken for thinking that there are people who don't really inhabit any particular place in the real world. Many are written in such a way that they refer to things occurring in the Media, politics and the like, as if these activities constitute a reality in themselves rather than merely being different reflections of what is occurring in villages, towns and cities of wood, brick and concrete in any of the two hundred-plus nations on Earth.

This passage is merely a test passage to allow me to design and create my blog. I believe in what I have written and will follow some of the themes in detail over the next few weeks, but I want to end here for the moment so that I can get the blog up and running.