Socrates and Charlie Hebdo

Culture Secretary Sajid Javid got shot down in twitter-flames this week for referring to Socrates' writings, when defending freedom of speech following the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  The thing is, as any classically-educated fule kno, that Socrates didn't write anything; that was Plato.  Cue lots of sneering. 

Well, fair enough, though the two philosophers are more or less identical for all practical purposes: Plato didn't write anything but dialogues in which Socrates was the speaker, and Socrates' philosophy is only recorded in Plato's writings.

More interesting, to me anyway, was the thought that even if Socrates was executed by the Athenians for his atheistic opinions, and his 'corruption of the young', he was far from being a believer in democracy and free expression (indeed, his association with shady oligarchs may have been one of the factors that led to his downfall).

For example, Socrates would almost certainly have banned Charlie Hebdo.  In his discussion of the just city, The Republic, Socrates presents it as one governed by a paternalistic 'guardian-class' of warrior philosophers.  Later in the book, Socrates expounds his theory of ideals (sometimes 'forms', but I think 'ideals' is less confusing).  Put very simply, everything that we see in the universe takes its identity from its imitation of, or resemblance to, a metaphysical ideal.  A table is a table in as much as it resembles the ideal Table; something is good in that it resembles the ideal Good.

This theory explains why, controversially, Socrates exiles poets (and depending on your reading, other artists) from his Republic.  Their art is an act of mimesis, imitation, but worse than that - it is an imitation of an imitation.  My depiction of a table is a poor copy of a poor copy of the ideal Table.  Socrates also suggests that art, particularly effective art, inflames the passions, and is therefore inappropriate material for his serene and ascetic guardians.  Anyhow, one way or another, the artists have to go, and certainly the publishers of satirical magazines would have had to go with them.

Socrates' conclusion troubled Victorian admirers (who had been happily going along with the rule by warrior philosophers up to that point), and it worried his interlocutors too; Socrates admits uneasiness with his conclusion, and challenges them to find counter-arguments.

I was reminded of this stipulation when listening to a man being interviewed about the prohibtion on images of the Prophet Muhammed last week.  Generally, this prohibiton is understood in terms of the strictures against idolatry found in the Old Testament - we shouldn't confuse workshipping a God with worshipping an (imperfect) image (like the Golden Calf or the Fish-tailed God Dagon, whose followers are so enthusiastically smitten in the Bible).

The interviewee went further, explaining the prohibition in strikingly Platonic (or Socratic) terms: Muhammed was such an excellent, virtuous and handsome man, indeed the ideal Man, that any attempt to portray him is bound to fall short of the reality, and will therefore represent a slander on him.  Plato (or Socrates) could hardly have put it better himself.

To be honest, I'm not sure what this shows.  Perhaps it is a) that if you throw enough classical education at people, some is bound to stick (however imperfectly) even 25 years later; b) that if you follow any metaphysical theory far enough, logic will lead you down some curious cul-de-sacs; c) that those who die because of expressing their views are not necessarily liberals; and d) that irrational prohibitions are not the exclusive preserve of the abrahamic religions, but can be found in 'rational' Greek philosophy too.

Stuck inside of planning, with the new town blues again

I can see the arguments in principle for and against a new generation of new towns or garden cities, as one way to tackle our chronic housing shortage.  But in current circumstances, the discussion seems purely theoretical; I can't see how new towns can ever be built.

For example, just to the north of Brighton, a proposal for a new 'market town' of around 10,000 dwellings has been mooted.  I can see the constraints on land in the South East and the need for bold moves, but I also have some affection for the area proposed, sandwiched between areas of outstanding natural beauty and a national park, and including one of my favourite pubs.  And we need to add the potential impact of a new town on existing communities, to these more sentimental considerations.

In any case, the Mayfield Market Towns proposal appears to have stalled for the moment.  The Planning Inspector has just paused his consideration of Horsham's local plan, arguing that they need to be more ambitious in finding housing sites, but also rejecting the Mayfield proposal.  His arguments against it are twofold: firstly, he does not believe that such a scale of new development is needed at this stage (though he acknowledges that expansion at Gatwick Airport would force a more fundamental rethink), and he doesn't think a scaled down version would be viable.  Secondly, as the Inspector puts it (in a late entry for Understatement of the Year), "the deliverability of the preferred 10,000 dwelling option...within two local authority areas without their support, and in the face of strong opposition from two local MPs, parish councils and local people, including land owners, is also an issue of concern."

This is why I can't see how any new town will become a reality.  Proposing a new 10,000 home development requires top-down planning.  It is not just a matter of responding to known and projected local demand for new homes (which will rarely if ever demand that scale of development on its own), but of considering and redefining what role a particular site might play in the economic future of its region, of the whole country.  This is a matter of creating and redirecting demand, not just responding to it.

And that would probably require pushing a scheme forward in the teeth of local opposition, especially in the areas of South East England where land supply is most constrained.  Local councils have no incentive to do that, and Government's 'localist' planning policy gives little scope for forcing their hand.  Labour's greater enthusiasm for 'a new Generation of Garden Cities and Garden suburbs', as detailed in the Lyons Review, is also tempered by insistence that their designation must be 'locally-led'. Even where local authorities are more supportive, planning processes take years; if there is a row, we are talking generations.

So perhaps all this jostling is a matter of gesture politics (town vs country, preservation vs 'hard-working families' etc).  But it does risk distracting attention from more pressing issues.  If we are not going to be a little more directive and ride a little more rough-shod over local opposition, we are not going to build new towns.  And if we are not going to build new towns, or at least not in the foreseeable future, we need to stop the make-believe, and focus more sharply on how to build more houses in our existing towns and cities.

Sometimes, it's hard to be a liberal

I am typing this post using Firefox, an 'open-source' web browser developed by Mozilla, a non-profit organisation that rose from the ashes of AOL/Netscape.  Like millions of other Firefox users, I use Mozilla products because they are free, well-maintained (by the wisdom of crowds), and gently cock a snook at proprietory behemoths like Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

This morning (yesterday afternoon in California), Brendan Eich was driven to resign as chief executive of Mozilla, because of his opposition to same-sex marriage, and specifically his support of California's Proposition 8.  Obviously, I disagree with his views, and think it's sad that people become so obsessed with preventing other people enjoying equal rights that they throw money at preventing it.  But his views don't make Mr Eich a bad chief executive, nor do they make Firefox a bad product (either in terms of its intrinsic quality, or in terms of its wider social and ethical impact). 

There's an interesting comparison to be drawn between Mr Eich and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.  Mr Bezos' credentials are impeccably liberal.  The $2.5 million he spent campaigning for gay marriage in Washington State dwarves the $1,000 donation made by Mr Eich.  But Mr Bezos heads a business whose huge wharehouses provide minimum-wage employment under Orwellian surveillance, which drives out of business bookshops, record stores and any other retailer it focuses on, and which has been criticised on both sides of the Atlantic for the paltry levels of tax it pays. 


Whatever their chief executives' views, I know who I'd rather do business with.

Just another accident statistic?

The recent spate of horrific cycle accidents in London, many resulting in fatalities, has focused attention on the perils of cycling on London's busy streets. There has been understandable grief, outrage and a rising political temperature as Mayor Boris Johnson is accused of 'blaming the victim'.

What there hasn't been (as far as I have seen) is any assessment of how dangerous cycling is in proportion to the number of cyclists, or compared to other forms of transport on London's roads.  It may seem a callous question to ask, as one cyclist crushed by a lorry is clearly one too many, but I was curious about the relative risk.

After not much digging in the London Datastore, I found some statistics from TfL's Transport Trends survey, which reports on number of journeys taken on different forms of transport each day (strictly speaking 'journey stages' - if I walk to a bus stop, take a bus, then cycle, I have had three journey stages), and the number of accidents and deaths suffered by users of each form of transport each year.  Oddly, the last set of numbers are for 2009 for journeys and 2010 for accidents, but I suspect the ratios did not change dramatically between those two years.

Here are the statistics:

The difference between relative accident rates is pretty stark.  London's cyclists are eight times as likely to be fatally injured as car drivers and passengers, and seven and a half times as likely to be injured.  Cycling isn't as dangerous as riding a motorbike (more than 50 times the risk of driving a car), but it's substantially more dangerous than walking or using other motor vehicles.  It would be interesting to extend The Economist's comparison of USA and Netherlands fatality rates, but I don't have the data. 

Overall, cycling on London's roads is about five times more risky than the norm for fatalities, and 10 times more for injuries.  I'm not sure whether I expected this to be higher or lower; by way of comparison, occupations such as roofers, electricians and farmers have similarly heightened fatality rates.  But it's not encouraging me to get on my bike.

Your city's a sucker?

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It's been a busy week for citittude.  Bruce Katz has been in town, showcasing his latest data on how US cities are leading the economy out of recession.  And Benjamin Barber joined him for a Centre for London debate, arguing that, as nation states flounder, mayors are the most dynamic and pragmatic leaders, and that international alliances of cities are the powerful organisational structure.

Work has irritatingly stopped me attending several of the events but what I've seen from Twitter feeds and blogs suggest an almost evangelical level of excitement; that as the world turns increasingly urban, cities are asserting themselves, seizing power and initiative from the drab and clumsy nation states that hold them back.  We have come a long way from the sixties or even the eighties, when cities were viewed a crime-ridden and corrupt rat holes, best avoided by upright citizens or treated as a problem, a target for initiatives, by well-meaning politicians.

Now, if this is a new religion, I'm a worshipper.  The vitality and variety of London continues to astonish me, and the two mayors I have worked for are far more impressive than the national politicians I have come across.  Similarly, I broadly sign up to the 'Mayoral Manifesto', the programme of policies that pretty well every mayor pushes, whether nominally from the left of the right.  This manifesto (which I will write more about another time) promotes open borders and global capitalism, but is also concerned about housing, about social equity and about climate change.  It embraces minority groups and marginal lifestyles, invests in public transport and public space, but also endorses a tough law and order regime, with low tolerance for anything that could be seen as civic unrest or even dissent.

So, to borrow from Edward Glaeser, cities have triumphed. But there's another side to this story too; one that would caution against too much triumphalism, would whisper warnings against hubris like a Roman senator’s attendant whispering a memento mori.  As cities become more like each other - with the same Mayoral Manifesto, the same coffee franchises and the same bus rapid transit systems - they drift further and further away from their rural hinterlands.  Some would argue, and in the case of London have done so - that this process should be followed through, that cities should be granted proper autonomy, controlling their own tax, welfare and regulatory systems. 

Absent that solution - and modern city states are a pretty motley collection, including Singapore, Hong Kong, the Vatican and Monte Carlo - and cities will continue to have to live with their sprawling green neighbours. Cracks are showing: in England, the tension between London and the rest (including regional cities) is becoming a leitmotif of debate: on house prices, on High Speed 2, on funding for the arts . But in the west (where the vast majority of the population already lives in urban communities), the urban elite has tended to stay in control, though the Tea Party movement in the US and UKIP in the UK can be seen as rural/provincial reactions to metropolitan values. 

In the developing world, where urbanization rates remain below 50 per cent, and urban values are perhaps less widespread, rural champions have been elected and tensions have been more clearly manifested. In Istanbul, the Taksim Square demonstrations brutally repressed by the police were the actions of a beleaguered urban liberal class fighting against destruction of a public space (one of the gravest sins in the urban catechism) by a President elected by a more religious, more conservative hinterland that is even more remote from Istanbul than rural Arkansas is from New York.

Similarly, India's urban, secular Congress Party is perpetually locked in battle with the more sectarian rural politics of the BJP. In Sri Lanka, a recent profile of President Rajapaska argued that the urban elites of Colombo regard their president, elected on a rural buddhist ticket, with embarrassment.

I'm not sure where all this leads us.  Personally, I am clear where my loyalties lie, and I don't think cities should be in the business of kow-towing to rural conservatives.  But even in their moment of greatest triumph, cities should tread softly in proclaiming inherent superiority and denouncing their rural opponents as bigots and hicks.  Those singing hosannas to the greater glory of the urban inside the church should be aware of those outside, many of whom are indifferent or actively hostile to their creed.

Now the Party's over

Party conferences have always been an acquired taste, but this year's (even without the McBride and Farrage sideshows) have seemed particularly remote from reality, alien rituals conducted by an alien species.  But is this just the latest chapter in the slow decline of mass party membership, or is something else at play?

The Guardian's John Harris, former chronicler of BritPop and historian of new Labour, has been worrying for some months at how the Conservative Party has lost touch with mainstream conservatism, continuing to promulgate the neoliberal nostrums of open markets and free trade, deaf to a crescendo of grumbling from its once core vote.  Outside the capital, in 'Alarm Clock Britain' (or whichever new-minted de haut en bas descriptor the narrative-mongers have come up with), Harris finds that open markets and globalisation are not viewed as paragons of efficiency and creators of wealth, but as destroyers of jobs and harbingers of instability.

Harris's argument was echoed in Aditya Chakraborty's analysis of falling party membership (and the takeover of the Conservative Party by financiers), and in the Guardian's reportage from Aldi in Worcester, the front line of this new class war, where shoppers proclaimed themselves either terminally disillusioned with all politics, or tending towards UKIP.

My reading habits are admittedly partial, but I don't think this us just a left argument:  Peter Oborne's broadsides at the metropolitan political class are aiming at the same territory. The politicians at their press conferences look increasingly like medieval clerics debating transubstantiation, while the peasants ponder plague and turnips.  The detachment goes beyond silly shibboleths about who knows the price of a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, a litre of superstrength cider, or whatever 21st Century staple politicians have to pretend that they buy.

Once you start to look for it, you can see this rancorous detachment everywhere.  You can see it in the 'below the lines' comments in newspapers.  These may invite provocateurs, trolls and other people with nothing better to do with their time, but there is a toxic undercurrent of resentment too.  Sometimes expressed through racism or xenophobia, but sometimes simply presenting as a profound hostility to the political class, and an establishment that is seen as interested only in feathering its own nests.

The sense of alienation is polymorphous, and perhaps hard to analyse clearly, but it's harder still to see where it is going.  The crowds are not out on the streets in the UK, and the protests of the Occupy movement never went far beyond St Paul's Churchyard, so will disgruntled citizens flock to marginalised parties of the left and right that diverge from the shared internationalist outlook of the mainstream parties, as Seumas Milne has suggested? Will unrest and violence erupt, maybe targeted at immigarnts and other easy targets as it has been in Greece?  Or is a more profound change underway?  It seems almost absurd to pose the question, but is Disgusted of Droitwich a British manifestation of the discontent that erupted in Taksim and Tahrir?

Writing in the latest LRB, David Runciman argues that the oil shocks and decaying industrial capitalism of the 1970s gave birth to what we now call neoliberalism, though it was years if not decades before the baby was named or its moment of birth identified.  Flip forward 35 years, and ask whether the crisis of the past five years is a blip in the narrative of neoliberalism triumphant, or the beginning of something new.  If the latter, pace Yeats (it is National Poetry Day tomorrow, after all), "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Policy-based evidence making?

For someone with my politics, reading research from the Institute for Economic Affairs is never less than bracing, not least when you find yourself in sneaking agreement with it.  The recent IEA report - Quack Policy – Abusing Science in the Cause of Paternalism by Jamie Whyte - takes a robustly sceptical cleaver to a herd of sacred cows: minimum alcohol pricing and lower speed limits, for example, fail to trade-off their supposed benefits with the pleasures of drinking and the convenience of driving fast.  In many cases, Whyte argues, policy-makers start with their paternalistic opinions and prejudices, and then find the evidence to support them.  Policy-based evidence making.

At first sight, basing policy on evidence rather than prejudice, blind faith or ideology seems uncontentious, a 'no brainer' even.  But I don't think that scepticism about evidence-based policy should be the reserve of the type of people who will be harrumphing that there is no evidence for man-made climate change until the flood waters start lapping round their ankles.

Evidence-based policy has its roots in the concept of evidence-based medicine, which responded to the tendency of medics (alarmingly commonplace until the 1990s) to base interventions on custom and practice rather than any clinical data about what works. 

The elision from choosing cancer treatments based on their demonstrable impact on specific physiological circumstances, to choosing policies based on predictions of human behaviour is not smooth, however.  To start with, policy interventions are rarely based on controlled, randomised scientific trials that can isolate cause and effect from other factors.  Even where a good result seems to have followed a specific policy - the reduction in heart attack rates following the ban on smoking in pubs, for example - the causal links are not simple.  People and societies are more cussed, diverse and chaotic than cancer cells or bunions.

But there is a more fundamental sense in which evidence-based policy worries me.  It takes the politics out of policy, and creates a technocratic world where efficiency and value-for-money are all; where white-coated analysts can dispassionately assess solutions, tinkering with the apparatus of incentives, nudges and penalties to perfect citizens and society.  Tony Blair’s 1997 mantra – “what matters is what works” – was not just a financier-friendly disavowal of socialist dogma, but also a retreat from conviction politics (until their re-appearance after 9/11).

Evidence-based policy may have progressive aims (safer roads, better health, lower re-offending, fitter, happier, more productive people), but this managerialist approach excludes discussions of principle, of morality, of big ideas.  It cloaks opinions behind assertions of scientific fact. This focus is also inherently conservative; it is about tweaking the current system to optimise the way it moulds individuals’ actions, rather than considering whether it is the system itself that is rotten.