Hardcore for Nerds

“Labour Party deputies voted against the Bill despite expressing support for such a move at last week’s party conference. A spokeswoman said last night the issue of abortion was a sensitive one and should not be dealt with through a Private Members’ Bill.”

The irony of reproductive rights and healthcare not being an appropriate subject for a ‘Private Members’ Bill’. Or the irony, more pertinent and depressing, of no government ever having the ‘courage’ (i.e. willingness to face down the vocal conservative extreme of Irish society, and risk soft political support) to legislate even for clarity on the abortion issue, yet the government restricting to itself the right to propose that legislation.*

Unless this action - and a subsequent failure to do anything themselves - irredeemably tarnishes Labour’s liberal credentials (along with their social democratic or generally left-wing ones, which are equally taking a beating through their rather more than acquiescent support of the austerity program) and for once produces the opposite effect, that dragging Ireland into the modern age is more imperative than kowtowing to those who would keep it in its socially authoritarian Catholic past.

Odder still is the snippet on the Irish Times website under the link to the article: “Fine Gael say ‘fornication’ is single greatest cause of unwanted pregnancies in Ireland”. Which is either ‘wft?’ or ‘duh’… though it turns out its actual part of more complex moral point that’s actually kind of in favour of legislating for abortion (or for not so strictly legislating against it?):

During the debate, Fine Gael TD for Mayo Michelle Mulherin said “fornication” was the single greatest cause of unwanted pregnancies in Ireland.

“In an ideal world there would be no unwanted pregnancies and no unwanted babies. But we are far from living in an ideal world,” she said. “Abortion as murder, therefore sin, which is the religious argument, is no more sinful, from a scriptural point of view, than all other sins we don’t legislate against, like greed, hate and fornication. The latter, being fornication, I would say, is probably the single most likely cause of unwanted pregnancies in this country.”

Of course, fornication technically refers only to sex between unmarried people… but since no truly modern democracy bases their laws on scripture, one way or the other, it’s irrelevant. The basis for legislating on the X case, and allowing abortion even in nearly the strictest circumstances conceivable, already exists in the form of reports and decades of debate - it only requires the will, and the commitment from the political parties to exercise it.

(there’s a good thread on the vote here on the Cedar Lounge Revolution, and a list of Fine Gael debate talking points)

*to be fair, I didn’t expect the United Left Alliance Private Members’ Bill to get anywhere, simply because such bills - regardless of how controversial the subject matter is or isn’t - rarely get anywhere, via the dynamics of power in a rather one-sided parliamentary system: but it’s still quite surprising and dispiriting the extent to which the Labour Party seems to have rolled over on this one.. too.

There’s some fantastic bending of language and logic in this article by Brendan Howlin, the Labour Party Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, which encapsulates most of what I detest about the political orthodoxy in this country and in Europe. I wish I could write something more coherent about this, but it’s just so full of things that make me angry about the direction of Ireland:

“We are committed to thinking creatively about freeing up resources for investment in the economy – the part-funding of the national children’s hospital by an upfront payment of the next lotto licence being a case in point.”

In other words, ‘freeing up resources’ means liquidating and privatising public monopolies, which are the nation’s assets. It sounds like it’s just moving things around in the economy, but it is a permanent transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector. And the lottery is essentially a voluntary tax on those wishing to be rich - why should the profit on that go to the highest bidder?

“Contrary to the view articulated, the Government is not pursuing an “austerity” strategy. The opposite is the case. We are borrowing enormous sums of money to sustain the Irish State and to protect the living standards of its citizens. We have extended the time available to the State to reach its 3 per cent deficit target from that agreed in the original troika agreement.”

So now the government, which has been proclaiming that we must recognise the ‘reality’ of our situation and the policy prescriptions it supposedly requires, is denying the far more tangible and actual reality of austerity? What kind of Orwellian madness is this? Sure, the current austerity (as in, reduction in public spending, certain increases in taxation,  a general freeze on expansionary activity by the government) could be more severe, but that doesn’t change the direction of the strategy, even if we’re still borrowing just enough to keep afloat or with reasonable levels of public services in operations. Saying austerity doesn’t exist because it could be worse is like saying that because it’s only drizzling outside, it doesn’t rain in Ireland.

“While the so-called left-wing critique of the stability treaty suggests it is about austerity alone, the opposite is also the case.

Had an appropriate structural deficit strategy been a priority of the Fianna Fáil governments since 1997 we would have had more in the locker to deal with the crisis in the public finances.”

Governments which, as the left-wing critique repeatedly points out, never broke the Stability and Growth Pact, and frequently ran budget surpluses (albeit keeping them small), and which ran up a sizeable enough wealth fund with Celtic Tiger windfalls. The notion of an “appropriate structural deficit strategy” is hard to define and politically tricky, something even Brian Cowen explained pretty well recently. Sure, we could have done better, but…

“Sadly, that was not the case. The Government is now confronted with the problem of a catastrophic deficit, the result of a catastrophic policy failure without precedent in the State’s history.”

It suits a government with an austerity agenda to describe everything as “catastrophic” - it’s self-justifying. Except it’s not applied to absolutely everything - policy failed, but this was policy that was well-known, agreed and subject to little mainstream debate about its potential for catastrophe: what was important was that it served capitalist demands for more growth, more wealth and more economic freedom. In other words, what was catastrophic was not just our policy or even our politics, but our economic assumptions and the structure in which they were contained. Which austerity seeks to preserve by merely ‘adjusting’ policy and government expenditure, but not attacking the destabilising and inhuman effects of capitalism as in themselves catastrophic.

But onwards to the selective realities:

“The first reality facing this State is we need to borrow money to fund our day-to-day living. The second is that there is only one group of lenders prepared to lend to us at the moment. And they will only do so if they believe we are intent on both eliminating our existing borrowing requirement and repaying the debt. That is their firm condition.”

Intention is one thing, capability is another. There is - and always has been - a serious body of economic opinion which suggests that both conditions are impossible to achieve in full, when austerity contracts the economy (thus making it more difficult to close the expenditure gap through tax) and our debts are artificially inflated (the private made public) to preserve the financial stability of the rest of the Eurozone and its banking system. The ‘firm condition’ makes a nonsense of reality, or vice versa (fair enough, politically there is a position the government has to appear to hold, for now, but it doesn’t make it a good argument.)

But what’s most twisted about this piece is the way that the close quotes Barack Obama in support of austerity:

“As President Obama said last year describing his administration’s response to the financial crisis:

“What’s guided us from the start of this crisis hasn’t been the search for a silver bullet, it’s been a commitment to stay at it, to be persistent, to keep trying every new idea that works and listen to every good proposal, no matter which party comes up with it.”

For its part this Government will do the same.

Of course, Obama has hardly been the shining knight of Keynesianism*, but he has engaged in stimulus and refrained from pursuing austerity on the federal level in the US. Where he has faltered most severely, however, is in pursuing this supposedly open-minded persistence, which has been an invitation for hard-line Republicans to press their own intransigence on economic matters under the justification of bipartisanship. Something similar I think is happening with our European ‘commitments’ and the unwillingness to confront the unfairness (yes, in the context of disparities of wealth and supposedly democratic power, that still means something!) and implausibility of the austerity agenda, which yes, exists.

*he’s probably the closest we’ve got, though: to paraphrase Arthur Koestler, we are the knights of rusty armour, crusaders without a cross.

Fintan O’Toole can write cultural criticism about anything, even Riverdance. (If you don’t know what Riverdance is, then I’m slightly amazed, but Wikipedia summarises it as follows: “a theatrical show consisting of traditional Irish stepdancing, notable for its rapid leg movements while body and arms are kept largely stationary. It originated as an interval performance during the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, a moment that is still considered a significant watershed in Irish culture.[1] Riverdance is, in essence, the story of the Irish culture and of the Irish immigration to America.”) In one sense, it’s up there with leprechauns as something we know is an iconic representation of Ireland but we’re quite embarrassed about, as you can see from the headline chosen above (at least Riverdance exists, though, in multiple performances around the world - leprechauns seem to exist solely in the minds of actual or potential tourists). Perhaps the best way to describe modern Ireland is that what you - mostly Americans - think of as ‘our’ culture is actually your culture (via tourist imagery and marketing), and ‘your’ culture is our culture (via globalisation and the media hegemony of the US and/or the UK, here at least). 

That’s not to say Riverdance isn’t good entertainment - it’s excellent. I roughly still remember its arrival in ‘94 (but also that Brazil won the World Cup that year), and I recently caught a glimpse of it at the variety show for the visit of the Queen (another important cultural dignitary and embodiment of a historical legacy of oppression, this time actually including us), and it is exhilaratingly impressive. But I doubt most of us think of it any longer, if we ever did, as culturally very meaningful - which is the first part of why O’Toole’s re-interpretation is so interesting:

“… Chinese people seem to find Riverdance not just spectacular but genuinely moving. In 2001, when an excerpt from the show was performed for the first time for a high-level Chinese delegation to Ireland, the minister of culture Sun Jiazheng was so overcome that, as he wrote to the producers, “a poem flowed out from the deep of his heart”.

Sun’s poem (in a translation that may or may not do it justice) includes the lines “Tinkling like the gentle spring, / Roaring like the fierce thunderstorm, / The vehemence comes with heavy grief, / But never caught in despair and petty gloom.”

The idea of grief is striking. To an Irish viewer it seems obvious that Riverdance (as any commercial blockbuster must) skates very lightly over the grief at the heart of the Irish experience of mass migration. It is an evident product of the boom years, when involuntary emigration could be framed as a happily concluded story. In the narrative of the show, indeed, emigration is fully embraced as the energy through which Irish culture (and by extension Ireland itself) is enriched and renewed. Whatever pain is endured along the way is battered away by those pounding feet.

But the Chinese seem to read that grief back into Riverdance. I suspect that one of the reasons the show means so much to them is that it enacts an epic sense of history. It unfolds over what French historians call the longue durée, the time scale not of individual events but of slowly evolving cultures. Maoism proposed to deliver a short, sharp shock, a once-and-for-all transformation that would redefine everything in a matter of decades. But the Chinese are all too aware that things don’t happen like that.”

It’s impressive that he manages to write that without using Zhou Enlai’s supposed quote about the outcome of the French Revolution being “too early to tell”; certainly the implication and the lesson here is that Ireland’s boom and bust are similarly less-than-scrutable - on the one hand, the hubris and the unsustainability of the economic miracle has left bitter psychological wounds, while on the other, the infrastructural and wealth legacy of the Celtic Tiger is still largely extant, leaving the future course of Ireland (to be navigated through the increasingly surreal political economy of Euro-austerity) still up for grabs. And there are wider questions of comparability and cultural interactions:

“Oddly, given the unfathomable disparity of scale, the Chinese identify with Ireland in a way that might seem utterly implausible to us. Given that the population of the island as a whole would hardly constitute a single respectable Chinese city, it seems incomprehensible that Riverdance evokes what Sun, in that same poem, calls “the striving soul of a great nation”.

But the Chinese, even while they know themselves to be at the centre of the universe, also think of themselves as in some sense a small nation – one that has been bullied and humiliated by more powerful countries. They see in Riverdance a moral tale of an oppressed “great nation” enduring long enough to come into its own – a message with obvious resonance.

The other great attraction of the show is its upbeat take on tradition and globalisation. Chinese traditional culture was devastated by the Cultural Revolution. (One of the most moving things I saw in China was a concert by musicians in their 80s who had come out of prison camps and reclaimed the old musical instruments they had hidden before they were arrested.) It has been rehabilitated only to face the new challenge of the influx of western culture. Riverdance, with its narrative of the survival of a tradition across the millennia, applies a soothing balm to this anxiety about the fragility of Chinese traditions.”

As he then points out in his conclusion, there is an irony in this with China’s treatment of Tibet and the general lack of cultural and political freedoms within China. Yet without forgetting that, there’s a lot more we can learn about Chinese perspectives and motivations than can be found in kneejerk anti-Orientalism (or, of course, in naive pro-Orientalism). It’s not just in America that China is seen as an evil dictatorship posing an existential threat to the West, part of an economic Cold War with similar levels of political understanding. Two recent opinion pieces in the Irish Times illustrated the contrast between the good and bad approaches. On the latter, John Waters opened another of his all-encompassing screeds by describing China as “the most genocidal tyranny that ever blighted the face of Planet Earth”. On the former, Timothy Garton Ash, syndicated from the Guardian, wrote about how Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd inserted his vision between those of John McCain and his Chinese counter-part:

“In response to the Zhang-McCain exchange, Rudd calmly sketched the huge growth in individual freedom and prosperity in China over the past 30 years and the distance still to go before China can be described as a well-governed country under the rule of law. Implicitly rejecting the positions taken by McCain and Zhang, he said “we need to shape global values together”.

That seems to me exactly right. The US and China must be prepared to get into a conversation about the terms of international order in the 21st Century. Each must remain true to its values, but work to see where there is common ground – and where compromise or simply agreeing to disagree are viable.”

Perhaps Riverdance could provide a shared moment of bonding (over globalised imagined-nation values), and sure wouldn’t that be a grand thing?

Michael Taft -

“Let’s bottom-line this:  if anyone thinks that driving more people into deprivation – whether in work or on social protection – will further economic recovery and fiscal stability, they should lie down in a dark window-less basement until that thought passes.  Rising deprivation puts strains on social services, in-work productivity, and the Exchequer (the Government loses revenue every time wages are cut).  Rising deprivation is a terrible burden for a society to carry – socially and economically.

Of course, alternatives are not allowed to be aired (or if they are, they are ridiculed):  increase wages, reverse tax increases on the low-paid, provide more in-work social protection supports, give workers more rights in the workplace (right to collective bargaining, strengthen and extend Joint Labour Committees), etc.   Such policy prescriptions are little short of heresy in the current debate. 

But until we understand that people’s living standards – in particular, the low-paid – are not the problem but an indispensable part of the solution, we will continue to see the deprivation graph rise.”

From a leading commentator in Ireland’s best-selling Sunday broadsheet: 

“Much though I hate to disagree with our esteemed President, on Hayek, I have to. Far from being discredited, Hayek is our inspiration now. It was he who showed how state intervention — the US Fed and Bank of England setting ultra-low interest rates in the Twenties — contributed to the Great Depression, and how, far from causing recovery, Keynesian economics resulted in the US economy sliding back into recession in the late Thirties. Likewise, low interest rates and sub-prime mortgages a decade ago caused this crisis. Last week’s temporary pick-up in US growth is less a sign of recovery and more a sign that quantitative easing has moved from being a needed and justifiable tool to save the US financial system to an unsustainable counter-productive tool for pump-priming US domestic demand.”

Is he saying Keynesianism is “low interest rates” in the middle of an economic boom? Or is he saying that higher interest rates and more tightly regulated lending would have been necessary state intervention? Does it really matter, except that this is what passes for economic discourse amongst a depressingly large part of Irish society?

Not only is the historical example laughably incorrect (it could only be correct in a reductively simplistic view of the whole decade), but he also seems to then misplace the term ‘counter-productive’ for ‘counter-cyclical’, while having used an example of totally un-Keynesian pro-cylical fiscal policy to point to the unsustainablity of the approach he’s ostensibly promoting. WTF?

You could say he has something from a valid point about demand, as from the opposite side of the political spectrum on the environmental left (yes, it exists!) we should really be moderating our demand in order to create a globally sustainable, equitable economy, so I’m uncomfortable with more consumption being touted as the left-wing solution to the crisis in Europe or anywhere else. However, as the right-wing austerity project is simply to drive down pay and conditions low enough to reduce the marginal cost of ‘job creation’ for wealthy corporations and businesspeople, it ultimately has to rely on consumer demand just as much. Hence consumption - much like confidence in financial markets - is merely the necessary means to an end we have yet to choose.

Here’s what our esteemed President actually said:

“The crisis is … also an intellectual one. Decades of Keynesianism have given way to decades influenced by the theories of such as Friedrich von Hayek, to unrestrained market dominance. A new dominant paradigm emerged. That paradigm has consequences for all institutions including universities. It is a paradigm that makes assumptions and demands as to the connection between scholarship, politics, economy and society. It has fed off and encouraged, I suggest, an individualism without responsibility. It not only asserts a rationality for markets, but in policy terms has delivered markets without regulation.

As a consequence, the public world is now a space of contestation. It is a space that sets what is democratic in tension with what is unaccountable. Much ground has been lost in terms of the public space, the public world, the shared essential space of an independent people free to participate and change their circumstances, to imagine their future, be it in Ireland, Europe or at global level. Intellectuals are challenged, I believe now to a moral choice, to drift into, be part of, a consensus that accepts a failed paradigm of life and economy or to offer, or seek to recover, the possibility of alternative futures.