Musings on the politics of youth work, community work and society at large – dedicated to the memory of Steve Waterhouse and Malcolm Ball, great youth workers, comrades and human beings
Britain’s political class rightly responded to the mysterious death of Alexei Navalny with an assortment of horror, outrage and indignation. The Kremlin critic’s treatment was an “appalling human rights outrage”, foreign secretary Lord Cameron said. Putin has to be “held to account”, Labour leader Keir Starmer added. So, when Julian Assange arrives at the High Court today for his final hearing, after being held without trial in Belmarsh maximum-security prison for almost five years, will the country’s political elite once again proclaim their commitment to human rights? I suspect not.
If the British state allows Assange to be extradited to the US, it won’t be dealing a potentially deadly blow just to one man, but to democracy itself
I’ve written for UnHerd about the two-day hearing starting today in which the UK High Court will announce its final decision on Assange’s extradition to the US. If the court rules out a further appeal, Assange could be immediately extradited to the United States, where he will almost certainly be incarcerated for the rest of his life on charges of espionage — most likely in extremely punitive conditions that will push his already critical physical and psychological conditions over the brink. “His life is at risk every single day he stays in prison”, his wife Stella Assange said. “If he’s extradited, he will die”.
The British government’s lack of concern for Assange’s fate is not surprising: they are the ones that put him in prison in the first place, after all. More worrying is the fact that much of the British public also seems relatively unconcerned with the case. This, I suspect, is the result of the relentless smear campaign waged against Assange over the past decade and a half, aimed at destroying his reputation, depriving him of public support and muddying the waters surround his case.
This is why in the article I try to debunk several myths about the Assange case, from the trumped-up rape charges to the depiction of Assange as a fugitive from justice.
As a break from my usual ramblings on the state of the world but not at all at odds with its philosophy, enjoy this brief extract of the quartet, ‘ΤΕΤΡΑΗΧΟ”, playing in the picturesque village of Pollirinia on Crete back in July 2023. I’ve been privileged to hear them breaking boundaries with this unusual combination of instruments and styles. My dear friend, Maria, an outstanding jazz violinist brought together two great figures from the Cretan violin tradition in Michalis and Markos, together with the outstanding lute player, Kiriakos to explore and improvise without any guarantees of whether it would work. The outcome was a joyous, anarchic celebration of intimate music-making founded on listening, always listening to one another. You should have heard their exuberant version of a Brahms Hungarian Dance! It exuded a love of humanity, a mutual affection, which more than ever we need to defend. I’m still trying to ascertain who won the children’s running race taking place in the background! Kids!
It is many years since I read any Edgar Morin and then only in second-hand summaries. It may be my ignorance but he has never seemed as fashionable as the likes of Foucault or Derrida. He describes himself as in fact an anthropologist, in the old sense of the term, exploring the interconnection of all knowledge about man. He notes, ‘This has led me to a transdisciplinary approach’. Born Edgar Nahoum; 8 July 1921 he continues to ponder, 102 years young. I tripped over this stimulating piece published in La Monde only a few weeks ago, courtesy of MoneyCircus, a dissident blogger I follow.
Thanks to lavoz.com.ar
‘The Progress of Knowledge Has Led to a Regression of Thought’
Midnight in the century
When Victor Serge published the novel with this title in 1939, the year of the German-Soviet pact and the dismemberment of Poland, it was indeed midnight and an irrevocable night was about to thicken and extend for five years.
Isn’t it midnight now in our century? Two wars are ongoing. The war in Ukraine has already mobilized economic and military aid from a part of the world, with radicalization and a risk of widening the conflict. Russia has not managed to annex Ukraine, but it maintains its presence in the previously separatist Russophone regions. The blockade has partially weakened it, but it has also stimulated its scientific and technical development, especially in the military field. This war has already had considerable consequences: the variously advanced autonomization of the South with respect to the West and the tightening of a Russia-China bloc.
A new warfront has ignited in the Middle East following the massacre committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, followed by Israel’s deadly bombing of Gaza. These massacres, accompanied by persecutions in the West Bank and annexationist declarations, have reawakened the dormant Palestinian issue. They have shown both the urgency, the necessity, and the impossibility of a decolonization of what remains of Arab Palestine and the creation of a Palestinian state.
As no pressure is, or will be, exerted on Israel to arrive at a two-state solution, only an aggravation, even an expansion of this terrible conflict can be predicted. It’s a tragic lesson of history: the descendants of a people persecuted for centuries by the Christian, then racist, West, can become both persecutors and the advanced bastion of the West in the Arab world.
Thought has become blind
These wars worsen the conjunction of crises that strike nations, fueled by the virulent antagonism between three empires: the United States, Russia, and China. The crises feed on each other in a sort of polycrisis—ecological, economic, political, social, civilizational—and it is escalating.
Ecological degradation affects human societies through urban and rural pollution, with the latter exacerbated by industrial agriculture. The hegemony of uncontrolled profit (a major cause of the ecological crisis) increases inequalities within each nation and across the entire planet. The qualities of our civilization have deteriorated and its deficiencies have increased, notably in the spread of selfishness and the disappearance of traditional solidarities.
Democracy is in crisis on every continent: it is increasingly being replaced by authoritarian regimes, which, by having the means of computerized control over populations and individuals, tend to form societies of submission that could be called neo-totalitarian. Globalization has created no solidarity and the united Nations are increasingly disunited.
This paradoxical situation fits into a global paradox inherent to humanity. Prodigious technological and scientific progress in all areas is the cause of the worst regressions of our century. It enabled the scientific organization of the Auschwitz extermination camp; it made possible the design and manufacture of the most destructive weapons, including the first atomic bomb; it makes wars increasingly deadly; driven by the thirst for profit, it has created the planetary ecological crisis.
Though difficult to conceive, we must realize that the progress of knowledge, through themultiplication and mutual separation of disciplines, has caused a regression of thought, which in fact has become blind. Linked to a dominance of calculation in an increasingly technocratic world, the progress of knowledge is unable to conceive the complexity of reality, especially human realities. This leads to a return of dogmatisms and fanaticisms, as well as a crisis of morality with the unleashing of hatreds and idolatries.
The absence of hope
We are heading towards probable catastrophes. Is this catastrophism? This word exorcises evil and gives an illusory serenity. The polycrisis we are experiencing across the planet is an anthropological crisis: it is the crisis of humanity failing to become Humanity.
There was a time – not so long ago – when a change of course could be envisioned. It seems now that it is too late. Certainly, the improbable and especially the unforeseen can happen. We do not know if the global situation is only desperate [désespérante] or truly hopeless [désespérée]. This means that we must, with or without hope, with or without despair, move on to Resistance. The word irresistibly evokes the resistance of the years of the German occupation (1940-1945), whose very modest beginnings were made difficult by the absence of a foreseeable hope after the defeat of 1940.
The absence of foreseeable hope is similar in our own times, but the conditions are different. We are not currently under an enemy military occupation: we are dominated by formidable political and economic powers and threatened by the establishment of a society of submission. We are doomed to suffer the struggle between two imperialist giants and the possible warlike eruption of the third. We are being dragged into a race towards disaster.
Fellowship, life, and love
The first and fundamental resistance is that of the spirit. It requires resisting the intimidation of every lie asserted as truth, the contagion of every collective intoxication. It requires never yielding to the delirium of the collective responsibility of a people or an ethnicity. It demands resisting hatred and contempt. It prescribes the concern to understand the complexity of problems and phenomena rather than yielding to a partial or unilateral vision. It requires research, verification of information, and acceptance of uncertainties.
Resistance would also involve the safeguarding or creation of oases of (agroecological) communities with relative autonomy and networks of social and economic solidarity. It would also suppose the coordination of associations devoted to solidarity and the refusal of hatreds. Resistance would prepare younger generations to think and act for the forces of union of fellowship, life, and love that we can conceive under the name of Eros, and against the forces of dislocation, disintegration, conflict, and death that we can conceive under the names of Polemos and Thanatos [war and death].
It is the union, within our beings, of the powers of Eros and those of the awakened and responsible spirit that will nourish our resistance to subjugations, ignominies, and lies. The tunnels are not endless, the probable is not the certain, and the unexpected is always possible.
When I was about 8 years old my primary school teacher, frustrated by my reluctance to enter, pushed me into the pool at the town’s Baths. I thought I was going to drown but my fellow pupils came to the rescue. How could she have done this? What callousness! Or so the story goes. In truth I’m not sure the incident ever happened. However, I’ve told the tale so many times, often embellished, that I’ve come to believe it. Why the need for this dubious childhood anecdote? Certainly it has served to excuse my genuine fear of putting my head under water. Friends who have sought to teach me to swim can attest to my frenzied splashing in protest. Indeed it appears to explain my life-long struggle to stifle frightening dreams, within which I experience being suffocated, physically with a pillow, or psychologically by guilt, having betrayed my beliefs or people dear to me. I awake dramatically, fighting for my breath. By and large I deal with this, park the neurosis in its place. And then again, perhaps not.
For over the last four years, in particular, I have felt suffocated, drowning in an unrelenting deluge of information, opinion, analysis and gossip. I experience being in a state of alternative asphyxia. It is not that I am starved of the oxygen of ideas, rather I gorge, I binge compulsively on their 24/7 availability. Some sort of diet beckons.
This self-indulgent, breathless cry for relief from the day-to-day assault on my senses inflicted by the media of whatever ilk is very much personal. It is not to be taken in any way as an argument against the widest possible array of views being out there and accessible. I oppose censorship, the suppression of opinion, most of all when I disagree even vehemently with such speculation. I stand against authoritarianism, whether dressed in the cloak of the Left, Centre or Right. Obviously I have no time for the manufactured categories of mis and disinformation through which the powerful seek to silence criticism and opposition. Plainly the charge of misinformation is directed principally at those who question the dominant narrative. It is applied to those who desire to make public what the ruling class wishes to remain private. According to the ever suave Barack Obama, I’m severely mistaken. I’m sinking into the ‘raw sewage’ pumped into the public square by the alternative media. Thus, misled, he opines it’s no wonder I’ve lost faith in society’s politicians, institutions and media and in doing so I represent a disturbing threat – let’s not mince his words – to the future of humankind. Given this apocalyptic charge, it’s no surprise that the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos is deeply bothered about my dissidence.
In his opening remarks to the conference of the great and good, Klaus Schwab, its founder and chair expressed his concern – “We must rebuild trust – trust in the future, trust in our capacity to overcome challenges and, most importantly, trust in each other.” In order to win back my undying support the elite will continue to encourage the creation of an armoury of so-called ‘independent’ disinformation agencies, funded by a mix of private and public sources. For example the European Union has “a network of anti-disinformation hubs that are part of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), the independent platform for fact-checkers, academic researchers and other relevant stakeholders contributing to addressing disinformation in Europe”. Forgive the obvious but there is not the faintest scent of humility in these manoeuvrings, the slightest nod of recognition that their arrogant and authoritarian programme of propaganda and restriction might have something to do with our mistrust of their motives.
In the UK’s recently passed ‘Online Safety Bill’ you can see how the government intends to win back our trust. Section 179 section makes it illegal to publish false information with intent to cause harm…..
…..but Section 180 exempts all Mainstream Media outlets from this new law!
Of course I might not be seeing the wall for the bricks but this suggests strongly that the MSM are explicitly permitted to “knowingly publish false information with intent to cause non-trivial harm”. Yet you or I can be imprisoned for a year for committing a criminal act in drawing attention to their conscious deceit. A touch topsy-turvy!
Hence, for my part, I will not be intimidated into accepting the powerful’s rule over what I think or believe. Perhaps you might think me simple but, on a day-to-day basis, I will proceed on the basis of receiving, reading and thinking about information. It will be whatever it is, a product of those who put it together, informed by their expertise or lack of it, their integrity, their prejudices, their beliefs and so on. It is my job as the aspiring, thoughtful citizen of Aristotle’s imagination to interpret and judge what I am told to the best of my faculties. Certainly such an ability, as far as it goes in my case, is born of a splicing of political activism with professional education and a measure of involvement in academia. At my most pretentious I fancied myself as one of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals.
Thanks to avanti.it
In this context, summed up in the world of youth and community work [YCW] work, within which I laboured, as the desire to be a critically reflective practitioner, I didn’t expect to be so isolated as the COVID manufactured melodrama unfolded. I remain perplexed at the extent to which the professional class, including its YCW members, embraced and colluded uncritically with an unevidenced and unethical regime of societal restriction. An emergency was asserted but never proven. Fear provided its justification. Naively, I thought such authoritarianism would spark resistance. In retrospect, I failed to recognise how deeply behaviourism, its apparatus of preordained scripts, prescribed targets and imposed outcomes, was embedded in the professional psyche – not least in work with young people.This acceptance of a discourse of certainty about the correctness of our data-driven, objective models, the righteousness of our impact, the benificence of our worthy goals, spilled over into life as a whole. And, as far as I can see, practitioners remain in denial as to what they were up to. No more than fleeting research confirms that masking, social distancing [made up on the back of a cigarette packet], the closure of children’s and young people’s provision were harmful and unnecessary. I await the National Youth Agency even shyly allowing it was a touch over the top, even as it bemoans a deterioration in young people’s mental health. Evidently it was the virus ‘wot dun it’ not the conscious application by practitioners of draconian social policy. Perhaps, though I’m too harsh, even the much revered Noam Chomsky, ‘an intellectual superstar’, according to the Guardian, succumbed utterly to the smear that the unvaccinated were dangerous and irresponsible, arguing that they should be ‘isolated’.
Ironically and thankfully, Chomsky along with much of the Left recovered his balance as the seemingly endless tragedy of Gaza erupted, as genocide stared us in the face. Almost overnight we rediscovered our ‘instinctive mistrust of the state’, of careerist and opportunist politicians, of undemocratic, unelected bodies of experts. In particular, perhaps, having swallowed whole the COVID propaganda spewing from the mass media, we remembered belatedly our relentless and scathing critique of the bourgeois press, which goes back at least in academic and activist circles to 1974 and the creation of the Glasgow Media Group.
Enough is enough. I’ve peddled this perspective before without reaction, which is fair enough. Who on earth am I? My insignificance acknowledged, it does mean therefore that I must take a deep breath about my suffocating immersion in the currents of available opinion. It is extraordinary but I’m ‘sut on mi bum’ to use a Lancashire expression more than ever in my whole life. True, I still drag myself out more or less every day to indulge the narcotic of my lingering athletic obsession. I persuade myself I feel better for having done it. Yet, outside this hour or so of exertion, I’m sometimes spending up to eight hours hunched over the laptop in a pompous search for the Holy Grail containing ‘the Truth’! Inevitably it’s always just out of reach. I need a break from this self-inflicted imprisonment.
To cut my usual ramble short I’m determined to work out a fresh approach in my declining days. I need to get out more as the saying goes.
I won’t abandon Chatting Critically but, in addition to my occasional originals, I want to use it more as a conduit to challenging thinkers and activists who you might not trip over. In doing so I’ve already culled the number of people I’ve been following because I can’t keep up. A future post will single out blogs and websites, which continue to stimulate me. You might well shake your head at my choices. On the ground I remain committed to our local Chatting Critically group.
I shall spend more time on a project to record the history of the Lancashire Walking Club , of which I am a life member. It gives me pleasure, believe it or not, to do so.
I am close to giving up on even being the In Defence of Youth Work [IDYW] archivist, the initiative of which I was once coordinator. Few seem interested. To all appearances its open-ended philosophy has been defeated – see the inanities of its supposed Facebook page, which ought to be closed out of respect to IDYW’s corpse.
I’m going to ramble and cycle as I wish without feeling the need to rush back home.
I’m going to spend more time singing and becoming musically literate.
I’m going to spend more time musing for the sake of musing in our village kafeneion.
I cannot promise but I ought to improve my Greek.
On reading this afresh it ends up looking like a belated set of New Year’s resolutions. Given my past track record in keeping to such sensible proposals as cutting down on the village wine, the omens are not promising. We will see.
Tony Taylor
To end positively, let me introduce you to the writings of W.D. James, who teaches philosophy in Kentucky, USA and his substack Philosopher’s Holler
He explains:
Egalitarian Anti-Modernist philosophical ruminations on our contemporary conundrums. In my native dialect, a ‘holler’ can refer to a hollow (empty space), a yell, or a work song.
I’m thinking my way through our current times and I tend to do that by digging into the ‘classics’ of Westen political philosophy to see what light they can shine on the contemporary moment.
My basic stance is characterized by:
Anti-Modernism
Anti-Globalism
Deep respect for pre-modern wisdom traditions, including religious traditions
Liberty
Defense of the opportunity for a good life for everyone
A critique of the modern state
Grounding in nature/reality, intellectually, morally, and existentially
For my part, TT speaking, I would recommend you download and dip into the free pdf, Egalitarian Anti-Modernism
CONTENTS Foreword by Paul Cudenec Part 1: Was Jerusalem Builded Here? Part 2: Jean-Jacques Against the Pathologies of Civilization Part 3: Rousseau and the Evils of Inequality Part 4: Rousseau’s Revival Part 5: William Morris and the Political Economy of Beauty Part 6: William Morris – Dreaming of Justice and of Home Part 7: What is Wrong With the World? Part 8: Chesterton Against Servility Part 9: Catastrophe Part 10: Egalitarian Anti-Modernism and the Contemporary Political Landscape
I enjoyed and was challenged by its content and argument, given that for a long time in my political life I believed in the inexorable relationship between progress and the continual development of the productive forces. I’m less confident nowadays.
CHATTING CRITICALLY 