Revolution Fatigue and the Betrayal of Syria

If I could change one thing about the world, it would be to remove – permanently remove – the highly cultivated assumption of moral superiority from those who exhibit an ‘anti-war’ or non-interventionist position. I put ‘anti-war’ in scare quotes because, as we shall see, those who think this way are rarely as impartial or as principled in their opposition to armed conflict as their often high-minded rhetoric endeavours to suggest. As I write, a fascist regime is engaged in a systematic campaign of state terror against its own people. In case the implications of that sentence failed to fully detonate, let me rephrase it: as I write, a fascist state is employing its war machine in killing, torturing, and starving to death its own men, women and children, and it is doing so with impunity, in front of the eyes of the whole world. Despite it seeming obvious for a long time that only outside intervention can stem the gathering tide of slaughter, there are still many amongst our political and intellectual classes arguing that the worse thing – the very worst thing – the international community could do is to try to help these people in any way.

In the twelve months since the Syrian revolt began, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have gone from arresting, beating, torturing and shooting unarmed protesters – some as young as twelve or thirteen – to an all out military assault upon those areas of the country where the rebel Free Syrian Army have made gains and enjoyed popular support. Under the guise of putting down an armed insurrection by “terrorist groups”, the regime makes no distinction between combatant and civilian. Which is another way of saying they are terrorising for the sake of terror, believing they can definitively crush the uprising with massively disproportionate force. At the time of writing, the international community, in its unwillingness to move, shows every sign of tacitly helping the Ba’athist regime to make that gruesome belief a reality. For over a month the rebel held city of Homs was on the receiving end of sustained punishment, as Russian made tanks and artillery pounded the city non-stop. A fortnight ago the rebels were forced into a tactical retreat from the Babir Amr district of Homs, leaving the notorious 4th Armoured Division, commanded by Assad’s much-feared younger brother Maher al-Assad, to go (in their chilling words) “mopping up”. In order to go about this grisly work unimpeded by prying eyes, the regime spent days denying both the International Committee of the Red Cross and UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos access to the stricken Babr Amr district. With a grim inevitability, the searing reports of atrocities that emerged from witnesses fleeing the shattered remains of the city were soon confirmed.

Assad’s father Hafez, who held Syria in his brutish fist since taking power in the 1970 Ba’athist military coup known as the “Corrective Revolution”, etched his own name in the atrocity handbook with the 1982 Hama massacre, a scorched-earth blitzkrieg against a previous Sunni uprising that is thought to have cost over 20,000 lives, the majority of these helpless civilians. Hard as it may be to credit now, when Bashir ascended the throne originally meant for his dead brother Bassel, the young leader was spoken of in some circles as a potentially reforming and liberalising kind of dictator. In the year since the current revolt began, Assad has shown himself to be in reality every bit his father’s son; that is, every bit as ruthless and every bit as capable of unleashing terror when his power is threatened by popular uprising. The death toll in Syria is already reckoned to have exceeded 8,000 souls. As many as 25,000 refugees may have fled the country in fear. In the absence of medical and military assistance, we can expect these numbers to rise dramatically. With Homs razed to the ground, Syrian forces are now gathering outside other rebel strongholds like Idlib and Deraa, presumably with a view to repeating the successful cleansing of Homs.

Given these facts, and the urgency of the situation on the ground, you will forgive my impatience with those whose words of condemnation are swiftly followed by a succession of qualifications as to why the world must, in effect, continue to let Assad slaughter with impunity. Most of these voices unite in telling us the situation is “difficult” and “complicated” as if that is saying something rather than nothing; as if difficulty or complexity can gloss or blur the reality of a fascist state terrorising its populace. Many of these voices go on to point out that the ethnic make-up of Syria is mixed: the Alawite Shia minority that Assad and up to 70% of the military high command hail from, along with Syria’s small percentage of Christians, have remained nervously loyal to the regime, fearing the consequences should the regime fall to the Sunni majority. Such fears are very real. However, it isn’t hard to see that the longer and more protracted this conflict, the more bloody and revengeful any eventual outcome is sure to be. The country is already in the process of implosion. That couldn’t be clearer. It seems to me the height of callousness to argue that we should leave the Syrians to their fate without an international presence of some sort.

Unfortunately for the Syrian people, the current occupant of the White House likes to conduct foreign policy by remote control, when he can be bothered to get involved in the outside world at all. Suffice to say, a president who was reluctant to get his hands dirty helping the Libyan people overthrow their hated dictator with a UN resolution, is not the sort of man who is likely to lend assistance to the suffering Syrians without one. With an election to fight, Obama is as likely to get involved in Syria as I am to run for president. U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta made the Administration’s disinterest plain: it “doesn’t make sense” to intervene in Syria, he told the Senate recently, because to do so would be “unilateral”. Instead, we must build “an international consensus” before considering any such action. Yet it is hard to see how an intervention that would be supported by both Europe and the Arab world could be considered ‘unilateral’ in anything but the most absurd sense of the word. No one is even suggesting America invade Syria, or that it take action by itself. Any intervention in Syria would have to be an international operation. A coalition between Europe, the U.S. and certain Arab states could be easily assembled were there the will to do it. Humanitarian corridors north into Turkey and south into Lebanon could be greeting refugees, rather than landmines. Safe areas could conceivably be in place and under protection by now. A no-fly-zone of the kind that kept Saddam from murdering the Kurds of northern Iraq and the Shiites of the south, or that stopped Qhadafi from butchering in Benghazi, might even be operating. Humanitarian assistance might have saved the people of Homs. Were there the will to do it. Instead we let Syria bleed and bleed…

Waiting for an international consensus that is unlikely to come – due to the implacable support for the Assad regime by such notable defenders of liberty as Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba – is simply an excuse, and a poor one at that¹, for the West to evade its responsibilities to the Syrian people, as well as a convenient way to avoid the obligations inherent in our nominal commitment to international norms of Human Rights. If we wait for Russia and China to come on board, as so many insist we must, we are as good as condemning untold numbers of Syrians to a death beyond imagining at the hands of their own government. If it really is your view that in the absence of Russian or Chinese permission the best thing the West could do is to allow that to happen, then you should at least have the decency to say so.

The betrayal goes deeper: UN special envoy Kofi Annan went all the way to Cairo to warn against intervention, saying he “hope[d] no one is thinking very seriously of using force in this situation,” because, “any further militarization will make the situation worse.” Worse? Casting my eye over the hollowed-out ruins of Homs, I find it hard to see how the situation, at least from the perspective of the Syrian people, could be worse. The humanitarian catastrophe Annan seems to envisage for the future is happening now, only it is the fascists and the communists that are intervening – and intervening on the side of the dictator at that – while the democratic world insists on doing nothing. Are Russian weapons and Iranian money not contributing to “further militarization”? When people speak of the danger of “escalating violence” and a “civil war” in Syria they seem to imply some form of moral equivalence between the rebels and the regime, as if there is little to tell between those who have risen up against a fascist state and a fascist state. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the escalator of violence in Syria is being purposely cranked by the bloody hands of the Ba’athists and their backers with the declared aim of maintaining a state of terror?

Needless to say, Assad couldn’t have been more pleased with Annan’s assurances, telling him when he got to Damascus that, “no political dialogue or political activity can succeed while there are armed terrorist groups operating and spreading chaos and instability.” As if to prove Annan’s diplomatic mission couldn’t be any more detached from reality, his spokesman now tells us that despite leaving Syria with nothing more than an open promise that terror will continue, he feels his mission to be “on the right track.” To be fair to Annan, his utter ineffectiveness is but a dim reflection of the structural inefficiencies built into the lawful architecture of the United Nations itself. As a body constituted for the enforcement of international law it suffers from the same glaring flaw as its League of Nations predecessor; namely, it is only effective when there is a common interest among the great powers in its being effective. If one asks why Qhadafi is dead and Assad lives, at least part of the answer has to do with Qhadafi’s having ran out of powerful friends at the big table. Those who exult in the UN and believe it must have the final say on all international matters seem not to be able to acknowledge this flaw, and have rationalised the successive Russian and Chinese vetoes as a good enough reason to wash their hands clean of Syrian blood.

It is worth remembering that the UN Security Council was inaugurated in a world devastated by half a century of nation-state warfare. As such, its legal framework was built around the sanctity of state sovereignty, and was most concerned with the protection of member states from outside interference by other member states. In this aim it has been largely successful too: the sudden annexations by big-power invading armies that so blackened previous centuries have been largely unknown to our post-war world. According to the political scientist Mark Zacher, there have been only ten invasions resulting in minor border changes since 1945, and all of those occurred before 1975. (The exceptions tend to prove the rule – Saddam Hussain’s invasion of Kuwait was quickly repelled precisely because he had violated this sanction.) However, with large-scale cross-border invasion rare, the conflicts that do arise tend to be within states, in the shape of civil war and mass infringements of human rights. Here the jurisprudence of the UN shows its limitations badly: conflict resolution runs up against the sovereignty question and should the state in question happen to have powerful sponsors, nothing gets done.

In this sense the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is fundamentally at odds with the aims of the UN Charter. In order to stop gross violations of human rights, the protection of civilian populations ought to take legal precedence over notions of sovereignty. At the moment, however, the Security Council’s say is considered final. Condemnation from the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court may carry moral force, but it is only so much hot air while the higher court retains precedency. When is comes to the idea that the Security Council is the arbiter of what is and what isn’t internationally lawful, therefore, I find myself in agreement with historian Robert Conquest who reasoned that “too strong a devotion to the United Nations encourages acceptance of majority decisions by dubious regimes of a type indefensible in principle.” UN approval may be coveted as the ultimate badge of legality, but its failure to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, paint a rather different picture of legitimacy, one where international law is far from set in stone, and in need of crucial reform.

The behaviour of the international community over the past few decades would seem to be in tacit agreement with this point: while the actions in Kuwait and Sierra Leone garnered UN approval,the intervention in Kosovo was undertaken without a resolution, and only ratified by the Security Council after the fact. Given this latter precedent, it seems to me futile to continue down the UN route with Syria. The moral case takes precedence over the legal one. Those who prattle high-mindedly about “dialogue” and “engagement” while the monster is already loosed upon the world are only helping to euphemise the bloody reality on the ground, and to repeat the mistakes of the Balkan conflict by assuming Assad is man with whom it is possible to peacefully negotiate. Bombs bought Milošević to the negotiating table, not words. Without even the credible threat of violence emanating from the international community, what possible reason could Assad have to stop his campaign of slaughter?

Is it possible to get revolution fatigue? The widely-felt euphoria accompanying last year’s eruption of Arab revolt has given way to a dark sense of resignation, as the liberal world has come to realise that revolution is a more difficult and altogether bloodier business than the speedy dispatch of the hated leaders in Tunisia and Egypt might have briefly suggested. It takes more than a Twitter account to take down a tyrant. The ramifications of the so-called “Arab Spring” will undoubtedly spit and sputter for years to come – its consequences are already giving shape and definition to our young decade. The revolution is far from over. This being so, we all have a stake in what happens to Syria. In a revolutionary situation, failure to help one side can amount to the same thing, morally as well as strategically, as helping the other. Yet nothing disturbs the frigid air of moral superiority surrounding those who maintain the illusion that they are always right, by insisting the West is always wrong, and so cannot and should not, intervene. The longer the the situation in Syria goes on, the worse it gets; the worse it gets, the more people argue it would be dangerous, even immoral, to intercede. I do not know if the Syrian people will get the help they so badly need. At the moment the signs are far from reassuring. In these dark days I wonder if it isn’t already too late. All I know for sure is that some of us sound serious in our opposition to tyranny, and some of us, to our shame, do not.

1The argument that an action is immoral or illegal if it is carried out unilaterally, and only moral or legal if carried out multilaterally, has never seemed to me to carry much force. The justness or unjustness of the use of force is not dependant upon how many countries take part. An action is not made more noble if there be ten countries taking part rather than one. In 1981, when the Israelis bombed the French built Osirak nuclear facility in Iraq, it was widely criticised on ‘unilateral’ grounds and condemned at the UN even by America and Britain. I think we can all be thankful that the Israelis chose to act ‘unilaterally’ at least on that occasion.

YOU CAN’T READ THIS BLOG: Reviewing Nick Cohen

Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are “fashionable”, it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.

Christopher Hitchens

 

On 7^th December last year, some twenty Muslim men stormed a book launch in Amsterdam and promptly declared a death sentence upon the book’s author. They unfurled a black banner adorned with hateful Arabic, began chanting “Takfir!”, and threatened to break the author’s neck. When the audience bravely formed a human shield around the hunted writer, the men began demanding that the event be shut down. The writer and the audience, to their credit, stood their ground, until the Dutch police arrived, eventually arresting a number of the extremists, whereafter discussion of the recently published book resumed. What is important to note about this small but sordidly telling episode is the nature of the book and the person that had driven these men into such an apparently murderous rage. For the author – a slight but brightly articulate woman called Ishrad Manji – is no apostate, and her book – Allah, Liberty, and Love: The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom – is no Satanic Verses. Manji is, in fact, an avowed believer in Islam, and her book, as its title suggests, is nothing more threatening or ‘offensive’ than a reasoned call for a reformist approach to Islam and a plea for moderation amongst her fellow Muslims. For this, apparently, did she deserve nothing less than death.

What must be understood about the reactionary mind it that it hates its own moderates and progressives before it even begins to hate its nominal enemies. “The first aim of religious violence,” argues Nick Cohen in his new book, “is to stop experiment by the faithful and enforce taboos.” Calls from the squeamishly liberal-minded for writers and artists to show ‘restraint’ and ‘respect’ when dealing with religious or cultural matters are therefore doing the extremists’ work for them by asking the impossible. If Muslim extremists cannot tolerate a fellow believer even suggesting reform, then no amount of restraint will appease them. If Islamists find the mere existence of a gay Canadian Muslim writer provocation to murder, then no amount of ‘respect’ will calm their noxious minds. If a moderate Muslim writer cannot promote her book unharried and unthreatened in the historical heart of liberal Europe, then there is nowhere in the world where free thought and free expression cannot be menaced. Over twenty years on from Rushdie and we have still to fully absorb the key lesson of that disgraceful episode: capitulate to threats, genuflect in front of hurt feelings, offer ‘respect’ to those who demand it at the point of violence (and therefore don’t deserve it by definition) and we watch the borders of our civilisation recede. Offer the hand of friendship, and you’ll take back a stump.

Speaking of the freedom of the press, John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty that “the time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary.” Those who share the assumption may review the above and wonder what the fuss is about. Some, eyes alighting upon the seeming oxymoron of Nick Cohen’s title – You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship In An Age of Freedom – may find their mind echoing the thought. A book about censorship? In the 21^st Century? In the post-Google age? After the ‘Twitter Revolution’ of Iran and the ‘Facebook revolutions’ of the Arab Spring? Where such minds miss the point is in mistaking progress for victory; ground gain for zero losses. While it is undoubtedly true that the average man has more freedom than the average man at any time in history, it does not follow that we live in a world where freedom of thought and expression are granted full reign – even, as Cohen sets out to show, in the advantaged West. The enemies of free expression do not lie down, even when defeated. The censorious are always with us. When the powerful can silence dissent, history shows that they probably will. Complacency, in this sense, can be fatal, and one suspects the complacent to be the main target of Cohen’s book. The problem, in other words, is with those who don’t think there’s a problem. (I had to chuckle at the writer who began his review by saying, evidently with a straight face, “It’s a strange title: we plainly can read Nick Cohen’s latest book,” inadvertently proving Christopher Hitchens’ maxim that the literal mind is baffled by the ironic one.)

Cohen has set out to write “an examination of how censorship in its clerical, economic and political forms works in practise,” and he begins, as he must, with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a controversy he calls “the Dreyfus Affair of our age.” (Indeed, Cohen can, “place [the] public figures of my generation by where they stood on Rushdie.”) The fatwa, in his view, “redrew the boundaries of the free world, shrinking its borders and erasing zones of disputation from the map of the liberal mind.” Although Rushdie outlived the Ayatollah and his book remained triumphantly in print, the fatwa had a crippling effect upon the Western intelligentsia. They had, in Kenan Malik’s phrase, “internalised the fatwa,” leading to a reflex that sought to blame the victim of religious hatred for stirring up that hatred. The sinister conservatives who said of Rushdie that “he knew what he was doing” have since become the frightened liberals who turn on people far braver than themselves: condemning the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten for printing cartoons of Muhammed, rather than the theocrats who stirred up violent mobs; unable to offer an ounce of solidarity to the persecuted Somali-born dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali because she was a “new atheist” and an “Enlightenment fundamentalist” and thus roughly equivalent to the butcher of Theo Van Gogh; and finding nothing to say to the fundamentalists who forced India’s greatest contemporary artist, M. F. Husain, into exile for painting nude Hindu goddesses, despite the awkward fact that Hindu gods and goddesses are always naked, and quite often copulating. “Today’s supporters of religious censorship claim that they are different,” writes Cohen, “They say they are not advocating censorship because they believe we must bow down before Church and the state, but because we must respect different cultures and say nothing that might offend them.”

In the secular West, of course, it is Mammon we bow down before, and in the second part of the book Cohen tilts his pen towards the corporate plutocracy who have the both the money and the power to silence dissenting voices from within their ranks. (“Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship,” in the book’s most arresting phrase.) Highlighting the inadequacies of employment law in granting protection to employees who might be troubled by institutional wrongdoings, Cohen argues that the costs of taking action – the loss of not just employment, but of a whole career – vastly outweigh the possible benefits of going public. “Every whistle-blower I have known has ended up on the dole,” he points out. Such disincentives, he suggests, played their part in the 2008 financial crash, where the great and the good of our moneyed master race faced a choice between keeping schtum about risky derivatives while reaping untold riches, or doing the honourable thing by warning regulators or the press about bad deals, and never working in finance again.

The world’s wealthiest, together with a pliant judiciary, have another blunt instrument at their disposal, in the form of England’s increasingly anachronistic libel laws, which allow the rich and censorious to exact financially ruinous penalties on writers and publishers. English courts have long been a friend of the litigious rich, but in the 21^st century they have become an embarrassing stain upon Britain’s reputation as a beacon of liberty. In England, after all, a Dutch oil company can sue the BBC for reporting that it dumped toxic chemicals in the Ivory Coast; a Russian oligarch can sue an American magazine for exposing the gangsterish roots of his wealth; a Saudi plutocrat can sue the American publishers of a book uncovering his links to Islamist terror funding; an association of quack medics can sue a science writer for correctly pointing out their therapy has no scientific basis; and an indulged, mollycoddled film director once convicted of drugging and orally and anally raping a thirteen year old girl can sue an American magazine – via video link – for damaging his reputation with the ladies.

The belief that ‘If you are telling the truth, you have nothing to fear’ does not apply in England. The courts say you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent. They take no account of the difficulty in persuading confidential sources to place their careers at risk by taking the witness stand. They tell the claimant that he does not need to prove that he has suffered damage or harm. They do not consider whether the claimant has a good reputation to defend. They are presided over by judges drawn from the pseudo-liberal upper-middle class who have no instinctive respect for freedom of speech or gut understanding of its importance.

Unlike in America, where the onus is on the claimant to prove malicious damage, England’s libel laws are heavily tilted towards the accused. In practise, the exorbitant costs of fighting a libel case cast a chill over investigative journalism in the UK and elsewhere, as publishers weigh the potential penalties involved and decide to nix writing that may land them in court. “I still recall the shame I felt when the legal director of Human Rights Watch in New York told me she spent more time worrying about legal action from England than from any other democratic country when she signed off reports on torture, political persecution and tyranny,” admits Cohen. Reading these passages in the context of the Leveson inquiry, where know-nothing actors and comedians have been lining up to testify to the beastliness of the British press and clamour for restrictions on its power to rake muck, one is reminded of how fundamentally important an unfettered press is to a democracy like ours. Besides the crimes against free inquiry chronicled in these pages, the whining of pampered celebrities seem laughably tame. Our libel laws are not often enough thought of as an organ of censorship, meaning their insidious effect continues to permeate unnoticed and unchallenged by all but the bravest. “Censorship is not always about hiding secrets,” Cohen points out, “Sometimes it is just an assertion of raw power.”

Power – political power – informs the final part of You Can’t Read This Book. Even before 2011′s wave of Arab protest, there existed a marked tendency among “techno-utopians” (Cohen’s phrase) to assume the technological freedoms bought by the web would magically translate into corresponding political freedom. The succession of revolts rocking the Arab world reinforced this impression, as dazzled Western journalists continually emphasised the role social networking sites had in organising revolt. The internet, on this view, was heralding a new age of freedom, as dictatorial regimes lost control of what their subject populations could read or say. People could outwit authority and organise rapidly. When the government attempted a crackdown, the results could instantly be uploaded to YouTube, where the eyes of the world would be watching. The results were right there for everyone to see. When the Arab Spring began to slide into its bloody winter, this view began to change. As revolution gave way to counter-revolution the flaws in the utopian argument became obvious. “As well as empowering the citizens of democracies and dissidents in dictatorships,” argues Cohen, “[the internet] empowers elected governments, dictatorial regimes, police forces, spies, employers, blackmailers, frauds, fanatics and terrorists.”

The Tweets that gave birth to the Iranian ‘Green Movement’ were quickly seized upon by the Ayatollah’s thugs, snuffing out the revolution before it had really begun. The mobile phones that allow the West to view, practically in real time, the slaughter of Syrian rebels, have hardly tempered Ba’athist violence. On the contrary, the regime uses the same technology to film then upload retribution videos of the security forces beating captured rebels as a way of warning off further revolt. The point Cohen emphasises is that: “most dictatorships do not want total control, but effective control.” Regimes like those in Iran, Syria, and China can live with the web, because they have the tanks. As Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya show only too well, overthrowing tyrants cannot be done virtually. Genuine political change involves physical action. In tyrannical regimes this often means putting one’s life in danger. In Egypt, the revolution only happened because the army took the side of the people. In the case of Libya, it was NATO killed the beast, not Twitter.

In the light of all this, it is no surprise that Cohen has little time for the type of t-shirt radical that thinks publishing American secrets from the safety of Sweden constitutes the ultimate act of rebellion. That the grotesque figure of Julian Assange can be held up by so many as a free-speech hero only goes to show how muddle-headed is so much modern thinking about censorship. When Assange – a man entirely incapable of human empathy – released his cache of American diplomatic cables, he followed through on his explicit anti-Western agenda by knowingly leaking the names of hundreds of dissidents, from Belarus to Afghanistan to China, alongside them. The fact that this meant some of the most violent and reactionary forces on the planet being able to exact revenge upon those who had spoken to or aided American diplomats meant nothing to Assange. Indeed, his response was unequivocal: “fuck them”. Assange is typical of the faux-radical left in never having faced physical danger and knowing nothing, therefore, about genuine physical courage. Partly for this reason, he shows nothing but contempt for those struggling with arduous battles against oppression and censorship. His betrayal, in this sense, is an all too typical one.

In considering the types of censorship that exist in the 21^st Century, one must look past the seductions of technology and the illusions of total freedom that it brings. One must push up against the tougher realities of meaningful political change. The fight for free expression never ends, because there will always be those who wish to, and are capable of, stifling dissent. The debate is, for this reason, always worth having because it is a fight over first principles. “True censorship removes choice,” Cohen remind us, “It menaces and issues command that few can ignore.” The author has written a stirring polemic that is sure to find an audience among those who value language, liberty, and the undeniable – indeed essential – connection between the two.

I Collect Therefore I Am: The Male Brain as Collecting Organ

A man must have a shed to keep him sane.

XTC, Fruit Nut

Shortly before winter had definitively set in, my brother and I were summoned to my parents’ house under the direct instructions that we were to clean out the shed. The shed (actually one of two sheds) had gone from temporary to indefinite storage space for various belongings he and I had accumulated during our childhood and teenage years. My father has been on at me for at least a decade to get in there and sort what was worth keeping from what needed chucking, a task I kept putting off both because it filled me with dread, and because my current residence is already filled to creaking with far too many records and books. Now the time of reckoning was on hand – my father was dismantling the two small sheds and replacing them with one big shed. In the event I quite enjoyed myself, rummaging through the detritus of my ill spent youth and laughing at awkward gawky photos of me and my beautiful family. Amongst the photos and ‘must try harder’ school reports were the remnants of several collections that vividly testified to the various

SWAG! Part of "the collection".

obsessions that had gripped my youthful mind. Among these were several hundred comic books, various film and music magazines, piles of videos, and a large collection of conjuring books together with a box of magic tricks. What struck me so forcefully was not how much had changed over the years, but what had remained constant – the urge to collect. My Mum wandered in at one point, visibly and audibly baffled at the twin piles of stuff – my brother’s junk filling one side of their spare room, mine the other. She looked around in disgust and said, “I don’t know why you have all this bloody crap!” My brother explained that this was because she was a woman. “Well,” she said, “I just don’t understand it.” We are men, my brother then exclaimed – men are collectors.

I have often wondered about the male impulse to collect, how the obsessive need to amass and organise collections seemed to transcend the particulars of what was being collected. It’s not that women don’t collect things. They do. Just not, I would suggest, in quite the same geeky and obsessively completest manner that men do. My mother, for example, likes to collect sentimental stuffed teddy bears and (lately) meerkats. However, these collections are usually small, and largely for display, like trinkets. If a man collected these “Me To You” bears, I can’t help feeling he wouldn’t rest until he had collected every single one – especially the specimens most sought-after by other collectors – and he would probably organise them according to some sort of system. He might even have a database, or a blog fastidiously cataloguing his jealously guarded possessions. For men, collecting and being the best collector is what matters, not what is being collected.

Most of the men I know collect something. My brother and I have both amassed large collections of music as well as large libraries. Several of my closest male friends could compete. Another has, at any one time, up to a dozen electric guitars cluttering his home in various states of antiquity and restoration. My partner’s father has a whole room filled with model cars, trucks, and tractors. I’m sure all of them could provide perfectly compelling reasons for this behaviour, but I suspect something deeper driving them. I have always rationalised my obsession with collecting records, for instance, by reassuring myself it was simply the end result of loving music so passionately. While that is perfectly true, there’s clearly something else going on. Everyone loves music, more or less, but not everyone has several thousand alphabetically organised pieces of vinyl. “Until recently, I’ve never really thought of myself as a collector. Collectors were people who cherished rare artifacts like coins, postage stamps, antiques; if they were record collectors, they were oddballs who fetishised format and packaging…For me it was all about the music, and anyway, I wasn’t collecting for its own sake. This was professional research material, part of my effort to expand my knowledge of musical history,” says Simon Reynolds, before conceding to the inevitable, “…it’s time to face facts. You’re a collector, a chronic one, well past the point where it’s a manageable, wholesome pastime.” I have long been dimly conscious of baser urges being sated by my collecting, not least because of how compulsive the habit can get. You can fight these urges – do I really need that £30 Moog rarity? – though the urge usually wins, much to the detriment of my bank account, living space, and patience of my partner and cohabitants.

I suspect the desire to collect among men has something to with the urge to compete among men. Mammalian males compete for women and status, and they compete for status because status gets them women. What is maladaptive about the human desire to collect, though, lies in assuming that a large collection will impress anyone but a fellow collector with strictly identical obsessions. Anyone who has perused music-themed internet message boards – sticking to my area of expertise – can attest to the fact that grown men like to compare collections like small boys compare penises. Such displays may be called many things, but sexy they ain’t. “Without meaning to be rude, the sort of boys who get obsessed, really obsessed with pop music do so because they don’t have a life…By the time you’re seventeen, your one and only life should not be revolving around a rotating piece of plastic,” wrote the inimitable Julie Burchill, in a line that elicited a wince of recognition from this (obsessive) reader.

Birding is still very male – it’s all about collecting information and obsessively putting it into lists. Women just can’t get that passionate about lists, can they?

Cath Jeffs, ornithologist

Perhaps a better clue to the male desire for collecting can be found in the controversial and unfairly maligned discipline of evolutionary psychology and its related field of cognitive neuroscience. Writers like Steven Pinker and Simon Baron-Cohen have been subject to the slings and arrows of politically correct disapprobation for daring to suggest that our best current research supports the long-intuited notion of essential differences between the male and female brain, differences that lead to marked disparities in male and female behaviour. In Baron-Cohen’s book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women, and the Extreme Male Brain, he argues that the female brain is “predominantly wired for empathizing”, while the male brain is “predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.” It is important to understand that we’re talking statistical averages here. It isn’t that men can’t empathize, or that women don’t systemize, rather that distribution rates among our species will slightly favour men for the former, and women for the latter. (By suggesting that sex differences are not entirely the result of socialization, Baron-Cohen and his kind have predictably drawn the ire of those who claim evolutionary psychology is at best a pseudo-science. Feminists like Natasha Walter and more traditionally-minded psychologists like Cordelia Fine have taken issue with both the quality and – it is implied – ideology of those whose research would indicate men and women are not quite as equal in innate talents as they are in rights. My own view in this debate is obviously worth nothing, though I find it hard to believe that our minds wouldn’t betray some differences, given the selective pressures of our respective niches in the environment.)

Systemizing, in Baron-Cohen’s sense, is a cognitive process that allows men and women to extract underlying causation from phenomena in the environment and make predictions based on these intuitions:

By a system I do not just mean a machine…Nor do I even just mean things that you can build…I mean by a system anything which is governed by rules specifying input-operation-output relationships. This definition takes in systems beyond machines, such as maths, physics, chemistry, astronomy, logic, music, military strategy, the climate, sailing, horticulture and computer programming. It also includes systems like libraries, economics, companies, board games and sports.

Though this covers a wide variety of human behaviour – from boiling a kettle to thinking about particle physics – such systems can be subdivided into six major categories. These include the technical (like mechanical engineering or computer programming), the natural (biology, chemistry, or geology), the abstract (fields such as logic or grammar), the social (areas like law, politics, and theology), or the motoric (piano playing or rock climbing). For the purposes of this inquiry, the most important of these categories are those Baron-Cohen calls ‘organizable systems’. These are systems that “need to be organized according to some criteria or taxonomy.” Most collections – from stamps to the trainspotter’s pad – fall under this rubric. As an example Baron-Cohen appropriately cites “a music enthusiast,” who “might decide that her CD collection (the input) should be reorganised according to the chronological release dates (the operation), producing a new sequence (the output) on her shelf.” (This passage raised a smile, as my brother and I have had a long-running disagreement about how one should properly organise a decent collection of music. His CD collection, which runs to several thousand, is meant to be chronological, though there are so many anomalies created by this system that the result is a shocking mess. An alphabetical system, by contrast, is inherently more logical for a collection this size, and therefore infinitely superior.)

At this level of explanation my obsession with collecting records is taking full advantage of mental capacities that evolved to help us negotiate the African savannah that was humanity’s cradle. “Such an interest in classification and organisation,” writes Baron-Cohen, “involves systemizing because one is confronted by a mass of input…and one has to generate one’s own categories…The categories are therefore not just a way of organizing information into lists: they are more than that…The more finely differentiated your categories, the better your system of prediction will be.” In the evolutionary environment, being able to identify the subtle differences between poisonous and edible mushrooms meant the difference between survival, reproduction, and an early death. In my world, having the ability to differentiate between 30 Dylan albums isn’t going to save my life (or get me laid), but it does give me the same sense of satisfaction that my palaeolithic brethren felt as they divided up the world around them:

Systemizing is different to classical or operant conditioning, in that the motivation is not external but intrinsic – to understand the system itself. The buzz is not derived from some tangible reward (such as a food pellet when you press a lever, or a salary when you do a job). Rather the buzz is in discovering the causes of things, not because you want to collect causal information for the sake of it, but because discovering causes gives you control over the world.

How much is too much?

So on one level my impulse to amass a large amount of records does indeed reflect my deep passion for music; on another it reflects the intrinsic need to exert some semblance of control on the world. It might be records. It might just as easily be a train set. The underlying motives, I would like to suggest, are the same. To repeat: it’s not that women can’t or don’t do this, just that they are less likely to want to. (Have you ever met a female trainspotter?) Nor do I say all this with a view to giving a veneer of scientific respectability to an obsession that borders on the unhealthy. Rather, there have been occasions, surrounded by multiple piles of albums – the end result of countless, irreplaceable hours spent trawling through mouldy boxes of records – when I’ve found myself taking a step back and wondering what on earth’s name I was doing. Why, indeed, I “had all this bloody crap.” “Such an gargantuan accumulation of recorded music starts to exert subliminal pressure,” argues Simon Reynolds, “You inevitably begin to think about whether there’s actually enough life ahead of you to listen to all the stuff you like one more time, let alone make new discoveries. The music obsessive’s version of the midlife crisis is when all these potential pleasures stacked on the shelves stop representing delight and start to feel like harbingers of death.” While I can’t say I’ve gotten to that bleak point, and wouldn’t, therefore, put it in such dramatic terms, I know what he means. Why do men collect? It’s in our nature. Men are nature’s nerds. I collect, therefore I am.

Only a Theory? Dispatches from the Evolution Wars

People want to agree with Jesus, and this often means they see him as agreeing with themselves.

E. P. Sanders

While on the campaign trail recently Texas governor, GOP hopeful, and potential 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry responded to a question from a small boy about the age of the earth by telling him that he didn’t know how old the earth was, but he was “sure it was pretty old.” Prompted by his mother to ask a follow up question about evolution, Perry then said that evolution was “just a theory that’s out there,” one with “some gaps in it,” before reassuring the boy (in that baby-kissin’ mode so beloved of populists) that in Texas they “teach evolution and creationism in the high schools.” For those as yet unacquainted with Perry’s style, try to imagine – are you sitting down? – a George Bush who can speak. Perry’s attempt to seek the Republican nomination has rightly been seen as something of a game-changer. Until now the mainstream GOP’s preferred candidate has been Mitt Romney, who has the unfortunate stigma of being both a Mormon and a bit of a stiff, and consequently harder to sell to the evangelical voting base of bible-belt conservatism. On the other hand, tea-party favourite Michelle Bachman is seen by many at the sensible end of the party to be too extreme and divisive a figure to be taken seriously for high-office. Perry is seen by his supporters as a figure capable of uniting both sides of a party whose fissures began to badly tell during the 2008 presidential campaign. Unlike Bachman, Perry is experienced in office – he is the longest running governor in Texan history. Unlike Romney, he combines mainstream Christian evangelicalism with the populist touch in a way that seems to come naturally to the Texan tongue. Fiscally and socially conservative without appearing extreme, if the Democrats aren’t worried by Perry’s stepping into the race, they should be.

As should, it would seem, all who care about science, education, and the separation of church and state as enshrined in the American constitution. For what is most dispiriting about governor Perry’s ignorance of evolution is that it displays all the hallmarks of a fundamentally anti-scientific attitude that has lately seized the upper echelons of the Republican party. This mistrust of science is part of a wider anti-intellectualism latent in the populist style, whereby it is assumed that over-educated ‘pointy-headed’ types from the east and west coasts are knowingly conspiring to shift the USA in directions that are treacherously anti-American. You can hear this at its most fevered in what David Brooks, writing in the New York times, calls the “alternative-reality right” (i.e. “those who don’t believe in global warming, evolution or that Obama was born in the U.S”). You can hear it in Glenn Beck’s foaming conspiracy theories. You can hear it in Sarah Palin laughing off the efficacy of fruit fly research about which she is wholly ignorant. You can hear it in Michelle Bachman’s ludicrous assertion that there are “hundreds and hundreds of scientists” (“many with Nobel Prizes” no less) who “believe in intelligent design.” You could even see it in the 2007 GOP candidates’ debate, when Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, and Mike Huckabee could all, without hesitation or embarrassment, raise their hands in denial of the core idea in modern biology.

And we see it again in governor Perry’s willingness to bend over and lie into the face of a small child. A more resonant image of the extent to which science in general, and evolution in particular, has been dangerously politicised could hardly be wished for; as a signifier of the willingness of certain political figures to do violence both to science and to religion in order to surf widespread ignorance in search of votes, it is nigh-on perfect. I suppose one might be charitable, by accusing Perry of cynically pandering to the religious right – he was clearly telling the boy what he thought he wanted to hear – but I fear he might actually have meant it. After all, in a country where polling consistently shows between a fifth and half the population doubting evolution, it would hardly be an anomalous admission. The worms of creationist propaganda have dined long and happy on the compost of American religiosity, and their influence is beginning to reach into the highest corridors of power. The dangers to America’s standing as a leading science and technology nation are obvious. Governor Perry may think the answer to a “nation in crisis” is to hold a prayer meeting. I would suggest a more pragmatic solution lies, at least in part, in the USA’s ability to produce more science graduates than its rapidly gaining rivals.

The first thing to understand about this battle – the battle between evolution and its religiously-motivated enemies – is that it is not, despite appearances, a scientific dispute. Scientific disputes are settled in the lab. There is an easy way to get ‘intelligent design’ taught in the classroom, and that is to do good science. Once scientific ideas become established, they will, no matter how radical or strange, inevitably trickle down into the high school text books. The fact that repeated attempts are made to circumvent this process by bypassing the science part and going straight for the impressionable minds of children, is illustration enough that the well-funded and politically powerful ‘intelligent design’ propaganda machine knows this. They don’t have to bother with observation, experiment, and peer-review. If they can sew enough doubt in enough minds among the general populace, they have won.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to attach to evolution a political message it doesn’t contain. Evolution, goes the argument, is not only untrue, if believed in it leads to everything from homosexuality to abortion to genocide. Anyone who casts an eye over creationist literature will quickly observe the repeated use of ‘Darwinism’ and ‘Darwinist’ in place of ‘evolution’ or ‘natural selection’. Why? Because ‘isms’ are ideologies, and ideologies are evil. This use of Darwin’s name is anachronistic among the sciences: mechanical engineers are not known as ‘Newtonionists’, to practise geology is not called ‘Lyellism’. Darwin may be a highly revered figure, but I doubt a single biologist or zoologist would announce himself in this manner. What they do is evolutionary biology, not ‘Darwinism’. In science it is the ideas that matter, in other words, not the man. By failing to observe the distinction, creationists are able to draw a straight line between Darwin and Hitler, and ignore the point that even if it were the case that accepting evolution automatically led to genocide, that would say nothing, in itself, about whether the theory were true or not.

It is telling to note that the denial of evolution is often held in inverse proportion to the firmness of belief in scriptural inerrency; that is, the more rabidly one opposes evolution, the more likely one is to believe the Bible is the unalterable and perfect word of God. The irony has a pleasing symmetry to it. On the one hand, we have one of the most firmly established explanatory frameworks in all science, with 150 years of cumulative and mutually supportive lines of evidence to back it up; on the other we have an anthology of Hebrew and Greek literature from the ancient world that has been edited, revised, rewritten, and translated (in many cases mistranslated) over and over again, for thousands of years.

In the case of a figure like Jesus Christ, that entails believers having to accept the divinity of an itinerant (and probably illiterate) apocalyptic preacher from from an obscure part of the first century Roman empire, based upon contradictory accounts written decades after the events they seek to describe, by anonymous scribes who were neither eye-witnesses to those events nor speakers of the same language as the protagonists. By way of analogy, imagine trying to reconstruct the life of Harry Houdini based upon nothing but the excited reports of those who have heard, by word of mouth, of his spectacular magic. It is, in other words, Christianity that is ‘only a theory’ here, held aloft on the shifting sands of ‘faith’, and thus prey to all manner of doubts that must be assuaged by the constant reinforcements of incantation and ritual. If one were to be Freudian about the creationist conspiracy theory, one would accuse those opposed to evolution of projecting onto science the shaky foundations of their own belief.

It is clear from the closing words of 1984 that what terrified Orwell – and thus terrifies us as readers – was the thought that lies could completely replace the truth, that propaganda could fully replace historical reality. In this, he was being overly-pessimistic. The relatively short-lived time spans of the totalitarian empires would seem to indicate that truth cannot be contained, because truth exists independent of even the most powerful of state apparatus. In a comparatively open society like that of America, those who would like to see religious stories replace science lessons haven’t a hope of achieving their aims. They may have muddied the waters enough to turn half the country into misguided science deniers, but their project is intrinsically doomed to failure. Not only is it unconstitutional, it is, in a sense, impossible. Scientific discoveries cannot be ‘undiscovered’. Evolution is not going to go away, however distasteful or unconducive to the idea of a benign creator one may find its implications to be.

Lying to oneself may be merely foolish: lying to children is immoral. Governor Perry doubly lied to the boy on his campaign trail. They don’t, in fact, teach “evolution and creationism” in Texas high schools. They don’t because they can’t; they can’t because the Supreme Court explicitly ruled against it the 1987 Edwards vs. Aguillard verdict. They did the same again with the rebranded creationism of ‘intelligent design’ in the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial. So far the guardians of establishment clause have done Jefferson proud, despite massive pressure from the population, and the ceaseless push from the proponents of pseudo-science. Let us pray – for the sake of the children – that it stays that way.

THE MADNESS OF CROWDS: Understanding the Riots

As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A. M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A. M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores has closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for their airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty cartloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army, and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters…

Steven Pinker

Last October, when the coalition announced its proposal to cut £81 billion of government spending over four years, a friend of mine (and old-Left firebrand) rather wonderfully predicted “tanks in the streets.” He was convinced – and he was far from alone in this – that a return to austerity would see a return to the ideological agitation that ran through the 1970s and 1980s like a Greek chorus. Well, he got his riots, though not in the form, nor for the reasons, he so dramatically predicted. For the first time in my life, I saw scenes of violence on the streets of Britain that rendered the alarming image my friend had seized upon – the militarisation of the domestic arena – an all-too-real possibility. In previous, more ideological ages, the British rioted for Rights, and against injustice. In the post-ideological age, the British riot for…well, what exactly?

The confused multitude of responses to four consecutive night’s of mass-looting, vandalism, and arson – scenes of destruction that have now scarred several of England’s largest urban centres – itself highlights the difficulty and dangers of reason-seeking in the immediate aftermath of such disturbing and disruptive events. The shocking scenes of disregard for person and property has inevitably bought out the ‘hang-em-and-flog-em’ brigade. At the other end of the political spectrum, earnest liberals urge us to ‘pause’ to think about the ‘root causes’ and ‘underlying’ socio-economic tensions at play in the rubble-strewn and smouldering streets. On the Right, we are told that such behaviour is ‘pure criminality’ by the ‘mindless’ constituents of ‘broken Britain’. On the Left, we are offered a veritable smorgasbord of ‘root causes’ from government cuts to racism. There seems to me something wrong with all these interpretations.

We like our causes simple, which is unfortunate, as in the realm of human behaviour causality is anything but. Ideology is helpful in this regard, as it allows the ideologically-minded to neatly slot turbulent and troublesome events into a pre-existing framework of heroes and villains, cause and effect. So for someone like Ken Livingstone – one of the earliest to attempt to make political capital out of this nightmare – or Harriet Harman, it simply stands to reason that the looters, muggers, and arsonists are as angry as they are about cuts to Educational Maintenance Allowance and the trebling of tuition fees. For an old Marxist and race-warrior like Darcus Howe, the stop-and-search powers of Operation Trident have resulted in an “insurrection” – the (black) proletariat taking on the (presumably white) superstructure. For Cameron and his co-thinkers meanwhile, the lawlessness is proof positive of their ‘broken Britain’ thesis; of generational welfare dependency and an “entitlement culture” of “rights without responsibilities” resulting from a breakdown of the family and corresponding erosion of society’s moral codes.

The problem with these explanations lies in their partiality. From the Left the muck is spread so erratically it is in danger hitting everybody but the culprits, blurring into indistinction the line between personal and collective responsibility. (By far the most ridiculous response has been that of the hand-wringing “we’re all responsible” variety.) It seems to me a chronic tendency among the liberal-minded to assume that angry people are angry about the same things they are; ergo, the looters are inspired by everything from expenses-embezzling MPs to the bankers (after all, they “looted” on a grand scale, didn’t they?). From the Right we are told this violence is ‘pure’ and ‘mindless’, though this wont quite do either. Not only is it unclear what ‘pure’ criminality would consist of (nor what the ‘impure’ variety might look like), ‘mindlessness’ suggests automaton or zombie-like behaviour devoid of agency (and therefore, one would assume, blame). I suspect that Cameron is attempting to shift the balance of responsibility away from politics and onto the individual, but in doing so he is in danger of oversimplifying the complex confluence of factors that set the law-abiding apart from the willingly law-breaking. Furthermore, Cameron’s assertion that “pockets of our society are not just broken, but sick” seems to me not at all helpful. Medical metaphors about living, breathing humans unnerve me: ‘sickness’ implies ‘disease’, implies ‘a plague’, implies ‘eradication’ or ‘cure’. I suspect Cameron was merely playing to the gallery after days of seeming on the back-foot. Nevertheless, those who seem inspired in their public-order tactics by Syria – such as Kelvin MacKenzie, who said he was “in favour” of “shooting” the looters – don’t need encouraging at a time like this.

The political argument seems to me to be especially unconvincing. While I am no fan of Cameron or the coalition, to blame, as somehave, “the government” or “the Tories”, seems to me to be self-evidently absurd. It may be strictly true, as Ken Livingstone was quick to taunt, that the last time our cities went up in flames the Tories were also in power, but that cannot hide the fact that the mean-age of the trouble-makers – at least as reported – puts them as having spent their formative years under Labour’s enlightened governance. Earnest right-on bloggers may see in the rioters a powerless-underclass emerging from communities the powerful “were not watching”, but the truth of the matter is more ambiguous than that. Successive Labour and Conservative governments have, after all, shown a remarkably consistent obsession with the lower classes, an obsession only matched in its intensity by bourgeois fear/fascination and tabloid demonisation. Far from ignoring the underprivileged and marginalised, governments of all stripes have sought to engage the lower classes with a series of social reforms, enacting policy after policy, with the inevitably varying results ranging from the drastic to the disastrous. From the socialist’s utopian egalitarianism, to the Thatcherite’s rabid individualism, from New Labour’s seemingly constant string of white-papers about ‘Respect’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’, to Cameron’s ill-advised (and now rather ironic) ‘hug a hoodie’ campaign, government after government has sought its own fix for society’s ill-educated and unemployed. New Labour threw money at the problem: the coalition, in seeking to reverse those incentives, want to take that money away. The one uses the carrot: the other the stick. Nothing changes. Could it be – just a thought – that interference breeds as much resentment toward the state as neglect?

The economic argument is similarly fraught with contradiction. Those who have been quick to blame ‘the cuts’ fail to realise that ‘the cuts’ have barely begun. Public expenditure actually grew in the 12 months ending June 30^th this year. This is partially explained by the faltering economy meaning less taxes servicing more debt, but it also shows the contraction in the public sector is, at least for the time being, less dramatic than some believe it to be. This doesn’t mean the state isn’t shrinking – it is – but that the ‘deep’ and ‘savage’ cuts warned of by Labour have so far been slow and incremental, rather than sudden enough and brutal enough to agitate a violent response in the way this formulation seeks to establish. Are we really meant to believe, as Ken Livingstone and others would have us do, that there is a connection between specific government policies – such as EMA, tuition fees, and cuts to public services – and the masked and hooded looters of JD Sports? The nature of the violence would suggest to me a rather different set of priorities from the acquisition of a higher education. I, for one, find it hard to credit this particular set of mobs with any such noble motive. The fact that they looted electrical stores rather than bookshops would indicate, to my mind at least, that these riots were not the work of young men moved to violence by the immanent closure of their local library.

Moreover, although recessionary economics are (with some justification) routinely held up as a major cause of societal instability, it is equally true that periods of economic growth can be just as destabilising. The jarring inequalities of today’s Britain, which many are fingering as a key factor in these disturbances, are in large part a product of the New Labour boom years of fiscal deregulation and easy credit. The key factor here is economic volatility; that is to say, the rates at which economies rise and fall. Seeing as global markets are inherently volatile, and that ‘boom-and-bust’ cycles would seem to be an ineradicable part of any capitalist system, such variables are always with us – riots or no riots. In our current climate, higher-taxes and rising inflation are squeezing the living standards of all but the super-rich, yet only a few thousand choose to riot. Similarly, there are two and a half million unemployed people in Britain. Even if we were to assume most of the rioters are unemployed – which at the moment is far from clear – that still means over 99% of the unemployed stayed away. Is the connection between economics and arson really so clear-cut as some are suggesting? In a deprived area like Tottenham the unemployment rate at the hight of the boom years was 19%. It now sits at 20%. Are we really so confident that the extra percentage point made all the difference between stability and chaos? Are the young men razing parts of London to the ground – to say nothing of our cities in the North and in the Midlands – doing so in response to the tosses and turns of fiscal policy?

Undoubtedly there exists an underclass in Britain, for generations badly served by education and employment, but we would do well to remember – particularly at a time when it is hard to generalise about the precise constituency of the rioters – that the underclass has been as much a victim as a perpetrator in this four-day rampage; which is to say, such wantonly destructive behaviour is as much a cause of poverty and deprivation, as it is a symptom. The last thing underprivileged areas like Hackney and Salford needed was smashing to pieces.

Nor does the racial argument get us very far. Although the shooting by police of a young black man in Tottenham began the train of events that led to wide-spread disorder, one should be exceedingly cautious about attributing the wider violence to the regrettable (and as yet not fully explained) demise of Mark Duggan – not least because the looters are obviously far from all-black. That there exists real tensions between London’s black community and the Met is well-attested to, and was reflected in the urge to protest peacefully following Mr Duggan’s shooting on Saturday. There are long-standing historical reasons for this tension, and it is fair to say such feelings probably contributed early on to the confrontations with police that followed the protest. Yet as the night grew more violent, that quickly changed: any concern for the troubling death of a young black man gave way to a more abstract and inarticulate rage directed at everything and nothing – shops were ransacked, buildings burned, cars torched. By the following night all thoughts of Mark Duggan had apparently receded to the back of the mind. As unrestrained violence broke out across several parts of London, it seemed more and more obviously the case that the mayhem had gained a momentum all of its own. Come the worst violence on Monday night, and I imagine most of those participating in the rampage would be hard pressed to even give you Mark Duggan’s name.

For a self-appointed spokesperson for black Briton like Darcus Howe, there may be no choice but to view this outbreak through the prism of previous racially-aggravated riots like Toxteth and Brixton. This failure of imagination not only ignores the racially-mixed make-up of the rioters and their actual behaviour (less “smash the state” and more “smash Miss Selfridge”), it also fails to take into account everything that has changed since the dark days of the early 1980s. Our inner cities have many problems, but Tottenham 2011 is not the same place as Brixton in 1981. Mr. Howe seems not at all bothered that the understandable grief, confusion, and anger that followed in the wake of Mark Duggan’s death has been ruthlessly exploited by violent youngsters on the make. He seems entirely unconcerned that important issues surrounding relations between London’s police and the black community have been side-lined and hijacked by people who probably wanted, more than anything, to fill their pockets. It is worth contrasting Howe’s response with the dignified and noble response of Mark Duggan’s parents, who saw no glory whatsoever in smashing up the community in their son’s name.

The more troubling conclusion to be drawn at this admittedly early stage, is that the riots may have had little to do with broader historical forces – of race, class, economics, and politics – and more to do with the fundamental nature of the human animal. More difficult to accept is the intrusive thought that these events, however disturbing, might have been fundamentally irrational, and therefore beyond easy rationalisation. Cameron is wrong to say this is “pure criminality and nothing more” – nothing happens without context – but how far such social and economic reasoning will get you is open to question. By far the most depressing aspect of this unprecedented week of carnage has been hearing from the faces in the rioting crowds. It is clear from the inarticulate and ignorant responses of those partaking in vandalism and looting that they don’t even really know why they are doing it, other than for the sheer thrill of it and the promise of free stuff. Excuses like “it’s the government’s fault” or “it’s the rich people” sound hollow and self-serving in the extreme. More honest has been the “police can’t do nothing” variety of response.

The level of control the state has over society and the individual in a liberal democracy like Britain is far weaker than many of us would like to imagine. The veneer we commonly call civilisation is extremely thin. Stability depends upon common recognition of a whole complex of societal conventions and restraints, both explicit and unconscious, concrete and abstract, legal and cultural. The ‘rule of law’ is a useful conception, but it is one we have to consent to, and we may freely choose to ignore it should those conventions break down, which they can, with terrifying speed. When wide-spread looting hit Baghdad following the fall of Saddam, I remember thinking and arguing that the same thing would happen to London should the authorities fall here. We had a tiny glimpse of that on Monday night, as the police effectively ceded control of the Capital to a violent minority who had realised, much to their delight, that no one was stopping them.

We want solid explanations for extraordinary events. Things don’t ‘just happen’. There must be ‘reasons’. Far harder to admit to ourselves is that young men enjoy violence, particularly when in groups. The phenomenon psychologists call “male coalitionary violence” – whereby groups of men band together to commit mutually-reinforcing violent acts – is a universal one that cuts across all boundaries of culture, race, and class. It’s high summer. The night’s are long, hot, and prickly. Anyone who has ever taken out their frustrations on an inanimate object could tell you how good it feels to break things. Realising that the police were unable to control them, and encouraged by the vivid pictures on the television news, any taboos about the sanctity of people and property had been suddenly, and tantalisingly, removed. People realised that if enough crimes were committed simultaneously the police were powerless to prevent them. In an intensely acquisitive society like ours, where status is accrued through the accumulation of material goods, it would be surprising if these loose and fast-moving gangs didn’t target high-end retail, whilst simultaneously drawing in opportunistic thievery and nihilistic yobbery.

Britain is no stranger to civil unrest. It has been correctly pointed out that our cities have a long and ignoble history of such riotous behaviour. This is not the first time looting has occurred in London, nor will it be the last. What does seem new to me though is the viral ‘flashmob’ quality of the burning and looting; the way in which modern communications technology has enabled trouble-makers to rapidly organise and dissolve fluid and loosely-structured networks of people intent on criminality. The reason the authorities have looked so far out of their depth over the past few days (as a friend of mine adroitly observed) is down to the reality that the looters had access to better technology, and therefore better intelligence, than the police. The fact that disturbances in London so spontaneously spread to other parts of the country, and with such speed, has been perhaps the most troubling aspect of these perturbations. I’ve seen riots before, but I’ve never felt the sensation that my country was out-of-control in quite the way I have over the past week. Any changes to policing and new public-order statutes will clearly have to reflect these developments.

At the time of writing a semblance of order has been restored to Britain’s streets by a large swelling of police numbers and the weather taking a turn for the worse. The post-mortems have begun; the blame being proportioned according to ideological bent. These debates will undoubtedly rage for years, but there are more immediate questions the citizenry deserve answered. The levels of policing used to quell the lawlessness are not sustainable in the long term. Before we draw concrete conclusions about the ‘reasons’ for this break-down in law and order, perhaps we should demand a clear and concise answer to the question: what about next time?

The Reluctant Republican: Thoughts on Monarchy

Dinner with Roman and Sandy Whitelaw. Sandy says he has made a list of the countries where it is possible to live a free and liberal life. There are five of them: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Britain. And what (he asks) do they have in common? Answer: they are all monarchies. This worries him, since he is a convinced republican.

Kenneth Tynan, Diaries

Being a republican in Britain is a thankless business. It is like being a Labour voter stuck in a perpetual 1980s: you are sure your principled stance against the status quo is widely shared, yet the moment this opposition has a chance to show itself, it mysteriously fails to materialise. You are convinced, moreover, that almost everyone can see, as plainly as can you, the absurdity and injustice of the present system. But then they go and vote for it anyway. Most of the time the British people seem to me largely indifferent to the fate of our ‘first family’. If they occupy our thoughts at all, it is usually for negative rather than positive reasons, as another financial scandal or sexual indiscretion befalls one or more of its extended members. I rarely meet anyone I could label a ‘royalist’ in any meaningful sense. Short of scandal, they just seem to be there, in the background somewhere, doing whatever it is unelected sovereign symbols do nowadays. It is fair to say that in any normal year, were the royal family to suddenly become invisible, it would be Christmas before many people noticed. But, of course, 2011 is not a normal year.

A few days ago I found myself in a city centre bulging with so much royal wedding paraphernalia it was like walking through a Martin Parr exhibition. Flags, tea towels, plates, mugs, spoons, bunting, posters, banners, hats – I’ve seen the grinning face of “Kate and Wills” so many times their features are now more familiar to me than those of my own parents. It may well be said that much of the time the Crown remains distant from the mind of its subjects, an object of mild interest, occasional derision or humour, rather than uncritical reverence. This is largely true, I tend to think, but gift the nation a wedding, a jubilee, or a death, and we suddenly seem to remember we were rabid monarchists all along. People may bitch and moan about the way they behave, but put on some pomp, make it a bank holiday, and all is quietly (or rather noisily) forgiven. Prince Andrew can hang around with as many paedophiles as he likes, as long as it’s a wedding year.

On these occasional forays into monarchy mania the republican must get used to finding himself or herself in an alien land where the sentimental and the kitsch combine to ramp up a vague and undifferentiated sense of national ‘feeling’ to frighteningly lurid levels. He or she must get used to the media offering up a tsunami of mawk insisting the flag-waving and face-painting is proof positive how much “we” all “love” our royal family. In a marvellous piece of internally contradictory reasoning we will be told that this is because the royal family are simultaneously both special and just like us really. The only consolation available to the republican the thought that it will all soon pass, equilibrium restored as we go back to not caring again.

These irregular fits of latent monarchical fervour do seem to refute the notion that – for all its everyday indifference – Britain has given up on or outgrown its royal family. What explains the disparity? I am constantly surprised that anyone can be bothered to even feign interest in what the Windsor Mafia gets up to any more. Even if I wasn’t against hereditary power in principle, I don’t think it would change the fact that to me they seem such crushingly boring people. Perhaps therein lies the secret of their longevity: the sheer tedium of these people makes it impossible to care enough to oppose them.

The more unpalatable truth, I rather fear, is that the monarchy as an institution still means something to large numbers of people, even if their attitude to the House of Windsor is mixed. Quite what that meaning consists of is rather more difficult to say. But it seems plain to me that the republican must face the awkward fact that, warts and all, the royal family provides an atomised post-Christian nation starved of national unity a symbolic sense of oneness. Outside of the sporting arena, royal weddings and jubilees are among the few occasions where an unabashed celebration of ‘Britishness’ is both tolerated and encouraged. By ‘Britishness’ I think I mean that sense – however vaguely defined – of what binds us in the present to the us of the past; that sense, as George Orwell wrote, of the nation being, “an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.”

For those who lack the gene sequence for such symbolic thinking, or indeed find such demonstrations of uniformity unnerving, it is tempting to sneer at these outbreaks of popular royalist sentiment. I can’t help thinking that would be a mistake. If there is an ambiguity to be pursued between our day-to-day apathy with monarchy, and our sudden outbursts of monarchical fervour, its source surely lies in the distinction between the intelligentsia and what used to be called the average man. When I hear the unfailingly irritating Yasmin Alibhai-Brown calling the monarchy “like a dummy for a child” I can’t help but wince. Anti-royalist coverage often takes this tone. In his fascinating if flawed book on class, Ferdinand Mount complained: “For the past 50 years – the whole of the present Queen’s reign in fact – a stream of commentators has exhorted the masses to grow up. Kingsley Martin said that ‘with the growth of science and democracy, people begin to realise that monarchy is a survival, surrounded by superstitions which must be outgrown.’ Malcolm Muggeridge complained that ‘true religion is in danger of being driven out by the royal soap opera’. The masses were hypnotised by fairy-tales about beautiful princesses in glass coaches. In the late 1980s, Tom Nairn in his sparkling polemic The Enchanted Garden was still lamenting that ‘people enjoy the monarchical twaddle and show very little sign of being robotised or “brainwashed”.’” Mount may be part of the aristocratic establishment most republicans would rather see the back of, but he has a point.

Not only is such criticism attacking what is populist rather than elitist about monarchy, it also has the analogy precisely backward. It is not, as is often said, that monarchy enshrines us in political infancy – quite the opposite. Monarchy as practised in Britain is a fossilised remnant of an ancient feudal system whose best days are, thankfully, far behind it. It is political decrepitude, rather than infancy, we are being enjoined to celebrate with this wedding. The urge to chide the flag-wavers must therefore be resisted, not least because the sentiment seems to me for the most part genuine – somebody must be buying all that kitsch. That the sentimental aspects of the royal wedding palaver are not really the problem can more clearly seen by the way successful republics like France and America still go in for all manner of orgiastic nationalist ritual, and quite unashamedly too. Even if we republicans were to get our wish, I find it hard to believe Britain would instantly abandon its need for organised mass celebrations of this kind.

Defenders of the monarchy are apt to emphasise these intangible aspects: history and tradition are said to bind people to monarch, in a pact that goes back centuries and is worth both maintaining and abiding by, even respecting. They tend to stress the sense of continuity these living symbols of British heritage give us, and how occasions like royal weddings give us a chance to “renew” this (unwritten) contract. You needn’t be a monarchist to appreciate this. Jonathan Freedland recently wrote of, “the mysterious alchemy that somehow converts love of country into affection for the House of Windsor.” Heady stuff, I think you’ll agree, and correspondingly hard to get at by mere reasoning. Even for a writer as radical as Orwell, writing in the depths of the war, such notions were seductive:

The function of the King in promoting stability and acting as a sort of keystone in a non-democratic society is, of course, obvious. But he also has, or can have, the function of acting as an escape-valve for dangerous emotions [I can't help but think of the death of Diana Spencer here]. A French journalist said to me once that the monarchy was one of the things that have saved Britain from Fascism. What he meant was that modern people can’t get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades, and that it is better that they should tie their leader-worship on to some figure who has no real power. In a dictatorship the power and the glory belong to the same person.

The republican, then, must grapple with such intangibles as ‘history’, ‘tradition’, and ‘continuity’, before attempting to shift the argument onto more concrete (read: constitutional) ground. Such a task might be considered a fool’s errand at a time like this, but to my mind the fact that we are in danger of being swamped by nearly universally fawning coverage of the “happy couple” makes the need for a restatement of republican principles only more urgent.

Tradition can be dispensed with right away, as it has never seemed to me to be a good argument for the maintenance of anything. The continuity and stability argument is more interesting. It is perhaps easy to contemplate such notions during the reign of a long-standing monarch like a Victoria or an Elizabeth II, but pull back from that close-up and the picture becomes a lot more discontinuous and hardly less stable. Even ignoring the Interregnum, the history of monarchy is largely characterised by usurpation, assassination, conquest, and civil war. The line joining the absolute rule of the past with the constitutional monarchy of today is hardly the smooth upward curve of the more Whiggish historical imagination; rather, it is a sawtooth whose peaks may include Magna Carta and 1688, but whose troughs include oppressions and inequities too numerous to mention. Getting our monarch into the position whereby they hold prerogative powers they dare not exercise has hardly been the pain-free evolution many claim for it – the doors to constitutional reform do not open from the inside.

As for history, I answer this way. While British history must obviously take account of our Kings & Queens, it also has other things to offer the world. The most important of these being our language and our literature, a significant proportion of which – Locke, Milton, Blake, Shelly – has been republican and democratic in spirit. Foremost among this lineage is, of course, Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense turned the present writer from royal agnostic to committed republican, just as it did for millions before me. It is Paine’s influence that makes the American constitution the greatest triumph of English republicanism. Our desire to be free of monarchy is therefore now at least as firmly embedded in our history as our need to genuflect before it. (British republicanism as a tradition now goes back much further, it is worth noting, than the tradition of royal weddings as public event.)

In a country where patriotism is axiomatically wrapped up with monarchy, it is a challenge getting people to notice just how arbitrary, just how odd, is our unwritten constitution. A hereditary monarch, as Paine pointed out in The Rights of Man, is as absurd as a hereditary mathematician. Dividing the nation into the titled and commoners enshrines inequality at the heart of our system and maximises all that is arbitrary about power and sovereignty: why this family, and not another? The republican’s wish is a simple one: I would like – not a novel idea this – to be able to choose my head of state by vote rather than by birth-canal. As such, I do not recognise the right of this family to rule over me.

The royally inclined might, at this juncture, point out that the constitutional powers invested in the monarch are symbolic. They are right, of course, but fail to realise that for the republican this is precisely the problem: we have the symbolic, if not the actual, status of slaves. Who is being more patriotic in the light of this? Those who insist we must forever hand sovereignty to the Windsor blood-line? Or those, such as myself, who believe that we are a sovereign people, and should start acting like one?

I realise that in a country where only one-in-five want to abolish the monarchy we republicans are fighting an uphill battle of Sisyphean proportions. With the country still basking in the warm glow of Friday’s wedding, such an appeal seems especially futile. As the historian Dominic Sandbrook pointed out in Sunday’s Observer, republicans have been predicting the imminent demise of the British monarchy at least once a decade for centuries, only to have the institution stumble on into the 21^st century, showing a resilience that defies logic. While I am not about to join those soothsayers who claim the end is nigh for the Windsors, I would like to end on an optimistic note.

All the regal pomp in the world could not disguise a deep anxiety at the heart of Friday’s nuptials; an anxiety that is an inherent and unavoidable part of monarchy as a political system. This is the anxiety of succession. As if the pressure on this young married couple wasn’t already enough, the monarchy is counting on their popularity to carry the institution forth into the next generation. The reasons for this are obvious. Aside from William and (now) Catherine, about the only member of the royal family to garner near-universal respect is the Queen. I imagine most royalists would prefer it if her Majesty really was as immortal as she sometimes seems. Alas, she will die, leaving the keys to sovereignty in the hands of her eldest son, a man whose unpopularity is only matched by his politics, which, as Nick Cohen (among others) has pointed out, goes steaming past conservative, straight through reactionary, and off into the downright weird. If ever there was a chance for the “strange alchemy” of monarchy to be revealed as pseudo-science, it surely comes with Charles’ succession. In Common Sense, Tom Paine wrote: “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.”

Am I the only one who thinks of King Charles III when I read that?

REVIEW: “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” by Richard Dawkins

In the appendix to Richard Dawkins’ latest book – The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution – the author reproduces the results of Gallup’s 2008 poll sampling American popular opinion about evolution. An astonishing 44% of those polled identified the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so” as the one that most accorded with their own beliefs. Even allowing for the error margins inherent in polling of this kind, the results would seem fairly consistent: Gallup has been asking this question at irregular intervals since 1982, and it always comes out between 40% and 50%. In other words, nearly half the citizenry of the most powerful and technically advanced civilisation in history are young-earth creationists who – in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary – insist the (unknown) nomadic scribes of Genesis knew more about the origins of life, the universe, and everything, than all of the sciences. This isn’t a small error. As Dawkins points out in the book, thinking the world is about 10,000 years old is the equivalent of measuring the width of north America to within a few yards.

In America the fight against creationism is a legal as well as intellectual battle. As the proponents of creationism know they cannot gain acceptance in the scientific arena – that would involve research, experimentation, and publication – they have instead opted for a calculated PR exercise aimed at capturing the ‘hearts and minds’ of a scientifically illiterate population – especially its young. Despite the successes of Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987 and Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, the cynical attempt to violate the constitution’s ‘establishment clause’ by teaching the sectarian, religiously inspired pseudo-science of ‘intelligent design’ in public schools is ongoing and even gaining momentum. In 2008 Republican governor of Louisiana (and ‘Tea Party’ favourite) Bobby Jindal signed into law the “Louisiana Academic Freedom Act”, a piece of legislation designed to open the back-door to creationism by allowing public school teachers to ‘supplement’ the teaching of evolution with material ‘critical’ of the theory. The material critical of evolution, however, comes not from within the sciences themselves – where there is no disagreement about evolution’s centrality to biology – but from the ‘intelligent design’ crowd. Similar ‘Academic Freedom’ bills are being forwarded across many states of the union as I write.

Even in a supposedly secular and godless country like Britain, the ideas of the creationists have gained a foothold, with the rise of the American evangelical influence, coupled with Tony Blair’s fondness for faith schools, resulting in a row like the one over Emmanuel College Gateshead – and a tension between science, religion, and education that seems to me to be something quite new. In Dawkins’ appendix he cites, with barely disguised alarm, a 2005 Eurobarometer poll that highlighted the extent of scientific ignorance among the British public, with a full 19% of respondents, for example, believing that the earth takes a month to orbit the sun. Even more worrisomely, a 2006 Ipsos MORI poll found 22% clinging to the creationist view.

Given all this, the question that naturally arises is: what do we do about it? How do those of a rational and reasoned mind (whether religious or otherwise) project a coherent and understandable vision of scientific reality in the face of such blanket denial? How do those with a commitment to truth balance freedom of speech and belief against the need to keep the sciences scientific? Does it even matter that millions of people believe the world was somehow magicked into existence after the domestication of the dog? These questions hold not just for creationism, but also for all manner of pseudo-science and pseudo-history, including ‘alternative medicine’, ‘new-age’ mumbo-jumbo, and all flavours of conspiracy theories (of which creationism is just one among many). Simply laying out the truth of the matter is clearly inadequate, as it is for dedicated Holocaust deniers and 9/11 ‘Truthers’, especially one considers the well-funded and politically powerful campaign to undermine scientific teaching, operating as it is in a world where reason and empiricism have been systematically undermined by the fashionably relativistic.

Many of those who chide Dawkins for his combative and vituperative approach to his subject tend to forget that he has, through no fault of his own, found himself in this embattled position for his entire career. Physicists, by and large, don’t find their classes or lectures interrupted by those who insist that E=MC²can’t possibly be true as it isn’t in the Bible. If Dawkins comes across as prickly – and I admit that he sometimes does – it is for a reason.

In discussing the Gallup poll, Dawkins concludes that, “This book is necessary”. Which, of course, it is – but necessary for whom? Although I enjoyed the book and learned much from it, it occurred to me that perhaps I was not best placed to benefit from its erudition. For me the question of whether we are evolved or created beings was settled long ago. Ideally a book like The Greatest Show on Earth should be read by the 44% who believe we descended from Adam and Eve. Here, however, we have a problem.

One of the favourite tactics of creationists is the setting up of a false dichotomy between religion and science. Telling religious people that they must choose between Darwin or God is offering them no choice at all. Unfortunately Dawkins inadvertently plays into their hands here – his reputation as the world’s most vocal non-believer means it is easy for people to equate evolution with atheism, and therefore to resist it with all their intellectual and emotional fibre. Those who would benefit most from reading his book are, therefore, among the least likely to read it. The 44% of respondents to the Gallup poll are as unlikely to pick up Dawkins’ book as I am of converting to Islam. His reputation doth proceed him.

This is a shame, as Dawkins is as articulate and passionate an advocate of evolution as one could wish for, and this book, like his previous work, readily displays his skill in getting across complicated scientific ideas to the non-specialist. Although his irritation with creationists is – at times to the book’s detriment – never far from the surface (“If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity”), his writing is never less than lucid and on occasion raises to the brilliant (describing the publication of the first edition of On the Origin of the Species as “the one that thumped the Victorian solar plexus and drove out the wind of centuries” being perhaps my favourite example). At its most thoroughgoing – as in the chapters on radiometric dating and embryology – it is easy to get lost in the labyrinthine nature of the subject (I mentally marked these for a rereading). Dawkins’ passion for his discipline cannot be doubted: the book’s description of Richard Lenski’s ground-breaking work with E. coli, for instance,is practically a love-letter to experimentation.

Where The Greatest Show on Earth succeeds best is in its power to cast new light on a much explored subject; to make even those who are already acquainted with the rudiments of evolutionary biology think again about the theory’s immense explanatory power. In a chapter entitled ‘History Written All Over Us’ Dawkins takes us through what has sometimes been termed ‘unintelligent design’; that is, those oddities and ‘mistakes’ in our biology that point to evolutionary tinkering and improvisation rather than a designer operating with forethought. The mammalian eye, which is unfailingly held up by creationists as a miracle so profound as to deny a naturalistic explanation, is a notorious and pertinent example. The photocells that make up our retina face away from the light source, while the nerves that connect those cells to the brain point towards the incoming light, resulting in a retina that is covered by a tangled mesh of nerves through which any photons must first penetrate before the brain can turn this information into vision. Because of this back-to-front wiring we are left with a blind-spot where the nerves are gathered and bunched into the optic nerve. The eye of the squid, by way of contrast, contains no such flaws. If the inefficiencies of such a system are blatantly obvious to a mere human observer, then they ought to have come to the attention of any intelligent designer (or, as Dawkins puts it with characteristic bluntness, “it’s not just bad design, it’s the design of a complete idiot”).

Building on this and other examples, Dawkins, in one of the book’s best passages, makes a wonderful point about the illusion of design that, like all brilliant ideas, seems somehow both blindingly obvious and profoundly unexpected:

…When we look at animals from the outside, we are overwhelmingly impressed by the elegant illusion of design. A browsing giraffe, a soaring albatross, a diving swift, a swooping falcon, a leafy sea dragon invisible among the seaweed, a sprinting cheetah at full stretch after a swerving, pronking gazelle – the illusion of design makes such intuitive sense that it becomes a positive effort to put critical thinking into gear and overcome the seductions of naïve intuition. That’s when we look at an animal from the outside. When we look inside, the impression is the opposite. Admittedly, an impression of elegant design is conveyed by the simplified diagrams in textbooks, neatly laid out and colour-coded like an engineer’s blueprint. But the reality that hits you when you see an animal opened up on a dissecting table is very different. I think it would be an instructive exercise to ask an engineer to draw an improved version of, say, the arteries leaving the heart. I imagine the result would be something like the exhaust manifold of a car, with neat lines of pipes coming off in orderly array, instead of the haphazard mess that we actually see when we open a real chest.

My purpose in spending a day with the anatomists dissecting a giraffe was to study the recurrent laryngeal nerve as an example of evolutionary imperfection. But I soon realised that, where imperfection is concerned, the recurrent laryngeal is just the tip of the iceberg. The fact that it takes such a long detour drives the point home with peculiar force…But the overwhelming impression you get from surveying the innards of a large animal is that it is a mess! Not only would a designer never have made a mistake like that nervous detour; a decent designer would never have perpetrated anything of the shambles that is the criss-crossing maze of arteries, veins, nerves, intestines, wads of fat and muscle, mesenteries and more.

There is, indeed, grandeur in this view of life. As the (deeply religious) Russian biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. What a shame, then, that large swaths of American society (and a significant minority of Europeans) lack both the intelligence and imagination to incorporate the wonders of evolutionary biology into their theological worldview alongside their fellow Christians such as Dobzhansky. If God exists, then evolution must count among His finest work. To deny the reality of evolution therefore seems – even to an old heathen like me – an exercise in sacrilege. The truth, alas, is not democratic. Even if the determined efforts of the creationist lobby were to succeed in their attempts to banish evolution from the classroom, this would change nothing. “Evolution is a fact,” writes Dawkins, “Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.” That millions of people have yet to accept they have already lost this argument says more about mankind’s seemingly limitless capacity for self-deception and grand delusion than it does about the nature of the scientific endeavour.

In the face of a highly-motivated, well-financed, and well-connected PR campaign to obscure and obfuscate the reality of evolution, all one can really hope to do is seek to persuade and enlighten where one can. As with the political and moral arena, this can be done in the living room and the street as much as in the law courts. As with the political and moral arena, such efforts will be lost on the literal, dogmatic and inflexible, who are (almost by definition) incapable of changing their minds whatever evidence is presented to them. Those who have the capacity for reflexive and disinterested thought, on the other hand, are halfway there, and remain the most receptive potential audience for the elegance of evolution, and the beauty of life’s shared ancestry. Though The Greatest Show on Earth, for all its style, wit, and erudition, is unlikely to win any converts in the short term, it is nonetheless a welcome contribution to a debate that should have ended in 1859, but shows no signs of going extinct.