The A Bomb

Trump has concerned himself recently with nuclear weapons detonated in tests in an Asian peninsula. But when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico it did so with the force of ten Hiroshimas being released every second on a US territory in the Carribean. As the mayor of San Juan begs for the lives of her citizens, the devastation is plain to see. Puerto Rico is a bomb site.

The extent to which this device was man-made is a subject for scientific approximation. The intensification of hurricanes like Irma and Maria has been estimated to be 40% due to anthropogenic climate change: warmer water at greater depths means the injection of energy into these weather systems continues longer than previously. The rate at which category 5 hurricanes occur has increased concommitantly.

But that's not even the principal source of the devastation I allude to by my reference to an "A Bomb." On this occasion A stands for Apathy. As Sarah Kendzior describes in her familiar magisterial prose, Puerto Rico's catastrophe is compounded by the effects of an Apathy Bomb whose origin is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue rather than Pyongyang. Trump has shown by inaction that he simply doesn't care about the lives of the US citizens of Puerto Rico affected by this hurricane.

But the effects of this Apathy Bomb are much more widespread. They are felt across the world. There is an abdication of responsibility which has rarely been seen in a democracy, an abdication of responsibility that is most often accompanied by the cynical exploitation of authority by criminal despots who are indifferent to everything other than their own interests. On this occasion A also stands for Accountability, which now also lies in ruins as much as the infrastructure of Puerto Rico.

And if Trump is not held accountable for his indifference it is not just his abdication of responsibility with which we should be concerned. We should recognise an abdication of the democratic responsibility of the electorate that put him in office. In a democracy the buck stops with them.

The Apathy Bomb that has destroyed Puerto Rico may include the last illusions of American democracy among its casualties, as the people acquiesce to the despotic caprice of their president in a way that would be inconceivable in an age of democratic accountability.

Hierarchy of needs

I was thinking of writing up a cosmic Maslow,
a hierarchy with a bit more cosmos in its scope,
a hierarchy of needs with a bit more undertow,
and so I came up with this little list below:

oblivion,
inheritance,
conception,
birth,
survival,
stability,
death,
succession,
immortality,
oblivion.

But then I thought:

love,

just love;

because people lock from the inside.
They close off when their dignity is denied,
and we are all implicated in that crime.
Their gut tells them: all laughs are at their expense;
our fellowship could only ever be a pretence,
a suspicion from which they have no defence,
and they think they'll never know the reason why,
and the world seems to be just passing them by.
Their peer group seems an impenetrable clique
they cannot crack, despite how hard they seek
to be initiated into its watchwords and mysteries,
let alone satisfy some elaborate hierarchy of needs,
and so they lock themselves away inside.
They close the door and curl up and hide.
It's the only way they know how to survive,

except for love,

just love,

because the world locks from the inside.
We feel we're trapped because it's finite.
The sky seems flat, and the orbits of lonely planets,
the scintillations of long dead stars, have no point
beyond the empty iteration of an order that reveals
only the deeper chaos from which it is retrieved,
an unavoidable void for which we stand witness,
and nothing can rescue miracles from the meaningless

except for love,

just love,

so, love is the key.

Love unlocks the mystery.

Love is all you need.

Fish out of water

Strange companions
share your dry stone pool:

Z-rod and V-rod; comb and mirror;
wolf and whale; serpent and crescent;

horse and rider in perfect profile,
the affectation of dispensing with stirrups
in emulation of those foreign emperors
whose cupidity and presumption
our forebears fought off long ago
yet another irony lost upon us

as we admire the craftsmanship,
the contours, incisions, the relief,
that catch you, the symbol-salmon,
no longer able to swim and swerve
over gravel beds strewn with boulders
arranged and eroded by glacier and flood
ten millennia hence, to leap and launch yourself
through cataracts of impossible airborne time,
escaping the grimace and gritted teeth
of the warriors in pursuit,

who share your fate now time is less fluid
upon a boulder quarried and carved by man,
a surface that knows rain instead of river,
and the cloudy time-lapse smirr,
the clanjamfrie of centuries of spectators
who marvel without understanding,
each peeling their thin glimpse of you
from the membrane of stone to which you cling
rubbing you smoothe with fumbled curiosity

and whatever wisdom there is in that
is held within the secret silence of the stone.

The well

As boys we sat at the edge of the village well
and flicked pebbles into the cool shadow of its shaft
waiting to hear them reach the bottom. We waited.

We waited. The sun shuttled between the solstices
and Eratosthenes tossed those in the well at Syene too
at the height of Summer. Time passed. No sound,

and as we waited, in the full mirage of our youth
the well slowly filled with the shadows of all the words
we did not say, and every pebble became a poem,

falling, and we waited. A butterfly was the pinkie hinge
upon which all our years' vagrant seasons swung,
a miracle of reckless yet enduring delicacy,

of weightless fragility. Early autumn held its breath,
teaching us in silence what cannot be learned
from all the world's loud boasts of strength,

and in the evening the equinox stood at the door,
pausing, searching through his bundle of keys
for the one which unlocks winter, and turned it.

Lightning briefly cracked the sky apart
and for a moment, through the crack, we caught a glimpse
of the light of better worlds, where butterflies are from,

and imagined our pebbles, falling, and as they fell,
growing, accreting mass, becoming planets lost to an orbit
through darkness deeper than any well, and we waited,

and imagined ourselves growing older, accumulating years
in silence, and when we died we imagined ourselves buried
in the cold earth of those planets, falling through space,

and now it is our turn to fall, through the cold grave
and into the bottomless darkness, and as we fall
through the silence of all the words we never said

we realise the only thing we have when all else is discarded
is the fragile love between us, as we wait in the sunshine,
wait in the full mirage of our youth, in silence, by the well.

Discovery

In so many aspects of life just now we seem to be stuck firmly in reverse.

I was watching a rerun of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation the other day. Although set in the far future, science fiction adopts the ethics of when it is made. These might be values shared by its protagonists, or assumptions challenged by the kind of counterexamples science fiction permits. However they are manifested, they express the values of the programme makers.

When I was watching TNG I was struck by how far we have regressed from the ethics it reflected. I was shocked to realise the set of assumptions it expresses regarding tolerance, conflict resolution, personal development, the purpose of collective endeavour, all seem less secure now than when it was first shown.

Our values today, even after the short period of normalised decline that has elapsed since Trump and Brexit were endorsed by the popular vote, seem constrained, narrower, more shrill, less accommodating. I feel we would have to argue today for positions we all shared and took for granted back then.

It's as if we have reverted back to the '70s, or worse, like we are Buck Rogers, but instead of being accelerated to some utopian future, have fallen back through time 500 years from the 25th century to a more barbaric age. It's like Superman has done that thing where he flies so fast against the Earth's rotation he reverses it, except he has not bothered to turn it back again.

Like people have forgotten retro-chic is just about style, fashion, music, and are trying to turn back the clock on morality, values, and all the tiny, excruciating increments of progress that took decades to achieve.

Do we really have to fight all these battles again? Have we really landed unwittingly on the wrong square in historical snakes and ladders. Have we really drawn the Go To Jail card? Do not pass go. Go straight to fascism, homophobia and misogyny. Do not collect several centuries of progress and enlightenment.

I feel like it's like that moment in a conversation when the person who has been smiling and nodding in agreement while you exposit says something in reply that reveals they have not understood a thing you've said, and have taken you to mean the exact opposite of what you believe, and are agreeing with an opinion you abhor.

It's like that moment when Pam Ewing wakes up to find Bobby in the shower. Except Bobby here is Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or some other harbinger of doom. Several seasons of progress seem not to have happened. We were asleep the whole time.

Now we've woken up to find ourselves in a Captain Kirk universe, and Picard was just a dream.

Ironic that the new Star Trek series is another prequel.

Maybe we need to remember that one of the first science fiction stories, "The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells, was a dystopia, that progress can never be taken for granted and does not occur as consequence of natural processes, but requires our continual collective efforts. 

There was an Old Labour that swallowed a lie

There was an Old Labour that swallowed a lie.
I don't know why she swallowed the lie.
Perhaps she'll die. 

There was an Old Labour that swallowed a liar
that wriggled and giggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the liar to catch the lie.
I don't know why she swallowed the lie.
Perhaps she'll die. 

There was an Old Labour that lied until hoarse.
She's dead of course.

There is none with neck so brass as those who offer to solve the problem they themselves caused without taking any responsibility for causing it.

PFI? The Scotland Act? Equal Pay? The Scottish rail network franchise? Labour's response is to offer nothing but lies, denial and obfuscation, as they dodge the blame and claim the credit for other people's ideas.

Labour in Scotland only has one principle, and that is power. The moral high ground is, for them, merely territory that must be seized, merely real estate, and "socialism" is merely the stake with which they make that claim. The reflex to every challenge is lies and denial, even when there is a constructive option available. 

They will seek political advantage at the expense of genuine solutions to real problems if necessary. We have seen they will even find common cause with fascist thugs if it serves the purposes of their unionism. In any meaningful respect they are merely the lying face of the British state in Scotland, and nothing more. 

The heist

You are accomplice to your own overthrow,
handing me keys to your private vault,
not to help me commit an act of theft,
but because it locks from the outside
and you yearn to be shut away within
its confines, fitting tight your lip and limb,
kept hidden by me, my secret obsession,
tucked in a corner of my heart unknown
to anatomies described in other poems.
I ache to make your heart entire and whole,
trapping you like an undiscovered pearl
by stealing you, even if that breaks the world's

Fat lady

She may as well be mute,

she may as well be deaf,

because for you, this fat lady don't sing,

and this fat lady ain’t goin’ on no diet,

and this fat lady ain't goin’ to let you

call her fat no more!

This fat lady's gonna dance til dawn!

And if you want to dance to this kind of blues

you’d better wear your steel-toed dancin’ shoes

The net

The net was patched and mended

so many times, over so many generations,

the original starting knot was lost.

Everything old was new once:

replaced so often, by so many hands,

their various patches overlapping.

And yet the big fish still swam free,

while the old man pointed out his work

to the boy learning needlework on the jetty,

one hand resting on the other, guiding it.
And the big fish would tell them
the only knowledge that endures is love,

but they would have to catch it first,
and that was never going to happen,
and so the net was patched and mended.  

The vortex

"I find it curious that so many Scottish Nationalists seem to find a greater affinity with Catalonian seperatists than the people of Tyneside, Yorkshire or Merseyside."

Kevin Hague 

"There are no foreigners in Scotland. Where you’re from is interesting, but if you are here, you’re one of us. That’s our values." 

Alyn Smith MEP

If I glance down at my jacket just now I can see I am wearing a number of badges. I have: a raptor I got when donating to the RSPB; a rainbow Yes 2 badge that was handed to me in the street; a Harris Gin "H" I got at the distillery in Tarbet; a little Saltire incorporating the twelve stars of the Flag of Europe; multiple overlapping or unrelated affiliations of varying scope and significance.

Boris Johnson's recent remarks that affiliations beyond the UK weaken affiliations within it reveal an attitude that is incompatible with my badge wearing habits. The same attitude is evident in Theresa May's "citizen of nowhere" speech at last year's Conservative Party conference. The UK government clearly believes identity is a zero sum.

They are encouraging a certain kind of British nationalism just now because they believe they can benefit from it. In this vision of Brexit Britain, which we must share or risk being branded traitors or saboteurs, any affiliation to one identity is at the expense of an affiliation to another, and they have stipulated that their vision will be the sole receptacle of our undivided loyalty.

It doesn't matter if the vision is vague or undeliverable, as long as it allows them to declare themselves custodians of "the will of the people." Indeed, the less well defined the vision is the better, as the only essential attribute of this vision is the pretext it provides for demanding loyalty and centralising power. Alternative loci of authority, at sub- and supranational level, in Holyrood and Brussels, are to be liquidated as competitors rather than collaborators.

The problem is, identity is not a zero sum. If we adopt one affiliation we don't have to abandon another. Identity is not some substance that must be subdivided and shared out. It is not a transaction, it is a celebration. It is a starting point, not an end in itself, a way of initiating conversations, not shutting down debate. It is a rioting jungle, not an austere desert, a party, not a vigil. It is promiscuous and profligate and kaleidoscopic and infuriating and exhilarating in its variety. It gently ebbs and flows in our awareness. It does not demand attention. It is what we actually do, not what we should do. It is who we actually are, not who we must pretend to be.

In the sterile vision of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox, and the others in the right wing clique that has captured the British state, there is room for only one badge on my lapel and all others must be swept away and swallowed by the voracious centripetality of their vision. Westminster, the media, the full panoply of the state, is to become a factory. Our identities and affiliations are to be stripped from us and fed to it as raw material from which shiny new lapel pins announcing our proud affiliation to the "will of the people" as embodied in Brexit are to be manufactured and distributed, one for each of us.

And if we decline they will find another symbol for us to wear, for where one identity becomes a vortex that consumes all others we are all diminished and some of us are destroyed.

One thousand days

Three years ago today the people of Scotland held absolute sovereign power in their hands.

For one fleeting moment, as we stood in the polling booth, pencil poised over the ballot paper, the direction of our country was entirely at our discretion. Our ancient popular sovereignty briefly held sway again, in which no rank exceeds the first among equals, and every voice is heard.

We temporarily abdicated that power that day, as we slipped our ballots into the ballot box to return a "No" verdict. We declined the chance to become Independent once more, and the moment had passed. At the brink of the precipice we hesitated, and instead of spreading our wings, our future stalled.

It remains in free-fall.  

Because since then the promises that were made to induce us to vote as we did have been broken. The Vow has become a bad joke. The United Kingdom we voted to remain part of has ceased to exist.

Instead we are thirled to a state that has become a stage for opportunistic charlatans to strut on, exposing us to the excruciating embarrassment of their grotesque parody of our highest principles, simple precepts that are nevertheless far beyond their powers of comprehension, as they subordinate good governance to their most banal personal ambitions.

As we contemplate the spectacle being made of the United Kingdom by those who persuaded us to remain part of it with their lies, we must surely be reconsidering the decision we made three years ago. We have waited over a thousand days since the last time we expressed ourselves on this subject at the ballot box, and more has happened in that intervening time that was imagined by those who sought to convince us with their predictions.

But in nearly a thousand days time we will commemorate another anniversary. It will be 700 years since the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath. Let us make sure by then we have expressed ourselves once more, and on that occasion give sounder testimony that will stand the test of time beside that document recording our ancient popular sovereignty as we celebrate its anniversary.

World's end

Beneath a slate-shod hoof

the low grey sky drums hard upon my roof

with heavy horseshoe rain from galloping clouds,

not the smirry mist,

not the brief gentle beneficence of Eden,

that awakens us to the presence

of a world wider than our senses,

not our dear Scottish dilution of the light

which we drink with our whole face

as we step outdoors each morning,

into the exploded cold sauna of smirr

that obscures the immediate to permit the infinite,

interrupting the world and allowing absence,

bestowing on us an easy and on-going baptism

that makes us known to no-one, to nowhere,

or everywhere all at once,

no, this rain is the grim window-melting deluge

that pours itself over the glass

and distorts the view into a gargoyle wall

of a continually warping world,

the trench-filling drench, harbinger

of the relentless mud-siege that destroys

the once fragile bright chill clarity of Autumn,

of October, that brought us rumours of distant bustle,

whispering Sunday morning traffic from the other side of town

refracted down in the dry clear strata of its temperature inversions

sifted between its shifting plate glass sheets of still air

sliding like rarefied, breathable ice over the fields

to reach us in our magnificent indifference,

as we loitered in the rioting dishevelment of our duvet,

indolently listening to the attenuated whisper,

the faintest hiss and fizz of drifting silence

filtered through the brittle sandy air

preserved on the other side of the bedroom window,

evidence of a thousand distant conversations

and car journeys, all bleached and mingled

emptied of content, stripped of context, detoxed

by the benign homeopathy of air and space.

It was an utterance unburdened of meaning,

which we listened to without any effort or attempt to understand

and it might have been inviting us nowhere

or everywhere, this sound without significance.

Now I stand confined

behind the continuously melting glass

watching my garden dissolve indefinitely

and at the same time inwardly observe,

contained within my air-tight bell-jar heart,

my rose-lipped love speak soft and secretly slow

imparting what lovers know:

weather passes, seasons return,

love once borne forever burns,

the faithful sun remains

beyond the grief of dreich drab days.

The dawn of hope will never fail.

O my sweet deceptive Niemandsrose of Rilke and Celan

that grows from pulse-tilled soil of the heart,

springs like a weed between those furrows in time,

in the silent stillness between its beats

and steals its blush from blood as it retreats,

I read your lips as the vacuum is pulled in your chamber,

your pouting petals falling with final syllables

as sound itself suffocates.

Lips that whispered words from nowhere are silent.

Eye-lids that concealed the dreams of no-one

open at last to reveal the author of those dreams.

Outside the bare trees stoop under the burden

of all the winters of this flood-filled world

and suddenly I am surrounded and alone,

an island entire of myself, an isolation,

a bubble.

Stranded and quick-sanded on this final shore,

I prune the driftwood beard of idle time, and perform

the endless coin toss of paradox and axiom

by which all truths have hitherto been reckoned,

balancing on the event horizon of my mind,

while paralysed trees stand with outstretched arms

in a desperate final freeze-frame effort

to catch their vanished leaves,

retrieve them from the brisk breeze-theft

of the now sharp and empty arid ice-combed air

of my deflating world.

No everywhere and nowhere anymore,

only somewhere sad.

The solstice stalls, the seasons fail to resuscitate,

even prayers cannot defibrillate the day,

and stale, dwindling hours decline and decay

until a dark and sunless dawn drains the sky of stars

and nothing moves upon the waters any more.

Hope has escaped all that astronomy can hurl

at the stark and starless darkness of my dim end of the world,

and the telescope is itself a bar in a glass cage

where I remember Autumn,

and the evidence of others.

"Chaos is a ladder"

Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: "The realm. Do you know what the realm is? It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over, until we forget that it's a lie." 

Lord Varys: "But what do we have left, once we abandon the lie? Chaos? A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all." 

Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: "Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb. They refuse. They cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is."

"Strength through purity, purity through faith"

Brexit, and the series of measures it has entrained, has placed us in a situation where government ministers will now no longer resign, or be sacked, as a matter of public democratic accountability. They will now only go as a consequence of petty internecine rivalry, as casualties of the private ambitions fulfilled by public office. The absurdities of Brexit have drained the possibility of public service from high office. Only the opportunities it presents for the advancements of personal careers remain as motives amenable to rational analysis and effective execution. This is corroding our political culture and surrendering it to charlatans whose vanity the state now exists to serve.

The Westminster government is incoherent as a result. This extends far beyond the demands of Brexit. The policy void and shambolic paralysis of services evident in our response to everything from Grenfell to Irma follow from this. And Brexit itself is only a consequence of a malaise that has slowly engulfed us over a longer period of time.

We are thirled to a dangerously vague and self-contradictory dogma now, one whose only practical purpose can be to serve as an altar at which to offer supplication prior to being initiated into its mysteries. As with every ill-defined doctrine amenable to multiple interpretations, the most successful sects are the most extreme, those who can exploit the most severe and exclusive purity tests as instruments of their intrigues.

"Taking back control"

"Taking back control" is becoming a ritual of self-flagellation, and those who hesitate to take up the lash are condemned as heretics. The acute embarrassment we now feel abroad, the economic pain we feel at home, and the abhorrence with which we observe the treatment of our friends, family and colleagues who do not qualify as sufficiently British to be accepted in the increasingly shrill, racist and delusional visions of a Utopian Brexit future, are all elements in the mortification of our flesh.

The question must be asked: is the damage now irreversible? Have we descended too far into the conditions in which fascism will thrive? Are we in blood stepped in so far that, should we wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er? Have we crossed the Rubicon?

The naked executive power grab that is the Repeal Bill that has just passed its second reading; the allocation of majorities to the minority party of government on the parliamentary committees scrutinising it; the withdrawal of government from opposition day debates: all seem shocking developments, only made possible by the quasi-emergency of Brexit, in the same way the enabling of a minority government was made possible by a state of emergency in 1933 in Germany, or a new authoritarian constitution was adopted more recently in Turkey.

But this Rubicon was always visible. For decades we have thought we moved parallel to its banks, while in reality we were approaching it inexorably. We should not now be surprised to find its waters lapping about our ankles.

When public servants are motivated only by private ambition, as ours now are, they become the instruments of the corporate interests that would reward them. But the legitimacy of private ambition and its priority over public service in our politics has been carefully cultivated for decades in a society in which personal consumption is prioritised over civic responsibility.

The democratic intellect has been stupefied. The rights reflex, our instinctive understanding of when we are being exploited rather than respected, has been numbed. This is a consequence of decades of consumer gratification, decades of a diet of shiny sweet stimulation without substance.

This has corroded the very language we can use to discuss the situation we find ourselves in. For example, last year Britons voted to "take back control," but their understanding of "control" has been narrowed through decades of indulgence, in which an irresponsible disregard for collective obligations has left all "choice" a fundamentally meaningless individual preference for one of a number of options ultimately outwith our control, a function of slavery rather than freedom, as we sit within the flat screen walls of our consumerist prison cells, tapping the deranged Morse of our infatuation on the screens of our mobile phones rather than engaging in meaningful debate and common endeavour, during the commute to the jobs that consume all our creative energies and excrete their outcome as dividends deposited in Caribbean tax havens for the benefit of plutocrats who despise us.

"The fight for universal principles"

Universalism is a basic assumption of the meaningful common endeavours exercised by free people such as democracy. Not just universal human rights, but acceptance of common perspectives, of the ability to understand and shares the perspectives of others with respect to the incomplete information on which we have to base our deliberations, and the ability to inform the priorities our deliberations serve with compassion towards all who participate in or are affected by them.

Democracy cannot function in the context of relativism, where contradictory opinions can be considered equally valid for those who hold them, where decisions can be based on matters of personal preference and taste without reference to rational opinion based on the logically auditable appraisal of verifiable evidence. The inevitable outcome of that, as has been understood since antiquity, is that "might is right," the cult of personality, and an authoritarianism that is accepted as redemption for our individual tendencies towards stupidity and selfishness.

But the only universalism people have been allowed to understand are the universal rights of corporations to strip mine, to clear cut to access the raw materials needed to fabricate all the shiny sweet distractions we now crave, to manufacture these in workplaces in which deliberately localised pay and conditions are subordinated to the company's universal right to make money.

We are invited to be stupid. We are invited to be selfish. We are discouraged from any effort to understand or to think of others. The very relativism that aborts democracy is openly advocated, even while the terms of that relativism undermine its own validity. This is because it invites the chaos that makes our manipulation easy. We are offered the freedom to not be free, to subscribe to limited options prepared for us in advance, to stifle our imagination and dream only of worlds imagined for us by professional liars employed by the advertising and public relations agencies retained by corporate interests.

We are taught to think of democracy as achievable only as a product of corporate universalism, as though it was a service we all have access to, like cable, at a price, and that price is the surrender of all other human-centred universalisms that compete with corporate priorities.

But democracy is not some capitalist product or service. Perhaps the way to revive democracy is to stop pretending we all share the same quality of democracy. Each of us lives in a democracy only to the extent we as individuals are prepared to participate in it. You and the person in front of you in the queue for a coffee only inhabit the same country to the extent you both, as individuals, are commited to the common endeavour of evaluating information and arriving at rational judgements about how to fulfil the compassionate objectives necessary to contribute to that country's democratic decisions. As Paul Mason has observed, "the fight for universal principles has to begin [...] with individual people."

The New Thucydides

Where will this all lead? Perhaps we need to dust off our Thucydides and reconsider the fall of the great exemplar of democracy that was Periclean Athens during the πεντηκονταετία. We will find striking parallels to our own situation in the era of Trump and Brexit.

Consider a democracy established after victory in a great war against a powerful autocrat against the odds (The Persian Empire / The Axis powers).

An alliance (The Delian League / NATO) is formed with a single dominant partner (Athens / USA) against a monolithic enemy (The Persian Empire / USSR ). This alliance is legitimised by the universal values (democracy and human rights) which it is claimed it has been set up to defend.

The alliance begins to fragment under the strain of its own internal imbalances and contradictions. War and appeals to militarism ensue (Sparta / the "War against Terror"). Military disaster (The Syracuse Expedition / The Iraq War(s) etc.) occurs. Financial disaster occurs (the fiscal burden of the Athenian fleet combined with loss of revenues / the financial crisis of 2008).

Democracy is eroded by corruption and prominent individuals colluding with the enemy (Alcibiades / Trump's Russian entanglements). Eventually democracy collapses through a coup of oligarchs to preserve their property during financial crisis (The 400 / the present crisis of democracy).

After total military collapse (Aegospotami) a brutal dictatorship sponsored by the enemy (the Thirty Tyrants) is installed. Let's hope we can avoid that this time round.

The Democratic Intellect

Things like the Yes Movement in Scotland, its equivalent in Catalonia, movements that invite people to scrutinise and think about their circumstances, assume a global significance when we see them as part of the process of citizen re-engagement necessary to preserve democracy against the chaos that is now unfolding around us. The Brexiteers in Britain, the core support for Trump in the USA, and similar voices elsewhere, claim to give voice to the "will of the people," and now more than ever it is vital the democratic intellect makes itself heard over its strident cry.

"Winter is coming"

All the while "winter is coming": the hot winter of climate change. And it will take all our combined capabilities as a democracy to understand the challenge and articulate and expedite an effective response.

The end of a new song

Today is the 20th anniversary of the vote to establish the Scottish Parliament. After a hiatus of 290 years, parliamentary democracy, undiluted by the toxic indifference and deliberate disregard of a discredited Westminster system, was to be restored to Scotland at Holyrood. If 1707 was "ane end of ane auld sang," as the Earl of Seafield had remarked at the time, in 1997 we had a new song to sing.

That Holyrood parliament is today under greater threat than at any other time over the intervening 20 years between then and now. There is now a risk that we may be present at the end of that new song too.

Brexit has set in motion a process concentrating power once more in Westminster. Powers repatriated from Brussels should reside by default at Holyrood. The Scotland Act makes clear those which are not explicitly reserved to Westminster are devolved. But as was also made clear by the UK Supreme Court in its ruling on the 24th of January, the Scotland Act is not worth the paper it is written on. As I pointed out in the article "point of order," this exposes the entire charade of the British state.

The Law Society of Scotland have themselves expressed concern about the Westminster power grab. Graham Matthews, President of the Law Society of Scotland, has said: “The effect of the [EU Withdrawal Bill currently being debated at Westminster] would be to remove the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament in relation to any matter in retained EU law." During First Minister's Questions on the 7th of September Nicola Sturgeon said the bill would “re-reserve powers” to the UK Government without consultation with the Scottish Parliament.

But more significantly than that, Brexit dismantles a set of international obligations that compelled Westminster to acquiesce to a Scottish consensus regarding autonomy in the first place. The principle of subsidiarity forms the basis on which Spanish autonomous communities, German Länder, and similar politicial configurations are reflected in European political structures. The UK's withdrawal from Europe means principles and protocols regarding subsidiarity need no longer be respected. Every understanding with Europe regarding Scottish autonomy carefully developed between the 1979 and 1997 referenda will be consigned to oblivion.

This is part of a long-term plan to abolish the Scottish Parliament. The process is already underway. Kite's are being flown, as in recent polling reported in the Times. Brexit will deliver powers to Westminster and free it from the international obligations thet would prevent it from abolishing Holyrood. Once Westminster has finished taking back control from Brussels, it will take back control from Edinburgh, and our new song will come to an end too, if we let it.

If we are not Independent by March 2019, we will be fighting, not for Independence, but to preserve what little autonomy we already have.

The democratic intellect

I hesitate to write this because it seems obvious, but events suggest the point still needs to be made. Perhaps it is one of those points that always needs to be made, no matter how obvious.

When we talk about democracy, we don't always mean the same thing. In particular, there are two things that the word "democracy" is commonly used to describe that are quite distinct, and the distinction between them should be understood by anyone who claims to be a democrat.

We can talk about democracy as a way of making sure the largest number of people get what they want. We ask everyone to express a preference and go with the most popular. We can call this the "will of the people."

Alternatively, we can talk about democracy as a process that engages people in discussion. We ask them to consider evidence, listen to others, and make a decision based, not just on how they each benefit individually, but how we all benefit collectively as a consequence of the outcome. We can call this the "democractic intellect".

The thing is, the "will of the people" and the "democratic intellect" are rarely in agreement, even though we call them both "democracy." So we have to make a choice about how we make our choices.

The "will of the people" can be influenced by anything, not just logic and reason, but fear and prejudice too. It can be manipulated. A given democratic expression of "the will of the people" can be declared final by leaders seeking to promote whatever agenda it legitimises on a given occasion indefinitely and without further scrutiny. Every dictator in history has come to power defending the "will of the people."

The "democratic intellect" presumes people are open to persuasion, and for this reason, a decision based on this process is likely, but not certain, to be the right thing to do. It is a process for trying to make that likelihood as high as possible, just as the "will of the people" makes the number of people whose preference is reflected in the outcome as high as possible. Do we give people what they want right now, or give people a chance to decide what is right for the time being? They are not the same thing.

The "democratic intellect" recognises that all democratic decisions are provisional and reversible: that information is incomplete, priorities change, and people are fallible. No-one has all the pieces of the puzzle. Anyone can get things wrong.

That's the price we pay for the possibility of getting things right. The "will of the people" is an abdication of reason, an act of intellectual cowardice, a retreat from the challenge only the "democratic intellect" can meet. The "democratic intellect" expects more of us than its alternative, but its rewards are commensurate. It requires compassion and humility. We listen to learn rather than to reply. It is only by running the risk of being wrong that we stand a chance of being right.  

So it is important to cultivate the art of disagreement. History is kinder to those who explored the different ways they could be wrong than it is to those we were certain they were right. The societies that survive are those that learn to live with a multitude of voices interacting in democratic polyphony. The societies that perish are those that attempt to impose on those voices a spurious unison. Where the "will of the people" finds contradiction and obstacles, the "democratic intellect" finds collaboration and a journey.

There are those who say that one person's wrong is another's right, we are all shackled to appetites we can neither understand nor control, and that there is no universal set of criteria on which we can base a collective decision of the "democratic intellect," therefore the most that can be achieved by democracy is a matter of preference rather than opinion. But their position does not survive the application of their own argument to itself, to which the 20th century gives costly testimony.

If this is obvious, why do I bring it up? Because once again we see the "democratic intellect" struggling to make itself heard over the "voice of the people."

The aims of the Scottish Independence movement are widely misconstrued by its opponents, but there are grounds for common cause with many, if it is not too late. For the Yes Movement has been an articulation, not of the "will of the people," in the way we have seen it hijacked and commandeered by opportunistic charlatans in the name of Brexit, but of the "democratic intellect," and to this extent it has a global and urgent significance, as we face once again the reduction of democracy to a travesty in the name of the "will of the people" by those who have barely reflected on the diverse meanings of the word.

This is why the Yes Movement must not allow disagreement turn into discord. It must celebrate its many voices. It is not a political party. It must see itself as the context in which many parties can contest elections. It must see itself as a celebration of the democratic intellect. And it must become a beacon to those who would see their democracies imbued with a vibrancy that elevates everyone who participates in them, not because of their opinions, but because of how they are argued.

Brexit is not a pizza

There are two incompatible interpretations of democracy between which we should make a clear distinction.

1. The wishes of the majority should be respected because this maximises the amount of respect shown to people's wishes 
2. The wishes of the majority should be respected because people are amenable to rational persuasion, so this will result in a course of action which is more likely to be the right thing to do

Type 1 and Type 2 democracy are not the same thing!

Type 1 is perfectly legitimate if you are, for example, choosing the toppings on a pizza to share with your friends. In matters of taste, or where people's preference is not really up for debate, a Type 1 poll is perfectly appropriate. Not all matters are addressable by the careful consideration of evidence, logic, and priorities. But where the issue at stake is a matter for discussion, a Type 1 poll closes down debate prematurely and imposes a totally spurious finality on the outcome.

Only Type 2 democracy fundamentally requires that participants follow a process for

• Logical appraisal of evidence, 
• Identification of where information is incomplete, 
• Discussion of different perspectives and priorities with other participants, 
• Anticipation of potential consequences and outcomes and their ramifications, and
• Evaluation of these possibilities with reference to shared sets of priorities and values.   

Crucially, only Type 2 democracy recognises decisions as provisional and reversible. As David Davis himself once observed, "a democracy that cannot change its mind is not a democracy at all."

The finality of a Type 1 decision allows the "manufacture of consent" because the outcome is not necessarily subject to continued scrutiny. It can be final. Only Type 1 allows rhetoric about "the will of the people" to be introduced, as though this somehow meant the discussion was closed. Trying to use "the will of the people" as some sort of clincher would appear ridiculous in the context of Type 2 deliberations.

Lately we have witnessed a lot of Type 1 democracy. It is my belief Type 2 democracy is both possible and preferable. This is basically the belief that we can rise above the influence of the Cambridge Analyticas of the world, that we can overcome all efforts to manipulate us given sufficient time to fact-check evidence and compare notes and contemplate what our shared objectives are.

There is a third type of course, Type 0, the absence of democracy. Under these circumstances people are not considered capable of rational evaluation of evidence, or recognition of the incompleteness of the information available to them, of the existence of multiple points of view based on that incomplete information, and the need to be respectful and compassionate, to listen to learn rather than reply, to accept one's own fallibility and that everyone is doing the best that they can at any given time. These are characteristics of Type 2 democracy. This is the opposite of Type 0.

Under Type 0 conditions people are considered to be irrational: basically stupid, selfish and incapable of acting in the common good without coercion. They require a charismatic, authoritarian leader who can redeem their stupidity and selfishness with his insight and wisdom and benevolence. There is no need to scrutinise the leader's activities as they are beyond our understanding anyway. Facts and logic no longer matter, other than as interchangeable tokens devoid of any real meaning or significance: totems around which to rally; badges to identify yourself as a member of the in-group; rituals of supplication to the mysterious greater good entrusted to the leader; emblems of submission to the "will of the people."

The problem with Type 1 democracy is that when it is applied to situations that require Type 2 deliberation it can be used as a stepping stone to a Type 0 solution instead. When people feel both responsible for their situation but powerless to change it, this Type 0 solution can be a tempting way to abdicate the responsibility to think for oneself.

The ultimate beneficiaries of a Type 0 solution, who are not the people but the corporate interests who happen to find the charismatic leader and his followers useful, will always try to push democracy from a Type 2 to a Type 1 formulation. They will promote rhetoric in their newspapers and websites and broadcast media that invites people to consider their decisions in Type 1 terms, as a matter of irrational consumer preference expressed in a final definitive choice rather than a carefully limited and circumscribed rational assessment subject to re-evaluation.

When you find yourself being invited to treat a rational decision as though it was a matter of personal preference rather than a provisional outcome of discussion and appraisal of evidence relative to well defined values, priorities and objectives, just remember: Brexit is not a pizza!

Temperament

 

"for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study"

Last night András Schiff gave a truly engrossing account of Book 1 of Das Wohltemperiertes Klavier at the Proms.

He commenced with the C major prelude, adopting a relatively fast tempo and resisting the temptation to play with an expressiveness that would be premature with the prelude played in context. I was reassured that he had a plan.

At the conclusion of the C# minor fugue it was clear this would be a memorable performance. The structure of the overall collection was being presented, rather than a series of performances of individual preludes and fugues. The initial exposition of Bach's concerns, universal in scope, always immediate, profound, urgent and compelling, is not complete until the shock and mystery of the coda of this, the 8th item in the collection.

And at this pivotal moment Schiff paused, and in that moment of silence everyone present understood the journey he was taking us on. And then, after all had recovered from the spiritual exertions of the C# minor fugue, he commenced with the miraculous, joyful, luminous, innocent, unselfconscious child at play that is the D major prelude, and proceeded to reiterate and elaborate and explore Bach's fundamental concerns over the tonal epicyles of the remaining items.

Even temperament itself is an act of trespass upon the Creator, who ordained a sequence of harmonics in nature that does not permit the system of tonality of which this piece is the first complete expression. Bach himself tuned his own instruments in order to ensure he could modulate with ease to the most remote keys. In Book 2 there is no Eb minor prelude because this is enharmonic with D# minor on an instrument tuned by Man rather than God.

In the 48 Preludes and Fugues, Bach is playing chess with God, using the only material available to him, which happens to be the sum of human experience, as transmitted to him musically by all his predecessors. But unlike a contest with another human mind, one objective, a critical preliminary, and perhaps the only aim achievable by the human mind, is not to win, but to discern the rules of the game.

As ever, the trick is not in knowing the answer, the trick is in asking the question. The exploration of tonality on which Bach embarks is a manifestation in sound of this quest to disentangle the rules by which we can approach divinity and presume to subject Him to the same degree of scrutiny He imposes on us by means of our finitude and mortality.

This is an intrinsically collaborative endeavour. Bach is not a musical innovator so much as he is an organiser: the history of music up to that point is given its clearest synthesis in his expression of it. And of course, we did not hear Bach perform last night, but Schiff. In the examination of ourselves made possible by this grand project, spanning the centuries, it is possible, on some occasions, such as the performance rendered by Schiff last night, to hear the question Bach is trying to pose on our behalf being articulated.

So does Bach accomplish this? Does he articulate the question? As the final cadence, with all its meticulously and miraculously contrived tonal ambiguity, hung in the air of the Albert Hall last night, Schiff's hands suspended motionless over the keys in a moment of refined ecstasy, and the audience held their breath, we knew that perhaps the greatest achievement the human mind is capable of had been accomplished - the only meaningful question man may place before God had been asked!

And the answer? Imagine, if you will, the first performance of this piece in its entirety, and imagine the sound of the instrument being tuned, of even temperament being restored, heard over the chaos of chatter from the audience during the interval, a period of a few minutes in the concert hall and at the same time a period 20 years of Bach's life between the composition of the first and second collection of 24 preludes and fugues that comprise the 48, before the performer embarks upon the performance of Book 2, perhaps one of the most hopeful documents of human spirituality ever produced.