Links : The Future of Politics

An overdue update.  Have been somewhat uninspired of late.  No good films on at the cinema (or even interesting bad ones) and I've only just wrestled my way through The Yiddish Policeman's Union (of which I thought less than most people apparently... but then I'm not a fan of overly clever novels that don't pay enough attention to the stuff they're trying to be clever with) and have now started on Blood Meridian, which I'm also finding a little dull.  Maybe I'm just not enjoying my reading at the moment.

On the plus side, I was recently informed that my discussion of the Cheney and Sanford debate earned me a quote in the Guardian on saturday.  So welcome all Guardianistas and allow me to wish you all luck in your attempts to transform Britain into a socialist state through such daring direct-action tactics as listening to Coldplay and renting villas in Tuscany.  I'm only joking, I currently read the Guardian (though not closely enough as my mention on Saturday completely passed me by) largely because I found it difficult to take a newspaper such as the Independent seriously when it harps on at great length about unnecessary packaging whilst simultaneously including glossy posters featuring British woodland birds that serve no purpose other than to add to the amount of waste created by British society.

FIRSTLY, Henry Jenkins featured a nice little discussion of the perceived class differences in choices of social media.  Apparently Facebook is where all the jocks and college-bound middle class kids hang out, while MySpace is full of ethnic minorities and people who "don't define themselves by the moral of their parent's generation".  I suspect there's some truth in the article but mostly it strikes me as really quite snobbish.

I don't use social networking sites largely because a) none of my friends do and b) even if they did, I'd have their email addresses anyway.  In fact, I'd completely forgotten I had a Facebook account until someone added me the other day and I logged on and wondered why I'd bothered to even create the thing.  However, whilst looking around I did notice the obvious reason why Facebook would appear more "outgoing" than MySpace and that's because unlike MySpace, which is ultimately built around reaching out to people who like the same stuff you like, Facebook seems to be built around reaching out to people you know in the real world either through work or school.  Indeed, when I signed up to Facebook, the first question they asked me is what schools I'd been to and because I only currently have one friend from my academic days (and I haven't seen him face to face for a year or so), I never bothered to fill them in.  Result?  no friends.

Indeed, unlike MySpace, Facebook is a bit like LinkedIn in that it assumes that your main source of social contacts is what you do in the real world where the main filter for friendship is geography.  Facebook has a similar attitude to friendship as my mother.  I could meet anyone I wanted in the real world and this wouldn't raise any suspicions but if I tell her that I met such and such on a website then immediately I'm told to be wary.  One assumes that this is because the internet is full of paedophiles so voracious that their lust extends to 30-year old over-educated and sarcastic hairy fat guys.  By keeping that foot in the real world. Facebook is more square and more traditional than MySpace where anyone anywhere can surf by your page purely because you're both into the music of Philip Glass.  This is unavoidable given Facebook's roots as an academic site.  However, what really interests me is the extend to which the Facebook/MySpace dichotomy seems to preserve the mainstream/outsider dichotomy of US Highschool life.  If you're on Facebook then you're a jock or a prep but if you're on MySpace you're a geek or an artfag and therefore are doomed to work in fast food.  I think the real dichotomy is in how people choose their friends... is friendship something dictated by geography or by sub-culturally shared conceptions of identity?  I suspect the truth is a bit of both, hence the high number of people who have both types of account.

SECONDLY, THIS nice little article by Tim Adams in the Observer about social attitudes to science and how people seem to be becoming more and more ignorant of science and of scientific thinking.  Interestingly, what the article doesn't mention is the issue of cultural politics and identity.  When Snow was writing, the Two Cultures were the results of early specialisation and streaming in the British education system.  Then, as now, you specialise very early in UK schools.  The National Curriculum ceases to apply once you're 15 and after that you can completely drop artistic or scientific classes.  This lead, over the years, to arty people having nothing but contempt for scientists (something that expressed itself through the science wars in which scientifically-illiterate humanities academics decided to take science to task) and vice versa. 

However, what has happened outside of academia is that the debate has become a political one.  Reacting to the preference in Western states given to the religious viewpoint, the rationalists adopted the language of the oppressed minority and started to complain.  In response, the anti-rationalists such as the religious and mystically-minded, with help from left-wing academia, responded by arguing that any attack upon religious privilege was an act of intolerance and bigotry from a rationalist culture intolerant of minorities.

What I am suggesting is that people are not just poorly educated and ignorant of science; more and more people define themselves in terms of rejecting not only the contents of scientific knowledge but the methods of thought and reasoning used in science and the language surrounding them is not about the correctness of people's beliefs but rather about being tolerant of people's beliefs regardless of how toxic and false they might be.

THIRDLY, one of my favourite genre pieces to appear over the last year or so was Graham Sleight's piece on The West Wing for Strange Horizons, in which he argues that the show is essentially science fiction.  In part this is because the world of The West Wing is not quite ours (no 9/11, elections in the wrong years, wars and events that never happened) and partly because the philosophical axiom upon which the West Wing is built is the same as that of early SF; namely that there is no problem so large that motivated and knowledgeable humans cannot solve it.  The West Wing is about that final frontier between potentiality and actuality and humanity forcing its way over the threshold.

I agree with much of what Sleight writes about but I think it nicely springs into context when you compare the West Wing to its British equivalent, The Thick of It.  When The Thick of It is mentioned, the first name that springs up is Yes, Minister, Jay and Lynn's satirical sitcom about a rudderless junior minister having to continuously battle the obscurantist civil service.  Inspired by the political climate of the time (wherein the Establishment embedded in the civil service warred with the government over who ran the country, as touched upon by Adam Curtis in his recent documentary series The Trap), Yes, Minister did a great job not only of criticising the way the country was run but also of actually informing people how Great Britain actually is run.  Appearing a generation later and the brain-child of Armando Iannucci, the Thick of It not only throws open a few windows and laughs at what it finds, it also manages to be British SF in the same way that The West Wing manages to be American SF.

During the intervening generation between the two series, British governments made great in-roads in stripping powers from the civil service and, through the use of aids and advisors, allowing elected officials to take a far more hands-on approach to how their departments were run.  Indeed, in The Thick of It, the problem is not getting the politics past the civil servants, it's getting anything done at all when the politicians are all obsessed with spin and they all have different ideas about how the country should be run based not only upon their personal beliefs but their need to get one over on a) the opposition and b) their cabinet colleagues.  This tone is perfectly captured in the series' pilot when a successful meeting with The Prime Minister convinces junior minister Hugh Abbott that he has a green light to launch a social security inspection unit (called variously "snooper squad" or "sponge avengers"), leading to a fantastic scene where Abbott listens to his policy being discussed on the news and proclaims "Brilliant!" just as the news turn to the thousands dead in Indian flooding. 

As the series goes on, The Thick of It presents British politicians as self-serving, cowardly, hypocritical, foul-mouthed, childish and spiteful.  In later episodes, the series also expands past being a satirical facsimile of the Blair government by featuring in the Christmas Special a Conservative Party run by a modernising (and potentially gay) leader whose response to the departure of the Prime Minister is to praise his legacy.  A prediction that was proved correct when Blair's final House of Commons appearance saw David Cameron urging his party to give him a standing ovation.  Similarly, The Thick of It featured a government within a government of people loyal to the Chancellor and waiting for him to take the reigns of power.    The Thick of It's universe is, similarly to that of the West Wing, not quite ours.  It is one that faces the same issues and challenges but these challenges and problems tend to manifest themselves in subtly different ways.

Rather than dwelling on the best in our politicians and trying to make people feel better about their nation as The West Wing does, The Thick of It exaggerates politicians' self-serving attitudes and obsession with how things play out in the media.  Indeed, the same difference was present in US and British SF; whereas the Americans produced the likes of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, British SF produced 1984 and The Day of the Triffids.  This might well be a gross simplification but one can't help but see in the difference in US and UK attitudes to politics expressed beautifully in the differences between two series; one a sentimental and serious drama about how great government can be and the other a vicious and darkly satirical comedy about how dreadful government can be.

Comments

[Serdar]

"What I am suggesting is that people are not just poorly educated and ignorant of science; more and more people define themselves in terms of rejecting not only the contents of scientific knowledge but the methods of thought and reasoning used in science and the language surrounding them is not about the correctness of people's beliefs but rather about being tolerant of people's beliefs regardless of how toxic and false they might be."

I could not agree more. I am constantly stunned by the people I meet who are not stupid by any stretch, but who seem to define themselves by how strongly they can resist modernity in some form. Science gets singled out for being "dogmatic", "monomaniacal", "tunnel vision", "authoritarian", and worst of all "Western". Comments about how this dogmatic, monomaniacal, tunnel-vision, authoritarian, Western discipline provided them with the medium from which to hurl forth their irrational idiocity typically go over their heads, or are greeted with snide comebacks.

It's virtually impossible to talk to such people in any substantive way about why they hate such things, because they seem to be defining themselves primarily by the fact that they resist something -- typically an easy, safe, tired target like "science" (or "technology"), without a germ of thought as to what that kind of resistance really entails, or requires, or what it would really involve giving up.

It's an argument I've had many times before in many different contexts, and it rarely changes. I'm fully aware of the fact that our civilization has come at a cost; so are a great many other people. I am also aware that it has come with many benefits, several of which probably kept me from dying in a very ugly way when I was younger.

It's always easy to define yourself by what you don't want, because then you can appeal to other people's senses of dissatisfaction and alienation. But it's a lousy way to build a world-view.

[A.R.Yngve]

When poseurs make silly "Opposed-To-Western-Society" statements, then challenge them to be consistent and opt out of said society!

Poseur: "I am opposed to the soulless technology which is ruining our planet."

You: "But of course! And you should live by those words, as an example to others! First, let's get rid of those soulless Western eyeglasses, they only obscure your natural vision. Then throw away that shallow mobile phone, and the asthma spray, and all that other evil Western technology..."

Poseur: "Are you insinuating something?"

You: "What, me? Nooo..."
;-P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I must admit, that I think it takes a spectacular degree of stupidity to sit in front of a computer and argue against science. In front of a COMPUTER that wouldn't even be possible were in not for our understanding of Quantum Mechanics.

As Dawkins says, show me a relativist in a plane at 40,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.

[Patrick H]

Handy tip for parents reading Jonathon's blog (ho ho!):

We cut those posters up and the kids stick the pictures in their scrap books.

Also, I'm not sure if the US SF = light/UK SF = dark thing always stands up to close analysis. The US produced Kornbluth & Pohl, PKD, Alfred Bester, Kurt Vonnegut and the cyber-punks, after all, while the UK's most famous SF writer is Arthur C Clarke and Whyndham produced reams of pulpy gumpf under the John Beynon psued before the war. I think it's more to do with a British attitude to science (ironically!) as "trade" that means there are fewer British writers of the Campbellian school. I dunno, I'm shooting from the hip, but I think there are other factors involved than just cynical old blighty.

P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Scrap Books? Aw... how cute. "Daddy's finished another bottle of vodka, can we put the label in our scrap books?"

I agree that the light/dark distinction is simplistic but could you honestly imagine a British drama that was as upbeat and sentimental about politics as the West Wing? even proper British political dramas have tended to be about corruption or under-handed scheming.

I think the fact that we, as a nation, seem to prefer comedy to drama as a means of examining our politics says something about how cynical a society Britain is.

You're right about science being considered "Trade" though. I think it goes some way to explaining why the new wave (largely concerned with making SF more arty) came primarily from the UK.

[Serdar]

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure it takes stupidity per se to be hypocritical about science. I think it just takes the same bullheadedness -- stubborn insouciance -- that it takes to remain studiedly ignorant about anything at all.

Something else comes to mind, too. Those of us who understand science at least better than trivially know that it's an overarching methodology for garnering knowledge. It's not a set of facts, but sets of explanations for why those facts are the way they are. As the facts change, so do those explanations. But most people don't see it that way -- they see science as some kind of arrogant arbiter of What Is and What Is Not, and how dare anyone tell THEM what's real and what's just a twinkle in the mind's eye!