Climagen

Generic word for plants and animals that have been genetically altered to permit their survival in unfamiliar or hostile environments. Climagen Palm Trees, for example, have been modified to allow them to thrive in temperate climates, which is why they are to be seen growing on northern European beaches, and round the Great Lakes of North America. Similarly, a Russian billionaire has recently stocked his estate in the Urals with woolly-haired climagen elephants in honour of the extinct mammoths who once roamed there
During the last decade, the word appears to have extended its meaning to denote any kind of accommodation of one thing or person to another. People of gentle disposition are being referred to as “climagens”, as are politicians who change their mind.
A compound of “genetic” and “acclimatise”, the expression was originally coined by scientists at the University of Newfoundland who were working on a project to replenish the Grand Banks - once the world’s largest source of the now extinct northern cod - with several species of fast-breeding fish of tropical origin. The original project failed, not for want of technology, but because as soon as the new breeds settled to their northern environment, the fishing industry scooped them up and left the region as bereft of edible marine life as before.

The Convention on Modern Liberty - 28 February 2009

I believe we need to approach the question of Liberty in the modern state more broadly and deeply than is suggested by the initial comments of Convention participants.
The tendency of all three main UK parties - and notably the two largest - to converge in the centre of the political spectrum means that in respect of many, if not most, of the significant issues of the day, the electorate has no effective choice. If we were to conduct a national poll, for example, on whether the people want private sector involvement in the NHS, or in state schools, or running the railways, or taking over the London Underground, or a third runway at Heathrow, it’s a safe bet that the answer would be a resounding “no”. Yet most of our parliamentarians think otherwise.
Despite the enormous weight of government and opposition propaganda, did the people of these islands agree with the Iraq War, the introduction of fees for university students, the draconian measures embedded in omnibus legislation such as the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill, ID cards, pervasive street cameras, the madness of the Private Finance Initiative, the organization of our economic life on neo-liberal principles?
According to the polls, they didn't. But most of our parliamentarians did.
Government and Parliament alike appear to have sailed away on a trajectory of their own leaving a disarmed and bewildered electorate watching from the shore.
These issues are fundamentally about democracy. They are the apparel in which Liberty shows herself. If we have no voice in what happens to us, our freedom remains theoretical, an empress with no clothes.
Equally critical is the international dimension. European unity may be a wonderful thing, but the EU's unelected officials wield substantial powers and the people of Europe have no direct means of influencing their decisions or removing them from office. Beyond Europe, our government's political posturing and military ventures in other parts of the world are inextricably linked to the imposition of intrusive and authoritarian legislation at home. Is it feasible any longer to think of our freedom as just a national matter, capable of being addressed in isolation from our international alliances and commitments, from global warming, migratory movements, our apparent subservience to transnational capital and the world market?
I do not believe the government's assault on democratic freedoms is solely circumstantial - a reaction to real or imaginary threats; nor that the problem is this government and that its removal would bring the nightmare to an end. Rather it reflects a sclerotic and probably outmoded political and economic system, one that rests on extreme levels of inequality and disempowerment both within our country and internationally. Attempting to reverse repressive policies may achieve some limited success in the short term, but it is unlikely to change the prevailing imbalance between government power and the rights of the citizen, between our image of who we are and the reality of power relations in this country and beyond, between our commitment to neo-liberal capitalism and the multitudes who remain in abject poverty, between cheap imported goods in our local high street and child labour in the back streets of Dhaka, between the unemployed on the picket line in North Killingholme, Lincolnshire and the unimaginable profits of multinational corporations.
My ambition for the Convention on Modern Liberty is twofold: that it will signal the beginning of a root-and-branch examination of the way we are governed, and that it will lead to an exploration of political alternatives that more closely reflect the democratic aspirations of the people who live here.

Israel and Gaza

My grandfather - whom I never knew - was Jewish, and I married into a Jewish-Israeli family, but I belong neither to the race nor the faith. I have always disliked organized religion and any form of tribalism, both of which tend to inspire their adherents with feelings of exclusivity and superiority over those who do not share the same allegiances. I see myself, romantically, as a citizen of the world; though if anyone thinks this an easy option they have not truly experienced the loneliness and isolation such a position involves. To have no tribe, to join in no faith too often leaves one standing at the periphery of human warmth, drawn in, if at all, as a guest, and looked upon as a stranger - a word whose significance Jews as much as anyone will recognize.

This sense of being an outsider, coupled with the personal baggage of being a scion of an impoverished, English working-class family has no doubt spurred my hatred of the class system, of racism and of neo-liberal capitalism - all forms of oppression against the weak and the disadvantaged.

The Holocaust stands out as one of the most extreme examples of such oppression, but I have long questioned whether it's true significance - not just to the Jewish people but to Humanity - has been adequately understood. Some time ago, I wrote an essay in reaction to Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary in which I tried to grasp the meaning of that horrific event for all of us. Here is an extract:

There is a sense in which we are indeed all guilty. However much the Nazi atrocities may repel us, they were committed by people; the same people who write poetry and music, who can speak to us in language of sumptuous beauty; the same people as we ourselves are. Somehow, along the road of human development, we reached a fork and were led in a direction of unspeakable criminality, of which the Holocaust is simply a recent and terrible example. We have all been forced along that road; and the experience has left an indelible stain on our skin. No serious definition of what it means to be human can avoid that stain. Our free will, of which we are so proud, has been shown to be a freedom to create hell. The Nazis made one such hell; but they are not alone. Wherever the diseases of blind prejudice, unthinking xenophobia, or just petty racial arrogance lead us to see other men and women as essentially different from ourselves, inferior, less intelligent, alien, evil perhaps and threatening, then we offer ourselves a licence to treat them as disposable items, creatures to be coerced or, if necessary, extinguished. None of us is immune to such spiritual infections.
It would be easy and comfortable to blame circumstances, or the evil play of chance, for this state of affairs. But it is not life or circumstances that are evil, only we who make them so. And we will continue to do so so long as we believe that we alone are glorious in the sight of God; so long as we visit hatred and contempt upon the children of others; so long as we cannot see that all of us are Nazis just as much as we are Jews.

In this context, I offer here a series of images of the 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza. All but one of the collages were sent to me by a friend. The quotations accompanying each image were added by me. I don't own the copyright to any of the photographs and, in the absence of any information to the contrary, I am assuming they're in the public domain.

Greed, Privatization and the Financial Crisis

News clips of shoppers fighting each other to reach the bargains at post Christmas sales remind us that greed is not confined to financial wheeler dealers. Our annual end-of-year shopping frenzy is not a consequence of shortages, as might have been the case in post-war Germany or communist Russia, but of surpluses. Stores are laden with unsold goods for one reason alone: because no one really needs them. That, in a nutshell, is how our economic system works: namely by inducing people to buy things they don't need.

Few better examples exist than New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani's post 9/11 plea for people to return to New York and shop. Commerce, in the end, was more critical to the city's health than the loss of a couple of iconic buildings and a few thousand lives. Shopping - constant, unremitting acquisition of material goods - fuels our way of life. If our lust for new cars, new clothes, new refrigerators, new houses, falters - capitalism falters too. Wall Street's recent scandals - greed written large - are merely a wide-screen version of a soap opera played out daily in every high street in the hemisphere.

If our political leaders are to be believed, the way to resolve the current crisis is to inject a few billion dollars into failing corporations, throw some ne'er-do-well hot-shots into jail, and tinker with the financial regulations. Then we can all go back to buying and selling, and all will be fine in the best of all possible worlds. Right?

Well, maybe not.

For the first time in decades, dissenting voices are beginning to question the consensus. Doubts are being raised about the long-term viability of our economic system. Marx is finding new advocates and not without reason.

Marxist theory tells us that for the system to work, most of us must spend our lives enriching the owners of capital. This seems to be precisely what has occurred.

Those hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who took out mortgages that were beyond their means are a direct reflection of increasing inequality and - yes - poverty. People were promised the dream of home ownership and then found - too late - that carpet-baggers, corporate directors, and feckless politicians had placed it beyond their reach.

Hence why the response of Western governments to the current crisis gives cause for alarm. Effectively, the corporate sector that got us into this mess is now proposed as the only viable means of getting us out of it.

A more bizarre solution could hardly be imagined. If we turn from the current crisis to a more fundamental one, like global warming, the absurdity stands out, perhaps, more clearly. Without "incentives", industry will do little or nothing to help clean up our environment: such is the message from Washington and Westminster. Yet expecting global warming to be resolved through the same greed that created the problem - and that creates periodical economic crises too - is like inviting a thief who's just stolen your purse to burglarize your house as well. Capitalism isn't concerned with social welfare - and the notion so beloved of neo-liberals that individual selfishness promotes the general good is almost too easy to refute. That it continues to hold sway over Western governments and their economic soothsayers probably reflects the familiar human difficulty of owning up to error.

Though government trust in the private sector to do things better remains unswerving, like gospel it rests less on fact than on faith. Let's take the UK as an example. In addition to building the National Health Service and an education system that has produced more than our fair share of Nobel prize winners, the state runs military, police and fire services, and has developed almost all our transportation infrastructure. It created most of our utilities and ran them superbly until they were practically given away to the private sector. Along with allies, it helped to orchestrate the defeat of fascism in WWII. In the past 100 years, the state's achievements on behalf of the citizenry have been nothing short of spectacular.

Still, we are told that if most public services were subject to market discipline, they would be more efficient and cost-effective. It is a baseless argument. In the commercial sector, the consequences of inefficiency are bankruptcy or closure -- and there are no public service obligations such as delivering mail to remote "unprofitable" areas or treating impoverished patients. Unfortunately, water and electricity supplies, rail schedules and rubbish collection can't be closed down if the companies that run these services are poorly managed or unprofitable. Instead, they go cap-in-hand to the government for subsidies or price increases. In place of market discipline, we get licensed extortion -- often accompanied by a net reduction in the quality of service. My water, gas and electricity supplies have not improved since privatization, they have simply become more expensive.

This does not mean, of course, that the public sector always gets things right. Incompetency is a human failing - and an ubiquitous one. But the idea that it is, by definition, blundering, inefficient, and unresponsive is not based on evidence but on ideology riding on a cloud of woolly thinking.

Deaf both to the lessons of history and to the cries of public unease, ministers nevertheless continue to shed state assets and the responsibilities that go with them. In the UK, the latest divestiture has been of our remaining participation in the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons establishment. Next to go will be a handsome share of Royal Mail. Details of such transactions, of course, remain secret, in order - so we are told - to protect "commercial confidentiality". This repellent phrase now stands on a par with the Official Secrets Act as one of the UK government's prime tools for evading public scrutiny. And this despite the obvious - and obviously inconvenient - fact that publicly-owned facilities belong to the tax payer (a.k.a. you and me) and that, as shareholders, we should have a right to know what deals are being struck on our behalf.

Kropotkin pointed out that the price of a house in Paris, which only a rich man could afford, lay not only in the bricks and mortar and the patch of earth on which it stood, but also in the city itself with its roads and sewers, theatres and museums, schools and hospitals all constructed - just like the house - with the sweat and toil of labourers too poor to rent the meanest of its rooms. Public investment in social infrastructure constitutes the bedrock of economic activity without which private enterprise could not function. Taxpayers are by definition investors in private enterprise, and privatization is, therefore, largely a transfer into private hands of the means of producing what Marx called "surplus value" - publicly-generated profits.

If, as I suspect, our current economic arrangements are inadequate to meet the future needs of humanity and of the planet - then our first question must be to decide whether or not we care.

Assuming we do, then the challenge that faces us - and that sooner or later we will have to confront - is how to develop an alternative economic model geared to the general welfare rather than individual enrichment, to meeting need rather than stimulating greed, to preservation of the environment rather than its exploitation. Exactly how such a model could work is open to debate; but it's a sure bet that greed, superfluous consumption, and privatization of public assets won't be in the plan.

Civilian Casualties

Victims of military aggression, whose injuries or death are seldom itemized but may occasionally enter the historical records as a statistical estimate.

Circumvention (by proxy)

Illegal activities conducted through third parties or in places not subject to national or international law.
Governments have always abused the law, of course, as Moise Finkelbaum points out in his seminal study of the phenomenon³³. Circumvention by proxy, however, came into its own in the early years of the second millennium when the United States - enthusiastically supported by Great Britain - established offshore concentration camps in places beyond any legal jurisdiction so as to be able to abuse prisoners at will and detain them indefinitely without trial. Both countries also acquired the habit of quietly sending detainees off to be tortured by nasty regimes in distant parts of the world.
But to what purpose? Finkelbaum provides a credible answer. “No one considers information obtained under torture as in the least reliable,” he writes, “Truth is not the aim. What matters is to obtain confessions or simply to fabricate evidence that can be used to convince people back home that their lives are in permanent and irremediable danger, that repressive methods are necessary for their protection, that they too must accept injustice, suspension of democratic rights and limits on their freedom, and that their best hope of safety and security lies in this government and this party and no other.”³⁴
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³³ Power, Principle and the Law, São Paulo 2111.
³⁴ Finkelbaum, op.cit. pp 214-5.

Chaos

Unpredictability as a constituent of the universe.
History is the story of human effort to impose order on life, to refashion as much of the universe as possible into a set of complex but organized - and therefore ultimately predictable - events. Most of us are bureaucrats at heart, conscious that things occasionally go wrong but determined that they will do so less and less, and that by taking due precaution we can protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of fate. Wise to the fact that we like to feel permanently armed against extinction, Hollywood earns plenty of cash by having heroes rescue humanity from disaster when all seemed lost.
Acknowledging chaos as part of life’s fabric means leaving that cosy scenario behind in the cinema.
At a personal level we are familiar enough with uncertainty. We know that brakes seize, pipes spring leaks, rains fail, smokers may or may not get lung cancer, we may or may not bump into an old friend on our next trip into town. We know, too, that some chance events are fatal. Yet we like to pretend that, far from being a product of happenstance, the planet earth has a purpose. Day-to-day randomness we can handle, ultimate purposelessness is another matter.
Most of the orbs out there in space (maybe all of them) are devoid of organic matter. It follows that life must be an anomaly; because if the universe worked predictably, it would be uniform, and we couldn’t exist. As it is, we occupy no more than an infinitesimal blip in the space-time continuum; and cosmically speaking, there’s no reason why we should be around for long. When we’ve finished ruining the planet, or the planet has finished with us, we’ll doubtless leave it. And all the beauty of which we make so much, the green fields, the desert sands, the snow-clad peaks and verdant valleys, the masterpieces of our own making, will melt back into the primeval soup from which they and we emerged.
Since we can count ourselves lucky to be here, maybe we shouldn’t lament the fundamentally chaotic nature of existence; for though chaos may one day cause our extinction, it has brought us into being and moulded our aesthetic and emotional response to the world.³¹ The harmony we find in natural landscapes, in the intricately disordered branches and twigs of trees, in overgrown gardens, in the ephemeral patterns of passing clouds is not accidental. Our brains are tuned to them. Artists understand this, which is why their works so often seem disordered, untidy - complexity being the overriding condition of human experience and the medium in which our imagination floats most easily. Shakespeare who saw many things, saw this too:

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish
A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air.³²

By contrast, we can’t inhabit a world in which everything that takes place accords with Aristotelian logic. Drama trimmed to the unities of time and place, architecture stripped of ornament and quirkiness, music played strictly to beat and measure - these may offer simple pleasures and even evoke admiration; but we experience them distantly, and tire of them easily. By contrast we enter and move within the worlds of War and Peace, or Lear, or The Iliad, recognizing in the messiness of the life depicted, the multiplicity of characters with whom we mingle, the thoughts they express, the diversions and tangential paths on which they and we embark, a parallel to our own. The best music works in just this way also, by creating expectations in us, and then satisfying them not with the notes our ears might anticipate unaided, but with a sequence that at once meets our expectations yet surprises us with an appeal to something tangential and more involving than we could have imagined for ourselves. All great art is, in that special sense, complex - satisfying to our brains which are complex too, and inimical to our instincts, which are self-protective and conservative. Art best plays its role in our lives when it defies the bureaucrat in us; when it beats against imposed order; when it simulates the chaos that we know lies at the heart of all that exists, and thereby helps us understand how wondrous strange it is to be alive and conscious.
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³¹ “Impurity,” wrote Primo Levi, “which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life.” - The Periodic Table, Turin 1975.
³² Anthony and Cleopatra, IV.14