Paris - The Horror and Three Hopes

Words seem inadequate but we all have to say something.

Of course everything has to start from the fact that our hearts go out to the injured and the friends and families of all the victims. And the witnesses and the emergency services who have to deal with the horror of what they saw. And all the people of Paris and the whole of France. Horror seems to have become part of the fabric of our society for a hundred years or more; the slaughter of the First World War, the unspeakable human degradation of the Holocaust and the fear of nuclear annihilation with any number of military juntas and genocides in between. And now this seemingly joyous negation of everything that humanity is supposed to stand for, this celebration of oppression, torture, rape and slaughter apparently for its own sake. 

This is the darkness of our time and I wish I thought it was going to be over soon but I'm afraid I don't.

And while we somehow learn to live with it I have three hopes:

The first is that we feel a clear and strong sense of solidarity with other people who are suffering in the same way. It is natural to feel especially shocked when murder comes so close but the people of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea and the Yemen are experiencing the same terror on a daily basis. Barack Obama was perfectly right that this is an attack on all of humanity and humanity does not stop at the borders of Europe or "the West". 

The second is that we remain determined and ambitious to stand for exactly the opposite of everything they represent. We have values that are rooted in our ideas of civilisation, our religions and our common humanity and we will stand by them. We will hold on to openness, respect, decency, human rights and the rule of law however much we are tempted to take short cuts and to descend to their level.

And the third is that we think carefully and coolly when we start talking about war. There is a long history of reflecting on whether war can ever be justified. Most people are not pacifists, they believe that war can be justified sometimes, but it is always terrible and often worse than whatever provoked it.

Catholic doctrine sits right in this tradition, saying that war may sometimes be necessary but four conditions must be met before it can possibly be justified:

• "the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• "all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• "there must be serious prospects of success;
• "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition)."

We face an unprecedented kind of enemy and we are becoming ensnared in a new and unprecedented kind of war - if that is even the right word for it. We know that humanity has been gravely wronged but it is not at all clear to me that this new and unknown kind of 'war' could meet the other three conditons. Can we be sure that whatever we do is a last resort because nothing else could work, that the war itself would work and bring success, whatever we mean by that, and that it would not make things worse? Recent history tells us that wars are often embarked on as a political expedient, for fear of being seen to do nothing, with little consideration for these questions and we have come to regret them mightily at a later date.

The Cyber-Bullying Thing - Part 2: Why Do We Want To Punish Bullies?

What a stupid question. Because bullying is horrible, because it ruins lives, because it causes depression and anxiety and because it has to be stopped.

Agreed in every way. 

But what if punishing bullies doesn't work? Would that change anything?

Let us begin with why punishment seems good for us as adults who genuinely want to put an end to bullying:

* Firstly it signifies that we take the issue seriously. A punishment shows what we think of a bully - and therefore of bullying.

* Secondly, it makes us feel that justice has been served, that the bully has got his or her comeuppance. 

* It satisfies our psychological need to do something, to feel that we are not powerless, that we can be effective in some way.

* Lastly, and less worthily, it helps to cover our arses. We can't be accused of doing nothing if we have inflicted a suitably severe punishment.

All of this is good and it comes naturally from the feeling that we have done the right thing. But you will notice that none of this does anything for the victim. And if it actually makes things worse then we are making ourselves feel righteous at the victim's expense. If that is true then our need to punish is essentially selfish.

But wait, surely the whole point of punishing bullies is to put them off, to deter them and thus to help the victim by stopping the bullying. Well, that's the theory - but does it? It feels like it ought to and the notion of punishment fitting the crime is deeply embedded but if it doesn't, if in fact it makes things worse, then we have to do some serious rethinking.

To me the evidence is absolutely clear, our conventional, instinctive reaction to bullying, to make the bullies feel something of what they have inflicted on their victims, clearly does not work. In general bullying Is still rife, it is an epidemic, and with the advent of social media it is in many ways getting worse. And in individual cases punishment does nothing to put things right. In fact by driving the bullying underground, punishment only makes it harder to discover and harder to deal with.

* In principle it could be argued that we are only perpetuating the dynamic of the bully; that we are trying to bully the bully into stopping bullying. Which is ironic.

* In practice it forces us to focus on the details of exactly what has been done, whether we have any evidence or whether the accusations can be proved. We become absorbed in issues of whether we believe the victim, whether there is any exaggeration or outright fantasising going on, whether the victim has in any way brought the trouble on themselves. All of this is tedious and painful and in reality a distraction from the fact that somebody is suffering and that suffering has to be stopped.

* It reinforces and exaggerates the gulf between bully and victim. We tend to have a very simple, black and white model in or heads in which one evil bully is inflicting terror on one innocent but pathetic victim and we impose this model on situations that are often quite different. We ignore the complexities of real life in which the bully may themselves be bullied and demeaned in a different context and may find mockery and threats perfectly natural. We ignore the way that we can all, kids and adults alike, convince ourselves that we are not bullies; that WE are only having a bit of fun or that THEY are weird or annoying in some way and deserve to be mocked. Even more we ignore the way that bullying often stems from a friendship group that has gone sour, a group of quite ordinary kids who have fallen out and started a vendetta that they don't know how to get out of. We ignore the shades of grey and impose our simple blacks and whites - and in doing so we make the bullies more bullyish and the victims more victimish and that does neither of them any good.

* Most importantly it raises the stakes. The prospect of punishment will make the bully even more determined to intimidate the victim into silence and the victim will be even more determined to suffer in silence because discovery will only make things worse. Whatever punishment the bully receives you can be sure that they will want the victim to pay for it - and that will only intensify the whole vicious dynamic and keep it further away from the prying eyes of adults.

So if punishment doesn't work, what would 'working' look like?

In individual cases we are looking for something that stops suffering. Something that takes us rapidly from a place where a children are being hurt by their peers to a place where they are happy and secure and well integrated. And more widely we want to prevent suffering, we want to produce a culture in which unkindness, intimidation and mockery are always exposed and are always unacceptable.

Naturally everyone wants to achieve this perfect state of universal empathy. My argument is simply that if we are serious then the peculiar, secretive dynamics of bullying mean that we have to let go of our natural instinct to punish and think of something more creative.

The alternative is well known and understood. More in Part 3.

The Austerity Lie

Just to be clear, 'austerity' is a lie. The idea that governments caused our current woes by reckless overspending is a lie. The idea that the last Labour government 'crashed the economy' is a lie. And the idea that you can take a patient who is already lying flat on their back in the gutter and somehow throttle them back to life is a lie. The diagnosis flies in the face of the evidence, not to mention common sense, and, bizarrely, the treatment prescribed makes the supposed problem worse.

As was widely reported at the time, it was the banks that crashed the economy. They took advantage of the fashion for deregulation to build a global bubble of debt that was always going to burst, taking out our economic infrastructure and bringing down the real economy with it.

So why do the coalition partners, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, persist with this lie so doggedly?

Well it appeals to different players in diverse and subtle ways:

In the first place it's a convenient and effective stick with which to beat the Labour party who were in power when the house cards fell over. It doesn't matter that it's not true, the Labour party themselves seem to accept this blatant rewriting of history so they might as well use it.

Secondly its a logical extension of the current economic myth that government spending is somehow different from other spending, that it does not contribute to the economy but drains the life out of it - that government spending is parasitic. If you pay for your health care through insurance, for example, you are a good economic citizen and contributing to the GDP whereas if you pay for it through taxes you are dragging the country down. It's obvious nonsense but myths take root in a way that defies logic and evidence and eventually they become unchallengeable orthodoxies.

Thirdly it appeals to voters on a kind of moral level. For some reason we like to think that we had it too good for too long and it appeals to a kind of masochistic impulse to have to pay for our over-indulgences now. Conveniently this means that the policy doesn't have to work; in fact the longer the pain goes on, the more true it seems.

But most importantly it provides an opportunity to attack the poor, the people who depend most on the state. The health and prosperity of the nation, for which we have to thank the rich, is apparently being undermined by feckless scroungers who can only be helped into productive citizenship by reducing them to complete destitution.

So we can feel economically prudent, we can confess our past sins and then in practice we can inflict all the pain on those who are least able to resist. What's not to like?

But liking it doesn't make it true. And it certainly doesn't make it work.

The idea of 'austerity' is a kind of reinvention of 'monetarism', the economic fashion embraced so enthusiastically by Margaret Thatcher when the main problem we faced was inflation. We don't have an inflation problem now but myths have a life of their own. The project really began in 2010 with an influential economic paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published in a non peer-reviewed issue of the American Economic Review which claimed that a country cannot have healthy economic growth if its debts are too high compared with its GDP. It turned out that this wasn't true - as was spotted by a young student doing a homework project. The data contained many examples of countries with high debts that had perfectly good growth rates but the spreadsheet had somehow excluded them. So an Excel error became a flawed economic theory and then a lie - a story that still gets told even when it's known to be untrue.

The cure also made things worse. Naive and economically illiterate politicians constantly compare the national finances to household spending. If a household is running into debt obviously they have to cut their coat according to their cloth. But cutting government spending, especially during an economic downturn, puts people out of work, increases the welfare budget and reduces the size of the economy. We end up with a higher deficit and a lower GDP - exactly the opposite of what is supposedly required.

So what is the alternative? 

Well in short the opposite in every way. As has been demonstrated through the 20th century, the way to cure a lack of confidence and economic activity is for the government to borrow and spend - because it is the only player that can. It needs to spend on infrastructure projects that will be useful in the coming years and which will bring less skilled workers back into work. Then the welfare bill goes down, the tax take goes up and the government finances come back into balance.

In the current climate this is a very shocking thing to say. It's a kind of heresy which makes the proponent seem not merely mad but positively evil. Which only goes to show how far we have come from rational and evidence-based debate.

And spending more money through the poor is a vital part of the recipe. Money doesn't trickle down, it trickles up. Money spent on the poor circulates in the real economy, making its way upwards until eventually it arrives at the rich who put it in offshore accounts. It is not the rich who create jobs but the poor who spend their money on food, housing and other essentials. The money the Bank of England invented through quantitative easing and which went directly into the hands of the rich might as well have evaporated. An increase in unemployment benefit ironically would have created many times more jobs.

Eventually the myth of austerity will be allowed to fade and everyone will deny they ever believed in it but in the meantime it is wreaking havoc in the economy and in the lives of the very people who could bring about the recovery - if they only had the money.