h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Indeed Cass, you´re quite right in what you said

"As you say I think that we both appreciate a genuine and thoughtful exchange of ideas- rather than point-scoring." The latter is the matter you find on every internet forum. It´s the people driving themselves to this sort of game. Sometimes it might be funny to have it as an past time, but when interested in some reasonable exchange of opinions and thoughts, it´s just disturbing.

"With the Scots referendum and a promised referendum on UK membership of the EU really the whole idea of (a) why we have the UK and the EU (b) how they can be made to work , and (c) why this issue is probably crucial to the future of any kind of global system/solution."

I´m looking with much interest towards the next year on the Scotlands independence referendum. As you said, these three points are already much interwoven in regards to the near future. I hope that the Union of the UK will remain. I also hope that the British will not necessarily opt out of the EU by referendum for I (a) can´t imagine a UK without Scotland and (b) an EU without the UK may have some effect on the stability also in the light of globalism. Hopefully these referendums might bring up some ideas towards reforming the UK and the EU for the better of the people.

Have a nice evening.

Cheers,
Thomas

I saw this thread on the front page & the above interesting comment which I add a brief comment.

It seems to me that British politics is in a rut, even the reporting of it is sensationalised, extremely selective & lacking in detail & depth required of democracy. Two pole party politics essentially destroys any real choice resulting in an impoverished democracy that is largely illusional. It also seems to be extremely centralised & London centric. Personally I think Scottish independence with massive cross-border collaboration (including joint defence by agreement) with no passport controls (like Schengen) is the way forward ... to break the political atrophy, get people thinking about politics again in a more forward thinking light, & to break this dreadful London centric focus.

Hi Stome Aart

Nice to read you..Actually I see Scottish Nationalism as just one more element in the disastrous turn that politics took in the 1860s when Nation States turned to the politics of "Economism" all based upon creating rigid and over-arching structures that basically hid the problems of change. The mid-Victorian prosperity that inspired continental states to create the idea of an "Industrial revolution" and "Industrialism" that could be pursued by individual states or by aggregates of States- ignored and fought against the reality that since Ancient times the real sources of Economic Dynamism and change taylor- made both to the current opportunities and the real needs of human beings has almost always been based on living and vibrant cities- by which I mean not the great wealth creating engines that have emerged as the metropolises of great States- but places where a community works, lives all together.

Those of us who live in London know that it is a world city- but it cannot live as such because it is expected to operate as that kind of great wealth creating machine- especially for a huge population that does not live here- but merely takes advantage of us.

Cass

And of course British politics is in a rut.. It has been since at least 22 April 1951 when the Labour Party conference broke up and the Labour Party gave up all pretension to being a truly progressive party- rather than one still tied to the dreams of German (national) Socialism that inspired its first foundation steps in 1893..

Not for the first time it fell to the Conservative Party to try to be progressive--

Cass

Hi Cass,

How does London create wealth? There doesn't seem to be much manufacturing or production inside London. It just seems to be land inflation plus various services. Some say the city is not dissimilar to a gigantic casino where people exchange the worlds currencies, stocks & shares back & forth on microsecond timescales for the purposes of creaming off short term profit & where multinationals organise cartels & seek monopoly status, lobbying & plying politicians for favourable legislative loopholes but maybe this is all Marxist BS ... difficult to tell at times. Maybe I am a bit of a cynic but I am always prepared to change my mind ... many things are the way they are because in practice it is the best way forward

Stone Aart

Well I believe that the Finance Industry based on the City of London is now by far the largest earning unit in the British Economy- and furthermore pays (from memory) something like half of all the taxes that allows our government (like most modern States) to spend 50% and more of all that we earn as a Nation... That is the problem with the Nation State that everybody copied (in effect) from the UK because it worked so well once we had created the Bank of England and therefore the chance to manage a National Debt which would make it possible for the whole nation to "live now pay later"...As with the 2008 Financial Crisis when it was necessary to "bail out the Banks" - it is in the final analysis only because of the ultimately terrifying power of the State that the State in Action is the only thing that can give any credibility to our world of "Big Money"-- But now that the USA (the main motor of that global Big Money system is NOT in Action we face once more the prospect of a total collapse of the State System and a return to World Chaos of 1932-33....

In short the system is only working because people feel that there is no alternative- even if we are like lemmings heading for the cliff edge- it does not seem so bad as just one of the herd.

Cass

I suppose the Finance industry in London makes most of its money through insurance & loans ... plus provision of a trading service via exchanges with each individual transaction (currency, shares, stocks) involving a small charge ??

Hi Stone Aart

It is ages since I really tried to get my head around the complexity of The City..

When you say "loans" of course the biggest borrowers are States- you may have seen Obama this evening expressing his hope that the present 'impasse' will be over soon and that those empowered to do so will lift the ceiling on the USA's borrowing requirement.. In other words agreeing that the Federal Banks can issue securities so that it will be possible to raise- through the great financial centres of the World- the money that the USA is already committed to spend in order to keep the whole world "turning"- He used the word "bedrock"- but it is more than than- it is the turning base without which the World will cease to function- rather as in the H.G. Wells story- the man who stopped the Earth..

Perhaps you have seen the film version. The Earth stopped- but not the Earth's atmosphere which carried on turning with winds of about 1000 miles an hour- ripping the Earth bare.

And as 'insurance' you might count the field in which our daughter specialises i.e. Pension Funds. These days working people are encouraged to pay up to 15% of all their earnings into a pension fund, with their employer normally at least matching that. This accumulates into vast sums of money- and managers of Pension Funds are some of the biggest players in the World's Finance since we all hope and expect that, by paying in a % of our earnings for up to 40 years, for perhaps the last 40 years of our life, when inflation will have eroded values, that money will have been wisely invested and will have grown into a fund that will provide us with a "living income" for which we will not have to work- but our Capital will still do so.

So Pension Fund managers are always looking for a basket of things that they can invest our money in on our behalf. And crucial in all of this( as it was in the late Nineteenth Century) is what is called "Venture Capital".. which, as the name suggests, is money that is invested in start up schemes. It used to be building raliways to unlock the potential of the huge land masses of the world in the 50 years down to 1914..

Now those great continental land masses have been opened up; and the big growth areas to invest in now involve bringing the 60% (?) of the World's population/ Labour force of India and China into the Global Economy. A vast more or less untapped potential as the vast continental land masses used to be. And % growth figures are always higher when you start from low down.

The move from zero to one is an infinity. 1 to 2 is a 100% increase..2 to 3 a 50% increase. So investing in Start Up programmes (as long as they are the right ones) usually brings the best returns..The Chinese have become accustomed to offering 10% overall growth, but are now only managing 7%.

The "Law of Diminishing Returns" argues that- in a country like the UK most of the most simple, most effective and most lucrative ways to make money have already been found, exploited and either played out- or have been copied and taken over by other countries.

But then there are things like "Hedge Funds" and "Futures Trading" where big money is spent and earned just in the effort to remove some of the instability and uncertainty out of the market.. And things are less secure and certain these days than they were in the late twelfth century when merchants from Florence would go to the great Cistercian monasteries in Yorkshire and pay them good gold Florins now in order to secure the wool crop in ten years time...

All of this counts as "Service Industry".. and the UK has become heavily based on its Service Industries- of which Finance is the one that can be most easily spread out over the globe, not least since the first Global Economy was made by London- and was based on a widespread acceptance that "An Englishman's word is his bond"- something that President Obama also alluded to this evening.

Cass

Further to my last

During my Oxford childhood one of the centres of my universe was "The Carfax Tower" a Medieval clock-tower with a couple of figures who struck a bell to mark the hours and half-hours. No doubt it was invaluable back then, and the name Carfax is generally believed to be an English corruption of the French 'Carrefoure' or crossroads. Such places used to be vital for selling things, and for showing off the 'wages of sin' in the bodies of the hanged left to rot.

But in those days people and things moved largely on foot and within walking distance.. Now more and more is done and moved electronically by remote control via massive electronic Carfaxes.. As we are told by politicians not only is there no such thing as a free lunch these days, no-one is expected to do anything without some monetary cost.. and that all means multi-millions of transactions per day being carried out through the world's great financial centres.. and in many ways London is still 'the big daddy' where that is concerned.

Cass

Hi Cass: Thanks for your replies. I probably need to go away now and read up on the nuts and bolts of the workings of the city & London. I agree that the finance industry in principle could be a power for "good" in society

... city of London

Hi Stone Aart

Unfortunately the way that the Brave New World was set up after 1945 took up the Adam Smith idea that you reconstruct humanity in such a way as to prioritise wealth generation- so that you can then use wealth to cure all the other problems.

This came to be paricularly associated by 1945 with the Plan produced by Robert Owen in 1815 and later elaborated in his New View of Society a few years later.. He held up his New Lanark Mills as a model for the future- both of the Economy and the Society.

Using the latest Science and Technology just two or three such great industrial complexes would be able to produce all the goods that people could desire- leaving large parts of the population surplus to requirements.. But at New Lanark he had taken the most depraved people from the slums of Glasgow and had turned them into model workers and citizens- the dream of "Social Engineering" given enough wealth.

So he suggested that the few great wealth producing centres would create such great flows of tax money that it could be used to subsidise 'rural colonies' where people would have their lives organised for them in work, leisure and entertainment 24/7- though in fact they were not actually producing anything that was really needed.

The post-war Labour Revolution with the idea of scientifically run Nationalised industries that would make large profits, and new housing estates for the re-settled working class, complete with community centres, recreation grounds etc- all properly organised and run with outside benevolent help was all inspired by Owenite Socialism.. It looks like Ed Milliband wants to go back there.

Meanwhile the City ceased to be a place for people to live- certainly not a real Society which brought all levels of Society together in the English tradition.. The rehoused 'indigenous' population has ended up in hopeless rural and suburban dormitory deserts in an kind of Apartheid, while the inner city slums they were moved from (and those Thirties and Sixties estates) have been used to park immigrant populations- in another form of "Apartheid".

Cass

On a separate note I think that globalisation is inherently unfair in that there is not a level playing field in terms of working conditions, taxation, environmental standards, social conditions. For example in Britain there is a minimum wage, there are health & safety in the workplace regulations, there are environmental taxes & regulations, corporation tax, and certain human rights regulations. So companies will tend to go abroad where there are little to no regulations & or taxation - produce the goods there & then import the products into Britain in effect circumventing minimum wage, environment, human rights etc regulations. Hence in my view, inherently unfair & exploitative.

Anyway I am off soon for another week. Apologies to Thomas for jumping into this thread - but on H2G2 it is customary to have a number of parallel discussions going on in the same thread.

Hi Stone Aart

That is why great cities are so vital... they are global and not merely national.. It was said of Ancient Athens that its adventurers went out and found their way to all the world, and then all the world found their way to Athens.


I suppose it was one of the things that the Nazis managed to exploit in the way that they picked on the Jews..this fact that great banking families were "international"- hence the International Jewish Conspiracy Theory..But every great family in a great city had people spread all over the known world handling the family affairs and its business out there.. and British cities had people like Frederick Engels who was only in Lancashire in the 1830s because his German family had a branch of the family firm there.

That is what I know so deeply from my many years of teaching experience in South London with a population embedded within the global community.. I heard on BBC radio 4 when in France that the amount of money that flows out of Britain usually from families with roots "back home" totally dwarfs the Foreign Aid Budget.. This is truly personal aid that makes it different than mere establishment aid in which the money divides the giver and receiver- because it is just a mechanical action and means nothing really in human terms.

The Welfare State finished off the process of destroying the extended family in the UK that was started by the "Industrial Revolution"- and has more or less killed off the nuclear family either before or after the children have left home-- hence the attempt to controversialize the idea that the taxpayer should not totally subsidise the independent life of someone under 25 who has no job or career, and is making no real effort to get either.

Cass

Your last paragraph made me think of a comment I read in a book somewhere - some societies "advancement" is like someone climbing a ladder and kicking out the lower rungs as they progress higher ... only to later find out later that the ladder isn't long enough ...

Stone Aart

I don't know when you're off.. If already see you later.

But your post made me think of Eric Perkin's excellent history of "The Origins of English Society" which brings out very clearly how during much of the Eighteenth Century England really did function not unlike a Jane Austin novel with that sense of still belonging to deep-rooted communities so that Lord Clarendon could say at the Restoration in 1660 that he very much hoped that England could find once more the spirit of "Good naturedness" that Merry England had been famous for.. It was a Society of almost endless gradations very much like a ladder with quite a lot of movement up and down which created quite a sense of community or "Commonweal"- to use the Old English expression.

But try as i might over more than fifty years I have not been able to find that the other parts of the British Isles have ever managed to achieve that kind of social cohesion.. and that the process of "convergence" that became a political necessity to defeat foreign Superpowers that might otherwise have conquered the whole of the British Isles resulted in England having to sacrifice that its social tradition.

William Cobbett the great pamphleteer complained between 1800 and his death c1835 about what we would call "English values" being sacrificed-- the masses were no longer "the common people" but "the Lower Orders".. and the Oxford Movement associated with J.H.Newman in the early 1830s similarly complained of what John Keble called a "national apostacy" in the first of the Tractarian tracts c1832-3 by which he meant that the English establishment (especially the Anglican Church) was abandoning its 'duty of care' for the common people.

It will be interesting to see with the referendum whether the Lowland Scots will feel able to 'handle" the people of the Highlands and Islands -that they never managed to until they became part of Great Britain- and took full part in punishing and exterminating the Highlanders after they had dared to capture Edinburgh and 'pollute it' with their wild ways.

Cass

Hi Cass,

I´ve noticed that you´ve been rather busy with other things over the last weeks. I hope you´re well and I´d be interested to learn whether there´s some news re the publishing of your works.

Regards,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

We just got back from more or less a month in France Tuesday evening so I was both off-line and without computer access all that time..

But I find our rural retreat an ideal place to do a storm of reading and note-taking. And this year my choice of books from the 'library reject' store in the front garden was particularly propitious- though I was also perhaps highly motivated by the hopes that I had formed based on that personal contact with someone actually working within a publishing company.. I have made contact since returning with the ex-pupil because she knew that I was going to be away and hope that she will let the 'other party' know that I am now around. Both are very busy young (to me) women, but I rather hope that they may have made contact over the week-end.

To some extent, however, that leaves me in a bit of a writing limbo- since as you above all others are very much aware- I already have a considerable body of written material, and it is not immediately obvious which particular strand I might be encouraged to work into something that a publisher might see as potentially marketable..Perhaps naturally I see the current project as the most directly useful because of the very powerful sense of global crisis and the need to see a way ahead. I would see some logic in starting with this and then (if it found a readership) publishing some of the work that I have produced on the 'thought-adventure' that has brought me thus far.

In the meantime I have been catching up with facebook- and one exchange with our French neighbour in Bligny led me to write down some of my most recent thinking based on my last month's reading.. which has been 'liked' by an ex-pupil who is now a journalist based in Africa working for the English Al-Jezeera TV Channel.

I will paste it so you can read it if you wish.. And regarding reading- the last book which I just finished two days ago was volume V of Elie Halevy's "History of England".. I am now annoyed with myself because I saw these works for sale back in c1962 and decided that they were 'not for me' at the time. I was probably right back then- France was such a foreign country to me then. Now it is my second home and I have loved reading this work written in 1926 and published in this second edition in 1951. Halevy had lectured in France on English history for 30 years, starting I suppose when England and France were old enemies. But Halevy saw lots of things that France could learn from England, while at the same time casting a very European light of understanding on British and Irish affairs. [Of the latter he briefly alludes to a period in the 1895-1905 years when he himself had toured an Ireland where the troubles all seemed to be over with Nationalism, Republicanism and Home Rule no longer hot issues.

And- for example- he ends his treatment of the Boer War "The peace of Vereeniging was a typcally English peace, inspired from beginning to end by the spirit which buries old scores".

But earlier on he had written of the new age of Imperialism (what I have called the 'Anglo-Saxon' period) "A peaceful nation the English had undoubtedly been in the period around 1860, possibly more peace-loving than any nation in the entire course of history. But these peaceable dispositions masked a profound disdain. Sure of her command of the seas, England scornfully abandonned the Continent to its dissensions."

My first "book" completed a dozen years ago is entitled "English Peace"- so you can understand how much I have enjoyed Halevy.

Cheers

Cass

PART ONE

This is an English version of a response to a French fb comment to the effect that nowadays the richest countries are ones that were anti-capitalist not so long ago.

* * * * *
It would be more accurate to say “the countries with the largest economic growth, key roles in finding the way out of the current global economic crisis, and with the largest high-spending billionaire elites.

And this means that the fundamentals of modern history have been reversed. At the birth of Modern Europe that ‘continent’ was more than ever threatened by the expansionist power of the Islamic world that was able to act not only as a producer and exporter itself but also and crucially as the middle man between Europe and the great ancient civilizations of Asia with their fabulous material and cultural wealth.

But the weakness of these great powers- especially the Islamic, ‘Hindian’ and Chinese ones was that their power and wealth had been appropriated by conquering aliens who formed ruling elites governing vast populations that lived under military occupation much as the French people under Petain lived under the German occupation. Over the centuries the real power and dynamism of the Turkish, Moghul and Manchu elites was undermined and destroyed by lives of luxury, affluence, leisure and idleness, while at the same time Europe developed an unprecedented military capacity, not least in the new generation of ships capable of venturing into unknown seas and opening up trade routes that cut out the middle men between Western Europe and the Far East. And having discovered the strength of the European market for such articles Europeans also developed their own capacity to produce these luxuries.

In this way the countries of “The West” created a new and more directly ‘global’ economic system, which raised new tensions and problems between the European feudal elites based on the Medieval military elites of the Crown and the nobility, and a new Age of Revolution produced new empires (starting with France) that offered the concept of “the universal rights of man” to peoples who would be helped in a struggle to liberate themselves using the European idea of ‘the State’ in various forms: most crucially by the two extremes of Capitalism and Communism which had both been inspired by the very particular nature of the industrial revolution in Lancashire between 1793 and 1848.

After the Second World War the contest between Capitalism and Communism moved away from outright military conflict towards a populism that set out to make ‘the people’ happier to be living under their ideology rather than the other one; and governments in “The West” were bound by the parliamentary system to ‘win’ elections by offering the majority whose support they needed lives with at least a share of luxury, affluence and leisure, very often with governments inspired by the success of Nineteenth Century Germany- the path towards economic and political federation with powerful and authoritarian governments working in the style of Bismark- that is to say on principles of national socialism.

But as the French historian Elie Halevy wrote in 1926, the effect of Socialism within a developed country is to diminish national productivity since it encourages the idea that work is something harsh and imposed upon the worker like the State ‘corvees’ in France of the ‘old regime’ . The principal of equality demands that everyone is entitled to their share of luxury, affluence and leisure.

Perhaps in Heaven or at the Last Judgment this may well be true, but in the real-life struggle it is now the turn of the “rulers” of the developed world to experience the weakening effects a globally privileged lifestyle, not least because the democratic system with its principle of giving “sovereignty” to in effect often only 40% or so of the electorate, let alone the actual population, leaves insignificant alienated and alien minorities. And now it is Europe’s turn to experience a sense of near helplessness when faced by the economic growth of more industrious countries where there is a much greater economic dynamism.

Where once the great economies of the Islamic, Moghul and Manchu Empires were undermined and effectively destroyed by the capacity of ’the West’ to capture their markets for cotton, silk, tea, porcelain etc, goods that Europe discovered in Asia and spread around the world, now it is these emerging economies that are capturing the global markets that have been created in developed countries with their ’Affluent Society” and their consumerist way of life, a way of life in which the new equality is not the old one in which all life-journeys end up in the cemetery, but where most life-journeys pass through the rubbish-dump recycling centre and the shopping centre search for the new ‘must have’ necessities of life.

But in this week of the “Made in France” exhibition it is often obvious that the Western economies should take advantage of their pre-revolutionary experience when the inequalities within the system were part of the economic dynamism and much of the prized ‘national heritage’ which is the basis of much of the tourist industry or the export markets is based on the fact that countries like France and England had people who were more than willing and able to pay for people to turn themselves into “masters” of their trade. Historians notably since Burckhardt have hailed the importance of “the Renaissance” in launching and inspiring the creation of modern Europe, and central to that is the achievement of Florence of the Medici and the great ‘masters’ produced by the Medici School- especially Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Increasing the tendency of the industrial revolution has been towards the increasing use of machines and technology, mindless mass-production by assembly line methods that call for the skills and competence of young children, and even these can now be replaced by robots.

But it now seems to be the ‘new rich’ of countries like Russia, China, Arabia and India where the old ‘courtly’ ways of life are either still within living memory, or actually still exist that there is a market for the kind of high-class and luxury items that Europe used to produce in the England for example of Wedgwood and Chippendale.

The danger, however, is that, as in many ruling elites in the past, those who find themselves in a world of wealth, luxury, privilege and leisure should accept the kind of fatalism expressed by J.K. Galbraith in “The Affluent Society” in 1958, when Galbraith expressed his conviction as a Social Scientist by academic background that human societies have always had a privileged and leisured class. This is an idea that was always rejected by the English people who always insisted, from way before the Norman Conquest in 1066, that more rights meant more duties to the “Commonweal“ - a more useful term than ‘Society’ in an age when social coherence and community have been shattered by industrialization and the inevitable sacrificing of Social Man for the benefit of Economic Man- that intellectual and abstract invention of Economists. The role of an elite is to use their time and energies to explore, prepare for the Future as an ‘avant garde’, and to be prepared to pay the price of failure when “The King must die”.

PART TWO

Further to that it was interesting to see that "The Brandt Report. North and South" published in 1980 highlighted two significant belts of populations living in massive poverty and underdevelopment- having chosen to ignore those lands that were being run by Soviet and Chinese Communism. They were the belts that fringed the Islamic World that endured many centuries of stagnation and decline with ruling elites enjoying fabulous wealth at the cost of systematic use of slavery and serfdom. Those belts spread west to east across Sub-Saharan Africa and across the north of the Indian sub-continent from Afghanistan to Bangladesh..The governments and governing elites of the post-colonial era blamed their poverty and lack of development on Western Colonialism, and it is true that in the early years of "Western" involvement in these regions the "Westerners" made common cause with some of the ruling elite that they found there, just like Marco Polo was recruited to a to-job working for the Manchu Conquerors of China, who were quite happy to use fellow aliens.. who increasingly offered them more power and more riches- as happened to the ruling elites who controlled the coastal trade along the Gold, Slave and Ivory coasts of West Africa, in African States that were finally able to fight wars of liberation against the interior States that had robbed, looted and enslaved them for centuries. In the Age of Revolution there was a revolt against the involvement of "the West" in the Gothic Horrors of the existing regimes in Africa, the Middle East, India and China where human life counted for next to nothing, and the beginning of a moral revolution that insisted initially that "Western Civilization" should reject any involvement- and then which came to believe that it had a God-given duty to try to save all the millions who were being crushed by old and decayed regimes- of the kind that still makes us commonly refer to buildings constructed (like the Mosque at Ayodah) in the Seventeenth Century as "Ancient monuments". When Michael Buerk broadcast about the "Biblical Horrors" of the Ethiopian Famine, he was not talking about the impact of Western Colonialism- but of the dead hand of those older Empires, including the great Empire of Ethiopia, of Ras Tafari and the Coptic Christians who had their roots in Prester John.