Tag: Denis Healey

Think differently.

“Before we change the world, we need to change the way we think.”

That quote comes from the sub-heading of an article in the magazine The New Statesman, Britain’s current affairs magazine.  In fact, written by Russell Brand from the week that he is guest editor for the magazine. Hence it following on from yesterday.

Guest editor for a week.
Guest editor for a week.

To remind readers, my post yesterday A powerful brand of truth centred around the interview on BBC Newsnight of Russell Brand by Jeremy Paxman.

Thus for today I wanted to offer some further thoughts from Russell Brand together with the film made by Dr Nafeez Ahmed. You will possibly recall that Dr. Ahmed was the author of the Guardian article that I quoted from yesterday.

Russell Brand’s New Statesman article spoke powerfully and eloquently of the issues that he covered in his BBC Newsnight interview.  With The New Statesman’s permission let me offer a few extracts:

First from where Brand is speaking about “young people, poor people, not-rich people”.

They see no difference between Cameron, Clegg, Boris, either of the Milibands or anyone else. To them these names are as obsolete as Lord Palmerston or Denis Healey. The London riots in 2011, which were condemned as nihilistic and materialistic by Boris and Cameron (when they eventually returned from their holidays), were by that very definition political. These young people have been accidentally marketed to their whole lives without the economic means to participate in the carnival. After some draconian sentences were issued, measures that the white-collar criminals who capsized our economy with their greed a few years earlier avoided, and not one hoodie was hugged, the compliance resumed. Apathy reigned.

There’s little point bemoaning this apathy. Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve.

Russell Brand is also no slouch when it comes to offering solutions, as in:

These problems that threaten to bring on global destruction are the result of legitimate human instincts gone awry, exploited by a dead ideology derived from dead desert myths. Fear and desire are the twin engines of human survival but with most of our basic needs met these instincts are being engaged to imprison us in an obsolete fragment of our consciousness. Our materialistic consumer culture relentlessly stimulates our desire. Our media ceaselessly engages our fear, our government triangulates and administrates, ensuring there are no obstacles to the agendas of these slow-thighed beasts, slouching towards Bethlehem.

For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political. This, too, is difficult terrain when the natural tribal leaders of the left are atheists, when Marxism is inveterately Godless. When the lumbering monotheistic faiths have given us millennia of grief for a handful of prayers and some sparkly rituals.

By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.

Towards the end of the article, or manifesto as Brand calls it, he speaks about the change that is required:

We are still led by blithering chimps, in razor-sharp suits, with razor-sharp lines, pimped and crimped by spin doctors and speech-writers. Well-groomed ape-men, superficially altered by post-Clintonian trends.

We are mammals on a planet, who now face a struggle for survival if our species is to avoid expiry. We can’t be led by people who have never struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by Whigs and old Dutch racists.

We now must live in reality, inner and outer. Consciousness itself must change. My optimism comes entirely from the knowledge that this total social shift is actually the shared responsibility of six billion individuals who ultimately have the same interests. Self-preservation and the survival of the planet. This is a better idea than the sustenance of an elite. The Indian teacher Yogananda said: “It doesn’t matter if a cave has been in darkness for 10,000 years or half an hour, once you light a match it is illuminated.”

Then shortly thereafter:

The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and in – clusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary co-operation.

With the article/manifesto concluding:

But we are far from apathetic, we are far from impotent. I take great courage from the groaning effort required to keep us down, the institutions that have to be fastidiously kept in place to maintain this duplicitous order. Propaganda, police, media, lies. Now is the time to continue the great legacy of the left, in harmony with its implicit spiritual principles. Time may only be a human concept and therefore ultimately unreal, but what is irrefutably real is that this is the time for us to wake up.

The revolution of consciousness is a decision, decisions take a moment. In my mind the revolution has already begun.

It’s a powerful and very personal response to the issues facing all of humanity now and I can’t recommend too strongly reading the article in full.

So on to another powerful and personal analysis of the issues facing humanity. This time in a film made by Dr Nafeez Ahmed.  The film is called The Crisis of Civilization and shows, oh so clearly, the interconnectedness of the many issues we are facing these days. It’s nearly an hour-and-a-half long but eminently watchable.

Author and international security analyst Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed on The Crisis of Civilization. Dr Ahmed is author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and co-producer of The Crisis of Civilization.

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilization. The Crisis of Civilization argues that financial meltdown, environmental degradation, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.

Most accounts of our contemporary global crises focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. The Crisis of Civilization suggests that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about the nature of the global threats we face. The Crisis of Civilization attempts to investigate all of these problem areas, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a ‘clash of civilizations’ as Samuel Huntington argued. Nor have we witnessed ‘the end of history’ that Francis Fukuyama prematurely declared. Rather, we are dealing with the end of the industrial age, a fundamental crisis of civilization itself.

oooOOOooo

OK, that’s the end of the serious stuff for this week.  Things are going to be very different here on Learning from Dogs for the month of November.

Tune in tomorrow and I’ll explain!

Events!

Strange how it can sometimes run!

It’s coming up to noon on the 18th, i.e. yesterday.  The morning has been busy and this afternoon a number of items on the ‘to do’ list are making it difficult for me to put together a Post for today.  I was minded to simply write a small piece saying this and apologising for leaving you, dear reader, in the lurch for a day.

Thought I might call the Post, ‘Events, dear boy, events’, the famous quotation from the Rt. Hon. Harold Macmillian, Prime Minister of the UK between January 1957 and October 1963.  Did a quick Google search to check the quote and came across a delightful piece from The Telegraph British newspaper published in June 2002.  So I’m cheating by selectively republishing the article in that paper written by Robert Harris.

As Macmillan never said: that’s enough quotations

Reading through the Guardian over breakfast the other day, I came across a column headlined “Events, ol’ buddy, events”. It was all I could do not to hurl it across the kitchen.

This was not because the column was bad, or because the Guardian’s leader pages were any more irritating than usual, but simply because I knew what was coming.

And, yes, of course, there it was, down towards the bottom of the page: “All politicians know – and often quote – the response from Harold Macmillan when asked what a prime minister most feared: ‘Events, dear boy, events’.”

Later Robert Harris writes,

It’s not as if it’s even been reliably authenticated. Some say Macmillan made it to President Kennedy, others to a journalist after dinner. Denis Healey claims it referred to foreign policy.

Alistair Horne, Macmillan’s official biographer (who tells me he can’t put his finger on it, either) thinks it may have been a response to the Profumo affair.

It didn’t appear in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations until 1999 (where it is carefully described as “attributed”) which may explain why hardly anybody used it until three years ago.  Now it’s as unavoidable as “a week is a long time in politics” or “it’s the economy, stupid”.

I’m not trying to be snooty about this. I can’t remember whether I’ve ever actually used it myself, but I’ve certainly used plenty of quotations like it – aphorisms that fall into a particular category: just above the out-and-out cliché and just below the level of something genuinely apt and unfamiliar.

Then Robert writes in a way that slightly touches a nerve of this poor writer, having lent on the use of a quotation from time to time!

Every writer and reader will no doubt have their own particular favourites that they’d be grateful never to hear again, but these are mine:

  1.  “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs” – Enoch Powell on Joseph Chamberlain.
  2.  “There are three bodies no sensible man directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers” – Harold Macmillan (also attributed to Stanley Baldwin).
  3.  “In the long run we are all dead” – John Maynard Keynes.
  4.  “I’d rather take advice from my valet than from the Conservative Party Conference” – Arthur Balfour.
  5.  “Socialism is what a Labour Government does” – Herbert Morrison.
  6.  “Not while I’m alive ‘e ain’t” – Ernest Bevin, on being told that Morrison was “his own worst enemy”.
  7.  “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” – de Gaulle.
  8.   “Is it better to be loved than feared, or the reverse? The answer is that it is desirable to be both, but because it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer for a prince to be feared than loved” – Niccolo Machiavelli.
  9.  “Treason is a question of dates” – Talleyrand.
  10.  “It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder” – Anotine Boulay de la Meurthe, on hearing of the execution of the Duc d’Enghien by Napoleon.

These are all, in their different ways, excellent quotations – epigrammatic or wise or cynical. They are certainly not as clichéd as “I don’t know what effect these men have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me”, as Wellington is usually misquoted, or Lady Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as Society”.

And yet, for all that, they are clichés, made slightly worse by the fact that using them is designed to convey a thin patina of learning. They are at once familiar, yet just unfamiliar enough to have a certain snob value.

Interesting list, don’t you think!

Is Mr. Harris immune?  Of course not!  Here’s how the article closes,

And while we’re about it, can we also lose those other phrases and images that have no specific author, but that regularly surface in columns (including mine)?

Let no more deckchairs be rearranged on the Titanic, or Fuhrers in their bunkers order around phantom divisions, or turkeys vote for Christmas, or horses be promoted by Caligula. Let there be no more strange deaths of Liberal/Tory/ Labour England.

“You have used every cliché except ‘God is love’ and ‘Please adjust your dress before leaving’,” Churchill (famously) said. In that spirit, I curse “events, dear boy, events”. As Cromwell (equally famously) declared: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

With no more ado, (there’s another cliché!), I will sign off.