I do not blame myself for anything

Rachel Reeves gives damning verdict on Brexit’s impact on Britain

• Rachel Reeves has stated in an interview with The Times that Brexit has negatively impacted Britain's economy, growth, and prices.
• The Chancellor advocates for closer economic ties with the European Union, describing it as the "biggest prize" for the UK.

 

I do not blame myself for anything. I am a result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am going to begin again when I get things thought out.

Sherwood Anderson - Windy McPherson's Son (1916)

Be Bold With The Wrecking Ball

 

Be bold with tax hikes or risk 'groundhog day', chancellor told as low growth recorded

Rachel Reeves faces the prospect of another "groundhog day" unless next month's budget goes further than plugging an estimated £22bn black hole in the public finances, according to a respected thinktank

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said there was a "strong case" for the chancellor to substantially increase the £10bn headroom she has previously given herself against her own debt rules, or risk further repeats of needing to restore the buffer in the years ahead.

Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them.

Now and then a bold mouse stands upon his hind legs and addresses the others. He declares he will force his way through the walls and conquer the gods who have built the house. "I will kill them," he declares. "The mice shall rule. You shall live in the light and the warmth. There shall be food for all and no one shall go hungry."

Sherwood Anderson – Poor White (1920)

Defeated by his ability to say words

Keir Starmer slams Kemi Badenoch as 'climate defeatist' but she says he's 'on another planet' in net zero row

Sir Keir Starmer came under attack at Prime Minister’s Questions from the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party over cuts to winter fuel payments and net zero reforms.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch accused the PM of being ‘on another planet’ over the Government’s controversial net zero drive.

But Sir Keir branded her a “climate defeatist”.

It is a terrible thing to speculate on how man has been defeated by his ability to say words. The brown bear in the forest has no such power and the lack of it has enabled him to retain a kind of nobility of bearing sadly lacking in us. On and on through life we go, socialists, dreamers, makers of laws, sellers of goods and believers in suffrage for women and we continuously say words, worn-out words, crooked words, words without power or pregnancy in them.
 
Sherwood Anderson - Marching Men (1917)

We already knew about things getting worse

Sir Keir Starmer: Prime minister to say things 'will get worse before it gets better' in key speech

Sir Keir will continue Labour's attacks on the previous government, saying the situation is "worse than we ever imagined" as they "inherited not just an economic black hole but a societal black hole."

 

I do not blame myself for anything. I am a result, not a cause.

Sherwood Anderson - Windy McPherson's Son (1916)

The mice shall rule

Now and then a bold mouse stands upon his hind legs and addresses the others. He declares he will force his way through the walls and conquer the gods who have built the house. "I will kill them," he declares. "The mice shall rule. You shall live in the light and the warmth. There shall be food for all and no one shall go hungry."

Sherwood Anderson – Poor White (1920)

Food activists occupy Palace of Holyroodhouse dining room

Activists have occupied the royal dining room at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh as part of an ongoing campaign to slash food prices.

Nine campaigners from This Is Rigged entered the palace at about 1.15pm on Monday carrying banners with slogans including “Is treasa tuath na tighearna”, which is Gaelic for “The people are mightier than a lord”, and “change begins in the kitchen, not the boardroom”...

They claim that one in four Scots have experienced food insecurity while 1,000 children per year are taken to hospital with malnutrition.

They criticised supermarkets’ actions in increasing prices as an “act of corporate violence”.

The Loaded Dice

 

The great forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded dice against a credulous public.

Sherwood Anderson - Windy McPherson's Son (1916)


In Sir Keir Starmer’s case, the loaded dice are the mess made by the Tories, a mess Labour would not and could not have mitigated. The credulous public are those he hopes to persuade otherwise - that the dice are not loaded.

Universal impotence

He told Bruce of his plan. “There’s a note I’d like to strike. It’s about impotence. Have you noticed, going along the streets, that all of the people you see are tired out, impotent?” he asked. “What is a newspaper—the most impotent thing in the world. What is the theater? Have you gone much lately? They give you such a weariness that your back aches, and the movies, God, the movies are ten times worse, and if this war isn’t a sign of universal impotence, sweeping over the world like a disease, then I don’t know much.

Sherwood Anderson - Dark Laughter (1925)


Given a certain level of security, impotence seems to be something middle class people willingly vote for and elites willingly provide.

I am a result, not a cause

A quote for Easter -

At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to come at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated. When he got there he found a wire from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and despondency over the loss of his old business standing and reputation, Colonel Tom had shot himself in a New York hotel.

Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and fighting to get his head clear. “The old coward. The damned old coward,” he muttered; “any one could have done that.”

When Lewis came into Sam’s office he found his chief sitting at his desk fingering the telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.

“Well, do not blame yourself for that,” he said, with quick understanding.

“I don’t,” Sam muttered; “I do not blame myself for anything. I am a result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am going to begin again when I get things thought out.”

Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour he sat there reviewing his life. When he came to the day that he had humiliated Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had written on the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted. “The best men spend their lives seeking truth.”

Sherwood Anderson - Windy McPherson's Son (1916)


Sam McPherson discovers that success isn’t what he thought, that he was driven by ambition while he himself drove nothing. He was merely a result of that ambition, not its cause. His epiphany is one Spinoza would have understood. “The best men spend their lives seeking truth.”

His ability in quibbling

To spend his life quibbling over trifles with other lawyers was not what he wanted. To have his place in life fixed by his ability in quibbling seemed to him hideous.

Sherwood Anderson - Marching Men (1917)


There are many people in the public sector with a significant quibbling role. Most of the rules and regulations creeping around our lives were honed and developed via quibbling. What steers people towards a career in quibbling though?

I’m a retired analytical chemist of the environmental variety and I occasionally wonder what steered me towards chemistry. The answer seems to be simple enough. From school onwards I found I liked chemistry and could do it fairly easily. The two are of course connected - liking it and being able to do it. Similar influences must apply to quibbling.

No doubt something similar also applies to many of us, perhaps most of us. We end up doing whatever we can and are able to endure for years or decades. Sticking with chemistry as an example, did I have a need to believe in the scientific method in order to do chemistry?

It helps, but no – it’s a matter of learning what works within the discipline. Chemistry teachers foster that via approval and disapproval. Some of it also comes from experience at the bench, such as not trying to pipette concentrated sulphuric acid by mouth.

Here’s a similar question – do politicians believe political doctrines? No – politicians find they have the ability to do politics and enjoy doing it. The doctrines are tools, not beliefs. They may have roots in certain political traditions, but that is the exploratory phase – finding their political tastes, aptitudes and backers. Also finding where the political approval and disapproval come from.

We do what we do to earn a crust if we can endure doing it for years and have enough ability to do it to a certain standard. This would be a standard which merits more approval than disapproval from the workplace and our social surroundings. It even applies to quibbling – do it well and it can be a career asset. Standard stimulus, response, reinforcement – we do not need to go further to understand such things.

We do not believe in what we do, the notion of belief is redundant. We do it because works in the sense that it attracts approval, including our own approval. Minimal approval perhaps, barely more than disapproval perhaps, but at least a residue of approval. A large part of approval is employment and pay so it’s very simple –

Can do it. Like it. Paid to do it. Do it.

Orthodox climate scientists do not believe in what they do, they do it because they can, because they are paid and because peer approval far outweighs sceptical disapproval. In this case, peer approval is supplemented by media, political and social approval. Engineered approval designed to outweigh sceptical disapproval.

Engineered approval is common, as elites, politicians, celebrities, media, advertisers and PR outfits demonstrate on a daily basis. Engineered approval tells us that orthodox climate science is a political activity. No scientific method, no experimental confirmation, no successful predictions, no belief. None of it is necessary. They must find quibbling useful too.

The scalding finger of thought

 

The empty, soft faces on which the scalding finger of thought had left no mark.

Sherwood Anderson - Windy McPherson's Son (1916)

You have to figure it out for yourself

You have to figure it out for yourself, and if you’re the kind no one pushes off the boat, the whole thing will never come your way and you're safe. Maybe you’re hardly interesting enough ever to be in danger. Most people walk high and safe—all their days.

Sherwood Anderson - Dark Laughter (1925)


Safe spaces - it’s a well known term, frequently ridiculed as woke, but there is much to be gleaned from it. If there are safe spaces then there are unsafe spaces. This gives us a political direction – unsafe spaces to safe spaces. All a matter of perception, but manipulating perception is how the nudge game works.

In which case, we may turn the safe spaces notion around and say the ruling elites are not interested in safe spaces, but they are interested creating a perception of unsafe spaces. They weave unsafe spaces into government narratives to create a pervasive sense of social direction. Unsafe to safe. 

Unsafe spaces within language is a major part of where this is going. Spinning a sense of caution and reticence rather than fear. Nudged towards a version of Newspeak where more and more subjects are turned into swamps of unsafe language where nice people don’t go. Not a new thing of course.

Apart from language, here in the UK, the biggest unsafe space for many decades has been the coronavirus lockdown. An official message suggesting that the range of lockdown measures made everyone safer, but the message was transparently aimed at making everyone feel unsafe except in their own home.

The catastrophic climate narrative is run on similar, if less effective lines. Here, and with monumental absurdity, the entire planet becomes an unsafe space. There is no escape from this one, which was perhaps a strategic error from the start. With no escape route there is no point trying to escape. We may as well adapt and enjoy life while recycling a few yogurt pots to show willing.

We could even suggest that the NHS has a contribution to make to the unsafe spaces strategy. There is nothing safe about needing medical assistance. If that medical assistance is not quite as effective as we might desire, not quite safe when we need it to be particularly safe – what then?

Ruling elites may prefer the NHS to be that way – not quite as safe as other health services. Not in a deliberate sense, but merely one outcome of an underlying, unstated policy where general anxieties are never allowed to fall as far as complacency.

In gender politics we have a wild attempt to make unsafe space within the language of human biology and reproduction. So wild it may backfire, but still a remarkable reminder of how far unsafe language can be pushed. And will be pushed. It won’t stop.

One for Harry

Given money and a respectable position in life you had to do openly something that defied openly the social laws before you could step into a free world, and the free world into which you stepped by any such action was not free at all. It was dreadfully limited, ugly in fact, the kind of world inhabited by—well, say, by movie actresses.

Sherwood Anderson - Dark Laughter (1925)

Out of Nowhere into Nothing

In the afternoon, after her employer had gone for the day, she would stand again by the window. As she stood thus she faced westward and in the afternoon saw the sun fall down the sky. It was glorious to be there alone during the late hours of the afternoon. What a tremendous thing this city in which she had come to live! For some reason after she went to work for Walter Sayers the city seemed, like the room in which she worked, to have accepted her, taken her into itself.

Sherwood Anderson – Out of Nowhere into Nothing (1921)

Many of us will know what Anderson is describing here. A young woman has moved from a dreary village to Chicago where she works as a stenographer. Here she is savouring the simple pleasure of being alone in her employer’s office, looking out over the teeming city as the sun sets. Just beyond the office walls she is surrounded by people, by the ceaseless buzz of city life but she is also alone at her window. She is apart from it all until she chooses otherwise.

After growing up in the village she loves the impersonal acceptance of the city, the freedom it seems to offer. She loves it as an escape from the stultifying closeness of village life where she was never really alone apart from temporary escapes into surrounding woods and fields. Now she relishes the freedom of anonymity which Chicago offers. Everyone knows everyone else in the village. Chicago's anonymity is impossible.

Escaping back to the present we see much the same effect in Costa coffee shops. Anyone can be assured of impersonal Costa acceptance as soon as they walk through the door. It doesn’t matter if we have never set foot in the place before. Everything is familiar and predictable, but the most important thing of all is acceptance. Strolling into a Costa is not the same as venturing into Joe’s Cafe on an unfamiliar village High Street. Acceptance is what Costa guarantees and that matters more than the coffee ever could.

It is much the same with any major public brand from Tesco to M&S. As in Anderson’s novel, cities are more accepting than villages simply because they are so much bigger, so much more anonymous and anonymity is itself a form of acceptance. We don’t know you but it doesn’t matter because we don’t know each other either. Join us - we don’t care so there is no need for you to care.

This may be a powerful attraction of identity politics. With an approved identity comes anonymity and with that comes acceptance within the identity. Individuals need not apply. They must seek their freedom elsewhere. Social media for example.

We encounter this with celebrities who cloak their inner life with the anonymity of a politically correct identity. They become at the same time both famous and anonymous. As if an inner sense of politically correct anonymity offers a calming sense of freedom inside the febrile skin of celebrity.

Read all about it

They all, the young illustrators and the writers who gathered in the rooms in the evenings to talk—well, they all worked in newspaper offices or in advertising offices just as Bruce did. They pretended to despise what they were doing but kept on doing it just the same. “We have to eat,” they said.

Sherwood Anderson - Dark Laughter (1925)

Where does one go for a consistently reliable source of general news? I certainly haven’t found one. No doubt the answer is that there are no such sources, not in the sense that one or two may be relied on to the exclusion of all others. That is a sure route to misinformation.

As a chap who remembers reading a daily newspaper and who usually watched the evening news on TV, coming to terms with the unreliability of news sources is a lasting pleasure, because beneficial discoveries are pleasurable even when they come rather late in life.

The vast global range of modern news sources, our ability to compare different accounts of the same event with a few clicks - the importance of it all is so colossal we barely understand how it will affect our future. All we know is that one way or another it will. 

The endless prevalence of bias, exaggeration, guesswork and outright lies may be deplorable but to those of us who remember the old days these inherent flaws in human nature are also enlightening. News is generated for a purpose and that purpose is not altruism, never was. We know that now, better than we ever did before.

If there are no consistently reliable news sources, does it matter? Having so many of them allows us to compare one with another and assess uncertainties and possibilities instead of taking favoured sources as authoritative - as we used to do. Fringe news sources also give us a handle on wider possibilities and how important or unimportant the main stories of the day might be. So many events to choose from. Those which hit the headlines are not necessarily the most important.

In my case the expectation that one or two news sources should be sufficient is fading slowly. Forged by long habit and the long dominance of the BBC the slowness of it is hardly surprising but the change is certainly welcome.

As it becomes easier to assess the news from a sceptical standpoint, it becomes more likely that it will be assessed sceptically. The uncertainties behind mainstream narratives become more obvious, their bias clearer. The political mania for being seen to do something becomes more transparently self-serving. I like it.

—and then

A man gets himself placed in life, all is settled, everything is going well, unpleasant things of the past are forgotten, the future is rosy—and then. What a man wants is to be let alone. If life would only flow straight on, like a river.

Sherwood Anderson - Dark Laughter (1925)

It is odd how being busy creeps up on one. I feel pretty busy these days, even though I’m retired and ought to have plenty of spare time. Unfortunately for many of us that isn’t how it works. If we have spare time it seems to attract another dose of busyness from a mysteriously infinite supply.

Working life is like that too. Those who know how to be busy seem to attract it. Those who don’t are immune and everyone knows who they are.

Universal impotence

“There’s a note I’d like to strike. It’s about impotence. Have you noticed, going along the streets, that all of the people you see are tired out, impotent?” he asked. “What is a newspaper—the most impotent thing in the world. What is the theater? Have you gone much lately? They give you such a weariness that your back aches, and the movies, God, the movies are ten times worse, and if this war isn’t a sign of universal impotence, sweeping over the world like a disease, then I don’t know much.”

Sherwood Anderson – Dark Laughter (1925)

If Anderson’s character was right about universal impotence, then here in the UK we would still be caught up in wars and conflicts and all kinds of unplanned consequences would infest our lives –

Okay that’s one box ticked so let us imagine a few other possibilities.

If we were really impotent we’d do ridiculous things such as allowing rapists into the country, or preachers of religious hatred. Or we would become entangled in monstrous bureaucracies and beat ourselves up with impossibly complex regulations. Or maybe we would find it impossible to build affordable houses for young people, control an apparently inexorable growth in our population or choose only the best from those who want to move here.

Even wilder possibilities come to mind if we really are impotent. We might find ourselves unable to criticise malign social trends in robust language without isolating ourselves. We might freely elect unworthy people to high office. We may even try to control global weather patterns by building giant windmills -

No that’s going too far. We can’t be that impotent can we?

A bound girl

I remember now that she was a bound girl and did not know where her father and mother were. Maybe she did not have any father. You know what I mean. Such bound children were often enough cruelly treated. They were children who had no parents, slaves really. There were very few orphan homes then. They were legally bound into some home. It was a matter of pure luck how it came out.

Sherwood Anderson - Death in the Woods (1933)

Although we know such things went on in the past, within the public arena it does not have the same status as slavery. This could be due in part to numbers and the horrific nature of slave trading, but there were other horrific issues too and for those the guilt seems to have abated.

The issue of child bondage is still moderately familiar partly because of media stories about far off sweat shops and partly because famous writers such as Zola, Hugo and Dickens have made it so to those who care to read them. Memes such as chimney sweeps sending little boys up chimneys have also become embedded in popular Victorian imagery. But novels, sweat shops and popular memes merely highlight the issue in a strangely offhand way, they do not give it depth. To some extent they also tone it down because the wider issue of bondage is not nurtured it in the same way that historical slavery is still nurtured.

Take Litton Mill in Derbyshire for example.

By 1830 everyone had heard of Litton Mill. It was one of the most notorious workplaces in England where child slaves were starved and tortured. There had been suspicions that all was not well as early as 1811 but it was not until 1828 that the horrific treatment of child apprentices there became common knowledge. 

The mill still stands and even today one cannot pass it without thinking of those long dead orphan children. Many were carted up from London slums to work in what would then have been a bleak nightmare of a place in the middle of nowhere. Ghosts of those children were said to haunt Litton Mill and I can see why. This is a fairly well known local story, but still we only have one patch in the patchwork. The horror and sadistic depths of it are not impressed into our cultural awareness to anything like the same extent as slavery. The level of slavery guilt seems to block out other, wider considerations. It certainly does so politically.

Maybe that is because we have it about right in terms of the weight we put on the two issues, but I don’t think so. We have bypassed the horrors of child bondage in our history and in so doing we have also bypassed the wider issue of personal bondage. To what degree are modern people bound by circumstances not of their own making and how tightly are they bound?

We can’t call it slavery and bondage now has other connotations, but the situation is real and not well represented in the public arena. It is more than alienation and much less than slavery but perhaps more widespread and damaging than we care to admit.One might almost see the whole thing as partly deliberate. If political leaders are willing to foster a crushing level of guilt about slavery, then milder yet still iniquitous forms of bondage barely reach the public arena. Apart from the hysterical memes spewed out by political correctness of course.

Yet mass bondage seems to be the whole point of current global political trends. Oddly convenient somehow.

The eating of sewage

source

They were graceful, living, free things. They were triumphant. The getting of food, even the eating of sewage was done thus gracefully, beautifully.

Sherwood Anderson - Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (1921)

Anderson was describing gulls soaring and diving over a polluted river. Shitehawks my father used to call them. They feed on it but don't live in it.

Seeds planted by dead men

I am paying old debts. Old thoughts and beliefs—seeds planted by dead men—spring up in my soul and choke me.

Sherwood Anderson - Seeds (1921)

As a tiny baby, what was your most cherished belief? Something to do with the delightful flavour of your big toe? We are not born with beliefs so where do they come from, how are they induced? Ah – that’s the key word though isn’t it? Induced. Creepy word. Say it slowly - i n d u c e d.

Beliefs are induced and the induction begins from day one. As we also know but prefer not to know, we don’t do our own induction. Not all the seeds are planted by dead men either. We know that too. Just read the comments in online newspapers...

You already do? Of course you do - it's just too delicious.

Belief is another of those misleading words we are stuck with because language is essentially manipulative and the vast majority of us are not the manipulators. It is just one aspect of our tendency to focus on the individual rather than controlling environments. Those are the environments we grew into, those which induced our beliefs, where the levers are in other hands.

Belief is socially induced verbal and mental behaviour. It is controlled behaviour and once we are controlled by a belief it is not easy to escape. Neither is it easy to see the point of escaping because we don’t control beliefs but are controlled by them. Having a belief is rather like joining a club with club rules and constraints which members must accept on pain of expulsion. As with a club, belief exacts a fee for its services; the fee being our independence, our freedom to think alternative thoughts.

As with a club, the control implicit in all beliefs is usually beneficial. It is a social allegiance conferring benefits we may or may not care to identify explicitly. The nature of belief is that we rarely see the control it exerts over our thinking simply because it exerts control over our thinking. Belief has to be internalised or it might be questioned. There are things we cannot allow ourselves to know except in that strangely oblique sense where we could know but dare not know.

Belief lies somewhere on a continuum between assent and support, between active and affirmative behaviour, particularly verbal behaviour. The distinction is well illustrated by political debates which are best analysed by clarifying what each side supports.

The important point seems to be somewhat subtle but it isn’t. Instead of being adopted by a belief, we could observe allegiances and their causes. In other words we could tease out the causes of the debate, the behaviour and the history of its causes rather than the airy abstractions we so often use to hide what is essentially allegiance behaviour. But usually we don't do that. Usually we are adopted by allegiances, infected by beliefs. Or we stand on the sidelines and sneer. Neither is satisfactory... well... I suppose sneering does have its satisfactions.

Aldous Huxley’s ideal of non-attachment is essentially an ideal of unbelief but one cannot easily believe in unbelief. We are not independent, not autonomous and there is nothing to be gained in expecting mass behaviour to be a kind of rational search for the truth. It isn’t and can’t be any such thing.

Belief is what dolts and charlatans make use of to worm their way into the public arena, why they always have and always will.

My blood is thick with surrender

My blood is thick with surrender.

Sherwood Anderson - Dark Laughter (1925)

Modern political life is indeed thick with surrender. It is one of the most characteristic features of our times, that constant, nagging demand to surrender as an individual, to submit to the politically fashionable will. Not that this is a dramatic change in the long history of the human condition, but a little while ago something less oppressive and more rational seemed to be in the air. Now all that seems so long ago. 

Cameron and Corbyn both preach surrender as a political philosophy. Neither man seems to have any real notion of the individual as an agent of change or progress. They expect us to surrender as they themselves have surrendered body and soul to the shifting sands of political fashion. 

Surrender to the EU is one of our big issues at the moment, but there are many more. Cultural surrender is another big one. It swirls through the immigration debate without ever solidifying around the cultural preferences of those who are already here. Whatever they might be, we are not encouraged to clarify because even our cultural future must be surrendered to the fads and exigencies of the elite.

The whole spirit, the whole ethos of political surrender seems to be an end in itself. Surrender is what totalitarian political regimes require as their basic political philosophy. Surrender is the groundwork of modern political thinking where genuine democracy has become a quaint relic of more optimistic times.