What’s wrong with being all-powerful?

Take a house with a dozen people, a neighbourhood with a few hundred, or a country with a few million, would it be better if in each case one single person is all powerful and everyone else is to live or die depending wholly on this person’s mercy, or if power is more evenly and fairly spread so that no one has to bow down to the commands of any almighty despot, regardless of how benevolent the latter is supposed to be?

Anyone who has any historical knowledge of the exploitation, oppression and injustice which come from power being concentrated in the hands of someone who is not accountable to anyone else will have no doubt which is preferable. Absolute power does not only corrupt its holder, it enslaves those subject to its exercise. If this observation holds for a house, a neighbourhood, a country, then surely it holds for the entire universe.

The world would always be better if there isn’t a single person who possesses limitless power to dominate everyone else. If God is the embodiment of perfection, it would follow that God cannot be an all-powerful entity unaccountable to no one else. As power is better distributed in a progressively more equitable manner amongst all those who can be affected by that power, perfection is reached when power is shared out so evenly that all can decide for the good of all, and none can arbitrarily dictate to the detriment of any single one.

The primitive infantile mind craved for a powerful parental figure to look after everything and projected God as an all-powerful being. Fixated on this naïve premise, theologians and their critics, for centuries argued about whether there is proof that an all-powerful being rules the universe. But what they have in fact arguing about is the likelihood of, not God’s existence, but cosmic tyranny. Perhaps all concerned can now wake from their intellectual slumber and recognise that what moral goodness calls for is not the absolute concentration of power in a single being, but its very opposite – the fair dispersion of power to everyone on equal terms.

The erroneous conception of God as all-powerful has for centuries lent itself to be exploited as a justification for papal, monarchical, patriarchal, fundamentalist oppression at every turn. Only a ‘God’ so twisted in its core meaning can be invoked to back wars, tortures, and suppression of love and free-thinking. God, properly understood as the ideal state of power shared by all in a just commonwealth with no boundaries, is real in so far as it is the guiding principle for life.

So it’s time to put aside flawed theology and invite the religious minded to embrace God as the path to a fairer society. Forget about worshiping all-powerful tyrants disguised as saviours. The only future worth striving for is the one where the gap between the powerful and the powerless is finally closed.

Together We Can

Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ continues to resonate down the age. It is so true that when citizens give up striving to hold the powerful to account, and allow themselves to be tricked or bribed into leaving those in command of their fate to act without due public constraint, they end up weak and vulnerable. Without a collective platform to challenge, and if necessary, halt those with power from charging forward, they become mere pawns in someone else’s game plan.

And tyranny adapts with time. If the first half of the twentieth century was still stirred by rallying calls to band together against Caesar-like dictators, the contemporary world is seeing a multiplicity of social, political and corporate leaders who seek to control others by fostering fundamentalist beliefs, handing the public realm to creeping private interest, and promoting addictive consumerism. There is no single imperial figure to confront, but a shifting alliance of the rich, the irresponsible, and the ‘let’s invoke God when it suits us’ brigade.

Against this chameleon axis of oppression, what can we do? In England, an initiative which began in 2005, is proving that solidarity can be cultivated through the focused collaboration of both the state and citizens. The Together We Can campaign, developed to encourage and support active citizens and public servants to cooperate in finding solutions to public problems, brought 12 Government Departments together with a shared commitment to improve citizens engagement with the development of their policies and services. The annual review of 2006 featured the Secretaries of State of all those departments reflecting on the diverse achievements, from citizenship education for all pupils, through greater local say in setting policing priorities, to wider adoption of deliberative engagement in developing environmental policies (see http://www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1502653).

Now an interactive resource on the web has been launched to enable all those, who believe that citizens can together exert far greater influence than acting alone, to utilise, contribute to, and promote ideas and practices which will strengthen that influence (http://togetherwecan.direct.gov.uk).

Together We Can cultivates a robust civic culture, to give citizens, from an early age, the skills, confidence and opportunities to work together in raising issues with and getting answers from with public institutions. Of course, this will not by itself prevent democratic life from being damaged by those who want to infect the public realm with their brand of ‘spiritual’ or commercial values, but it is an important inoculation against civic atrophy.

For example, approaches like participatory budgeting are spreading and people who had previously been sceptical about the prospect of civic solidarity have not just witnessed, but deeply moved by young people changing their minds and switching support to back projects which were to benefit primarily the elderly, and ethnic groups voting on spending priorities irrespective of racial factors. Women who had been marginalized, and people with learning disabilities had acquired new skills and confidence to make their voices heard.

Without fanfare, but with quiet determination, a new generation of civic-minded activists are coming through. Together they will stand up to any modern Caesars, in whatever guise they may appear, who threaten the precious solidarity of democratic citizenship.

Long live the Con

When so many commentators in Britain and America are queuing up to congratulate France for electing a President who’s prepared to drive through ‘reforms’, take the ‘tough decisions’, and bring about ‘greater flexibility’, you have to start worrying for the French people. What have they done?

They have for decades struck a nice balance between work and life – producing sought after designs and goods all round the world, and enjoying a decent quality of life sustained by economic security. What exactly went wrong? In short, they began to be undercut by corporations which made more money by squeezing their employees dry. Corporations which are celebrated by Anglo-American pundits for ‘thriving’ in the global marketplace by being utterly committed to cutting back on employment protection, demanding longer hours, polarising between the bosses who could do more and more as they please, and the dispensable workers. The message to France and other socially minded countries in Western Europe has been simple: embrace this style of governance or perish.

But why would the citizens of any democracy, in France or anywhere else, give up the power they have through their state and let new leaders dismantle the precious apparatus for securing liberty and equality for all? Well, you have to use the old divide-and-rule trick, but give it a contemporary twist.

Here’s the new con – a compassionate one as some like to put it, for it hinges on showing how caring you are – challenge people to choose between trusting themselves or some faceless public institution. Put this to them bluntly: Wouldn’t you rather trust yourself than somebody else? To keep your destiny in your own hands, you must distrust, nay, reject anyone trying to regulate things on your behalf. Keep these meddlers away, and what happens in life would be down to your own efforts. You can’t get fairer than that.

Once the gullible bites, you can feed them the rest. Why pay ever more taxes to the state when you know better how to spend your own money? Why let anyone dictate to you how many hours you can work, or indeed what conditions are acceptable for you to work under, when all that would do is to hamper you from earning what you deserve? Why allow busy bodies to interfere with what can be sold to you, or how it should be sold to you when it would just add to the costs of what you want to buy? Why do we have to pool our resources to invest in schools and hospitals for everyone, when we should be able to choose the health and education services we want from successful private companies?

Con artists at the service of plutocratic barons have refined their message with a reference to globalization here, and a nod to post-modernity there. But their intent is the same as it ever was – ensure those who have amassed wealth and power over others can take the fullest advantage of them without any intervention from collective forces acting in the public good. They want people to see taxes, civic institutions, public standards, state inspection regimes, regulations and controls as all inherently bad. They invite to us to cut them right back, so that we can be more free, more flexible, more ready – to be picked off one by one. They are counting on each and everyone of us to be foolish enough to be tricked into enslavement in the name of individual freedom. Vive le con.

Give restorative justice a chance

I have heard so many people say that the youths of today are getting out of control. They cannot be made to behave and they ruin the lives of others, old and young. The ‘tough’ proponents argue that the only solution is to target those who are threatening others with much more stringent measures. Punish them, and possibly their parents too if they are to be found, with eviction from public housing, cuts to their benefits, and prison sentences. Hit them hard until they submit.

The ‘soft’ advocates, on the other hand, maintain that more support should be given to parents and children to help them cope with living in a society with relentlessly growing income inequalities. More supervised time for out of school hour activities, more play facilities, more leisure events which are affordable without being branded as second class, and generally better response to the unmet needs of the marginalized.

But between the tiny minority of young people who really require the most punitive treatment to prevent them from harming others, and the general needs of young people who would otherwise be made to feel neglected and insignificant, there is a substantial group of youngsters who deal with their own deficiencies and low self-esteem by being unpleasant to others. There is no evidence whatsoever that either the tough or soft approach is necessary or sufficient in changing their behaviour.

The only evidence that anything would make a real difference is that gathered by the Youth Justice Board of England and Wales on the impact of restorative justice in schools. Schools in many different areas were introduced to the practice of restorative justice where teachers, and in some cases pupils, were trained as facilitators to bring perpetrators of undesirable behaviour and their victims together to talk through the problems. Crucially the process was to guide the perpetrators to see the hurt they have caused, make a sincere apology, and offer to behave differently. At the same time, it would give the victims an opportunity to have their say, and secure for themselves the assurance they needed.

Apart from the most serious, though thankfully few, cases of violent behaviour, all forms of insulting, bullying, teasing, aggravating behaviour were picked up by the restorative justice approach, and in 93% of the cases across the participating schools a resolution was reached with an agreement signed up to by the perpetrator. But are these agreements worth the paper they were written on? Does anyone take them seriously, you ask. Well, 96% of the agreements were honoured. No wonder, pupils and teachers alike were delighted with the improvement to their schools and confident that they would be sustained. In some schools, the pupils who had trained and practised as facilitators asked their head teachers if they could offer their support to other schools as the problem of abusive and bullying had virtually vanished from their own schools.

So why shouldn’t we have restorative justice practices in every school? Apparently some of those who favour the tough approach believe that they absolved the perpetrators of blame for their bad behaviour and should therefore be rejected as a legitimate way to deal with wrongdoing. But the essence of restorative justice is the recognition of blame and the embrace of personal responsibility to rectify past wrong. Let’s cast dogma aside and give restorative justice a chance.

Weapons of mass confusion

What is it about America and weapons? Why does this country stockpile more weapons of mass destruction than anyone else and yet is permanently poised to strike at any country thinking of acquiring a few of their own? The biggest threat to its own citizens in terms of being injured or killed by gunfire comes not from abroad but their fellow Americans. And what is the American response when the umpteenth tragedy strikes with more of their own slain by some gun-obsessed shooter? That it is a fundamental right of the American people to bear arms.

But why should this peculiar right be so important in America, when it is utterly alien in every other civilized country in the world? It may have something to do with the culture of distrust that goes right back to the origins of the USA. People who did not want to live under various European regimes migrated to America, and when the British government tried to retain control over their affairs, they took up arms and declared themselves independent. But once their own system of government was put in place, the American people were not prepared to surrender their weapons. Even with one of the most elaborate checks and balance form of governance, individuals wanted to have ready access to their own guns should they fell out with those they put in temporary charge of their collective affairs.

To this day, the deal remains that whoever runs the American government has to acknowledge that its own citizens rightly cannot trust it with sole possession of weapons. It is odd then that it should expect the rest of the world to trust it with having the most powerful weapons imaginable. Is it because feeling impotent in relation to its own arms-loving citizens, it wants to exert control over people outside its borders? Or is it trying to translate the historical belief of American people that only they can be trusted with weapons into a global policy of preventing non-Americans from having powerful weapons of their own?

Yet, just when one thinks any of this might make sense after all, we are reminded of the fact that the world’s leading exporter of arms is none other than the United States. Not only do American weapon makers dominate the international market for destructive instruments, their government faithfully supports them by cultivating new buyers in its tireless sales pitch to foreign states. So whatever their rhetoric may be about weapon proliferation posing too great a risk to peace and security to be tolerated, they in practice do more than everyone else combined in arming the world.

Logic of course cannot by itself make sense of the actions of people who are seriously disorientated. A symptom of persistent distrust is the spread of paranoia eroding the capacity to work with others collectively to find sensible solutions. Why sit down with others to seek to reach an agreement on a way forward when one can shoot down any opposition (real or perceived). The infantile American colonies of the 1770s, feeling in turn neglected and repressed by the father figure of a deranged monarch, grew up into a 21st century superpower who celebrates the freedom to wield weapons everywhere so long as the deadliest weapons of all stay in their own hands.

To be fair, a significant number of people in America – derided as liberal or progressive – have over recent decades developed a much more mature outlook which recognises that juvenile macho obsession with weapons has to be displaced by proper controls nationally and internationally, and pressed for reining in arms sales at every level. But until they become the majority, America and the rest of the world can expect many more innocent people to pay the price of this armed mayhem.

Of frogs and men

A sign by the road along the stream nearby warns drivers of frogs crossing in the breeding season. It was put up in the early 1990s when every year a large number of frogs headed towards the stream to spawn. But in the last few years the sign is largely redundant. The common frog (Rana temporaria) has become very uncommon indeed around these parts.

Changing land use, scarcity of ponds, sharply fluctuating ‘spring’ weather, have all cut down the survival rates of these amphibian creatures. Their decline may not be as visually dramatic as that of the polar bears, but it provides us with yet another reminder that the irresponsible use of resources is wreaking havoc with life on earth. There is no escape. However much large corporations commission researchers on their payroll to deny that there is any problem, the damages are everywhere to be seen.

So in spite of all the objective evidence piling up, can it be that the corporate sponsors of relentless pollution really believe nothing is going wrong with our planet? Or is it more likely that they take the view that when the proverbial hits the fan, they would as usual be able to buy their way out of trouble, and leave the poor to bear the brunt of it all. Isn’t that what happened when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, where the rich got themselves safely out of the city, leaving those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder to literally drown? Isn’t that what they expect that when tobacco induced illnesses push up the costs of healthcare for the state, they can rely on their private clinics to look after themselves? Or when dangerous waste is generated from their industrial plants, they simply ship them off to poor countries which see it as a means to make some desperately needed foreign currencies?

Yes, they are convinced that their harmful drive for profits will make them rich enough to enjoy themselves while the harm is all pushed down to the poor, powerless lot around the world. And what response to this aggressively greedy strategy is being developed? Those who are truly progressive minded would have expected perhaps a call for genuine solidarity – a commitment to share out the control and utilization of limited resources more equitably. After all, when the Second World War threatened all, rationing for all was the progressive strategy to unite people to fight the common threat together.

But rationing, solidarity, economic justice are not on the agenda it seems. What we are presented with are more variations of the rich man’s game – environmental protection through market mechanisms. Introduce tax incentives to shift people away from damaging activities. Establish carbon trading so the responsible can sell their shares to those willing to buy rather than behave more responsibly.

What will this bring? Those who are at the bottom of society already are penalised with taxes when they have little choice over their daily routines (whatever happened to the investment to improve their public transport system?), whereas the rich are assured that they can indeed buy their way out of any sticky situation. If they are rich enough, they can buy their way to legitimately pollute even more.

Life for those without a fat wallet, frogs or men, is looking more ominous by the day.

What exactly is pro-family?

On the whole, children having to grow up in unstable, dysfunctional families tend to suffer more problems than children brought up by loving, dependable adults with a steady relationship. The more parental figures there are – biological, adoptive, grandparents, guardians – the more support there is likely to be compared with a single individual with no help. For the sake of all children, it is fairly obvious that we should all be in favour of strong, happy, caring families everywhere.

But if you think that means ‘pro-family’ ideas must be about identifying and countering what undermines flourishing families, you’d be in for a surprise. Many of the self-styled champions of the sacred, precious institution of family are actually fixated about the legal protection of heterosexual marriage as the respected norm in society. They want to give people in that form of relationship more rights, more tax benefits, more dignity than anyone else. Whatever causes them to think like that has very little to do with the parental capacity of different forms of family arrangements.

There is no evidence that married heterosexual couples raise children more effectively than an aunt and her companion, two devoted dads, a loving mother supported by her mother, or any other combination. The only constant factor is sufficient attention being paid to the needs of the children by adults who share a deep concern for the wellbeing of those children without being torn apart by stresses and strains placed on their own relationship.

So anyone whose real interest is in the upbringing of children would focus on the factors which prevent those with a parental role from carrying it out effectively. And it is here that we come upon the obstacles about which many ‘pro-family’ advocates are so resolutely silent. The long hour work culture that keeps parents from their children, the work pressures that spill into destructive stresses that pull apart parental partners, the diminishing job security that creates uncertainty at home, the expectations to uproot families or leave them behind to get work, the consumerist measure of parents’ ability to buy things for their children linked to their level of earnings, the substitution of time with one’s parents by the acquisition of status symbols (from toys through to cars) via their purchasing power.

These factors are of course inter-connected. They are all related to the socio-economic changes which have been accelerating since the second half of the twentieth century. It is not some mindless defiance against the moral duty of being good parents that suddenly erupted and destroyed the capacity of families to bring up intelligent and responsible children. The Anglo-American market model which values above all economic growth as an engine to drive the plutocratic concentration of wealth in the few has been growing in strength from the late 1970s, when its political sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic won the power to roll back the checks and balances against corporate greed.

Now we see the consequences of this relentless expansion of the commercial hierarchy – the top rejecting taxation and regulations as fettering their golden ability to generate wealth (for themselves), the middle perpetually anxious that they would be ejected as inadequate and must therefore work harder than ever to prove themselves, and the bottom convinced that they (and their children) have no future, no respect from anyone else.

Anyone wanting to stand up and claim they are pro-family had better from now on start by explaining how they are going to tackle corporate irresponsibility.