General Strike

The far-left Mafias which masquerade as trade unions here were out in force this morning. Flags waved, horns blared, whistles sounded, and some chap with quite a good voice shouted the usual nonsense through a sound system that had been specifically designed for you to be heard clearly without shouting.

Despite my habit of eating babies, I believe in freedom of association as one of the basic things that defines a free society, one in which it is possible to live and to experience respect for your humanity. Not only do I defend the right of trade unions to exist, I think they are a good thing, or they would be if they did what they claim to do. The right to strike is a much more complex matter, but I also believe that, subject to certain conditions, the collective withdrawal of labour can be a legitimate tool of negotiation.

The two major leftwing union, Comisiones Obreras and UGT have called a general strike for the 29^th of March. This is not a labour dispute, but a political protest. They have been preparing it since they realized the left would lose the general election, and it was always perfectly predictable that they would act in the first few months of the new government, whatever it did and whatever the results.

They have called the ‘strike’ without a ballot, of course. How could they hold a ballot when they claim to speak for all of us? They have, unilaterally and without consultation, called for a day of protest simply because they have to be seen to do something to justify the large salaries their leaders pay themselves. They have suffered years of frustration at not being taking seriously by governments and the media and now they have a chance to act. They are the leaders of a (supposedly though not in practice) private organization whose membership consists of a small fraction of the population, and in any case the decision was taken without asking the membership. Anyone else in that position would be laughed at if they declared that the entire nature must stop work on a particular day under threat of violence. Or locked up. But Méndez and Toxo get invited onto the TV to shout and order the rest of us around.

The unions are not very interested in their own members, except that they need to keep the numbers up in order to increase the payments they get from the long-suffering taxpayer, and that means telling the members what they want to hear. They are not interested at all in the unemployed, except as a weapon to throw at the government; otherwise they would not instinctively oppose every attempt to make it easier and cheaper to hire people and invest in new business.

The question is not whether this sort of strike should be legal, nor whether the government’s policies are good or bad for Spain. But is the strike itself a good thing, in some way? It will not achieve the aims that are being claimed for it. It won’t achieve anything at all because the government will (quite rightly) ignore it and carry on. It won’t bother the union leaders because they aren’t trying to reach the government. Their message is for the television and the activists.

Those who wish to protest should be free to do so. Those who wish to protest by withdrawing their labour are also free to do so and that is probably as it should be. But the price of a protest that will achieve nothing is many thousands of people losing a day’s pay, and for the great majority who are not interested in the protest it will mean an atmosphere of open hostility and sporadic violence as they try to go about their business.

Here in my small city these things are usually quite civilized, but in many of the bigger cities the leaders will pump up the strikers with a sense of the injustice they are suffering, will make sure they know who the enemy is, and will send them out on the streets where they will smash things and attack people. That is what will happen, because it’s what always happens, and the unions will not accept any responsibility for it, because they never do, even though they know it will happen and that they have caused it themselves.

When the union leaders talk about defending the rights of workers, they ignore the fact that those ‘rights’ are paid for with other people’s money, and that the more secure their own job is, the higher unemployment is likely to climb. We all see our own point of view most clearly, but to make it into a virtue, and use it to put words in the mouths of millions of people who have never asked you to represent them, is not something we should accept as normal.

That’s why it is not good enough to say, ‘the government is wrong, we are entitled to protest and if it doesn’t work, at least we didn’t just sit back and do nothing’. It will be a purely symbolic act, but with serious consequences for many people.

God

Arguing about God on Internet forums is a largely pointless activity, guaranteed to lead to annoyance and frustration, and one I don’t usually dabble in. But the other day I got caught up in such a discussion over at Longrider’s blog. I made the mistake of trying to make two points at once, or rather, one observation which I didn’t expect to be contentious as the lead-in to another which was no more than a question, though a difficult one to express, and to understand.

There were two commenters who attempted to engage. The first did so intelligently, but he didn’t quite seem to grasp the point of what I was asking, and in any case he retired early on the not unreasonable grounds that he’d had this sort of argument before and they never got anywhere. I intend to follow his example after this post. The second was a weird creature who interlaced references to irrelevant people and concepts with random abuse in block capitals. Both signs of a less than towering intellect, so that wasn’t going very far either. Then our host on the blog stepped in and asked us politely to return to the topic, from which we had strayed to some extent. Politely, we obliged.

The observation I made, which I thought uncontentious, was that Richard Dawkins is a militant atheist. He is frequently bombastic, importunate and rude, dragging the stupidity of believers into places it wasn’t invited. Although he has a sharp intellect and an extensive knowledge of his field, which is itself broad, not everything he says in defence of his beliefs is filtered through that intellect. Some of it much more primal. It seems to me a perfectly reasonable use of the word militant. Not only that, but a criticism of his dialectic style was given in the original post, albeit tangentially, and I originally commented to defend him from a misconception that had arisen.

The question I asked was, in essence, the following:

The idea that there exists, or should exist, some power, creative, guiding, saving, explaining, is present in the human mind. This idea usually conceives, implicitly or explicitly, that this power is outside the mind itself. At the very least, almost everyone seeks some kind of moral order, both personal and social, and recognises that it is good that there should be such a thing. Most people seek, or imagine, something more than that, that there life has meaning, and not uncommonly, that that meaning, that purpose, that moral order, is created, or actively imposed, from outside man.

This is not an invention of ‘organised religion’; the fact that large and powerful organizations can exist which take advantage of it merely proves how important that perception is to us.

This is why it is important to explore the question, because ‘god’ undoubtedly exists in the human mind, and is an important part of what we are. Where, then, does it come from? Is it a product of the way the human mind is constructed, does it arise within the mind, as a result, perhaps, of our ability to recognise and reflect on our mortality, but not to understand it or to change it? Is it just a by-product of what we are?

It’s quite possible that one day it can be fully explained through a much more complete understanding of the nature of the mind and the genetics behind it. Not explained away, or some plausible story constructed, but actually explained, by identifying the physiological mechanism that brings it into being. But not yet. We are a very, very long way from being able to explain it properly.

There is another possibility, that it actually does reflect something outside ourselves, that thing we sometimes call god.

The question I asked was, has Richard Dawkins given a convincing explanation of why this last hypothesis is the least parsimonious?

I could have put it in other ways. Has he proved to his own intellectual satisfaction that this last possibility is not true? It isn’t quite the same question, though it’s close enough, and I wish I had asked it that way, because although the question is difficult to frame, there is in fact a simple answer: no, he hasn’t.

His book, The God Delusion, is an attempt to address precisely the question I asked, as I originally asked it. He sets out to consider what causes the sense of a greater, guiding power to arise within mankind, and to take such an important personal and social role, and he considers the possibility, naturally enough, that it could be because there is something outside us which has placed knowledge of itself within us, or that we are capable of identifying. Does he show, at least to his own satisfaction, that it can’t be true? In fact he doesn’t, not completely, and he recognises this fact, although he does conclude that it is very unlikely indeed.

In the first draft of this post I wrote that I imagined Dawkins, privately, to be completely convinced of his position, despite the minimal reservation he expresses in the book. But, oddly enough, right on cue, comes this debate, in which he states his position as that of an agnostic, almost but not quite convinced intellectually that there is no sentient creator, but unable to rule it out entirely. The last little bit is belief. It reveals a greater intellectual honesty than I have seen him bring to these discussions before, and is precisely what I was wondering about. Those who claim that ‘Dawkins has proved there is no god’, are talking through their hats, and have themselves failed to understand his arguments and where they lead.

He rejects any attempt to consider god as an old boy on a cloud with a beard and a set of scales, or any variation thereof, because once you posit an omnipotent being that can arbitrarily change reality or our perception of it, it all comes down to how much that being wants to be noticed. Human reason cannot detect such a being. It isn’t the only concept that can be, or has been, posited, that is more or less defined to in such a way as to lie outside the scope of our reason, but it is probably the only one that actually matters. Some people find the idea obviously preposterous, others feel they have actually experienced him. But there’s no point arguing about it intellectually.

He doesn’t consider the god of the creationists either because it isn’t worth arguing about. Creationism is not an intellectual position, it’s just a belief, and one which, unlike the old man on the cloud, is now easily refutable by observation, at least to the extent that it attempts to justify itself by reason.

The god of most believers is not accessible to scientific enquiry and genuinely curious atheists/agnostics know this. The moral systems derived from those beliefs are a matter of debate, ultimately inconclusive and often circular, but productive nonetheless, and necessary. The concepts and limits of right and wrong are defined and redefined constantly by a continuous social negotiation, and if you don’t contribute others will decide what you should and shouldn’t do (even more than they do now). Insofar as the actions of believers have consequences for other people they will be judged in the same way as actions derived from any other source of will or motivation.

Arthur C. Clarke postulated the existence of a china teapot orbiting the moon. The details don’t matter much, the point was to show that there are intrinsically implausible things, things that are almost certain not to exist, but whose non-existence we cannot directly prove. But the difference between the teapot and god is that it is not in the nature of man to imagine there to be a teapot orbiting the moon, or to make spontaneous psychological investment in the existence of that teapot. Clarke’s teapot doesn’t matter to us. God does. We would really like to know whether he is out there, what he is, and what we need to do about it. And as yet, although many people have answered the question to their own psychological satisfaction, and many have not, intellectually there is still no completely definitive answer.

The purpose of this post was to explain the question I’m trying to ask. Inevitably (because I’m me) I have ended up rambling about other things which seemed relevant or appeared to shed some light, but the post is intended as an intellectual enquiry, not a defence of any theological position.

What is it We love When We Love

Every part of the person we love changes, but we still love them. So what is it we love?

Everything about the person we speak of loving changes over time. Every cell in our body is replaced over a period which depends on which source you refer to, but there appears to be no doubt that any given person’s body contains none of the molecules it did some years ago. The few cell types which change over longer periods are not involved in inspiring love.

 

But the slow mutation of tissue is the least of the tricks the world can play on our sense of identity. The person we love can become a physically different person in very immediate, perceptible, tangible ways, as a recent of severe illness, serious accident or by fire, for example, and we don’t necessarily cease to love. A father might discover that his daughter was in fact sired by a passing vacuum cleaner salesmen, but he will still love her, even though that love was initially based on their shared genes.

Emotionally and psychologically a person can experience, again through illness, accident or the degeneracy of age, perhaps, changes so profound that they become, literally, a different person. We love this new person. In some cases there is no consciousness left, and so we love the non-person. We love the dead, who are nothing. When their mind has ceased to work, their senses have stopped perceiving and their body has been dissolved among the five elements, we still love them

In other words, there exist a number of ways in which whatever we imagine led us to love the person in the first place, can be completely destroyed, and yet we do not cease to love.

 We create love within ourselves. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real, but it doesn’t seem to reflect any external reality.

On the Purpose of Schools

I observed yesterday, in passing, that teachers, and the teaching unions, seem to believe that the purpose of education is to provide jobs for teachers. This appears to be a fairly common belief among public employees and bureaucracies in general, and helps to explain why it is so hard to get the public sector to do things efficiently and economically. They treat waste and redundancy as good things, proving more positions for civil servants.

In Spain it has been enshrined in law for 150 years that public employees have the job for life, including a guaranteed pension. They cannot be sacked for laziness or incompetence without a very long and tedious administrative process which is only very rarely initiated, let alone completed. And they cannot be sacked at all simply because they are unnecessary. We, the public, are undoubtedly paying hundreds of thousands of civil servants who were originally employed to do something which is no longer required, or which, in the current economic climate, is a luxury we would choose to do without, if we had the option. Hundreds of thousands of people are effectively paid by the taxpayer to do nothing.

This system of awarding government jobs for life by means of independent tribunals was created with the excellent intention of stopping the corrupt practices of the 19^th century whereby an incoming government would sack the civil servants of the previous regime and replace them with people loyal to themselves. Since then there have been two republics, two dictatorships, two changes of Royal house, various attempts at different forms of democracy, some 15 heads of state of all types and all political persuasions, and some 5o heads of government, almost equally varied (they include nobility, but not royalty). Now, with a stable democracy and a constitution accepted by all sides, it may be the moment to review a practice that is 150 years old and is the direct cause of enormous economic and human waste.

Politically it can’t be done. Neither of the main parties would touch such a reform, but it could happen slowly, over a couple of decades or so, if government at all levels starts to use more contracted staff and allows the system of permanent posts to die off, or at least to become a rare thing, a way of covering core positions from people who have demonstrated competence and diligence over a number of years. Even the private sector needs greater flexibility in employment at difficult times like these (something even Felipe González understood in the crisis of the early 90’s) and the civil service needs to become hugely more flexible.

Nevertheless, in teaching a problem at least as great as the inability to get rid of bad teachers is the way they are selected in the first place. No part of the selection process, I repeat, no part at all, has the aim of determining which of the hundreds of candidates are the best teachers, and best suited to the positions available that year. The whole point of the process is that no one can be blamed later for the decisions taken. It was ‘the tribunal’ that gave that idiot the job.

It’s easy to imagine how a selection process whose only purpose is to exist, so that the right boxes can be ticked, affects the quality of teaching.

So in Spain the purpose of education is to assign salaries to teachers, any teachers, as long as the numbers are high enough to satisfy the unions. Not surprisingly, the education of the majority of children ends in failure to achieve a fraction of what they might have done. And no change is in sight.

On Striking Teachers

If anyone wants to know why the Spanish education system doesn't educate children properly, they had only to look out of my window on Wednesday morning to see one of the important reasons. The teaching unions were on strike and they were massed below me, in a display so thuggish and infantile that a pupil who behaved that way would be suspended. They don't understand this. Giving a public display of your unfitness to do what is a very responsible job strikes me as rather stupid, but oddly enough it seems that most parents already know what sort of hands their children are in, they were not surprised and they accept it as the way things inevitably are, if not actually as the way they should be.
The unions, and the people they claim to represent, believe that schools exist to provide work for teachers. This is typical of public employees. They made it very clear on Wednesday, but I knew it long ago. When you are that wrong about something that is a major part of your existence, you will never understand the truth. Nor will education in this country be able to achieve what it should.
Why do these people, and the ‘perroflautas’ and the occupiers and the hippy/squatters and the others imagine that they are doing the world a favour by making a nuisance of themselves in public places? They seem to think, and there are those who agree with them, that they are some kind of heroes, drawing the world’s attention to the state of the country. This strikes me as nonsense.
I have no objection, neither in principle nor in practice, to peaceful protest. Governments of all colours need to be constantly reminded that, in theory at least, they serve us, not vice versa. A stressed and worried politician is by far the best kind. But no one in Spain needs to be reminded that the economy is in a bad way and that millions of people are having hard time. There are things that can easily be forgotten or pass unnoticed, but this isn’t one of them. The protesters are a combination of political opportunists and the usual inadequates looking for an excuse to break things. These are difficult times, and the cathartic magic of shouting on the streets is not going to solve anything.