David and Ed Miliband at a news conference earlier today, disagreeing with each other on Trident, and whether they should hold to a pre-election manifesto commitment and keep it….

At the end we got a high-five, a clasping of hands and a brotherly hug. It made me wonder what would have happened if my brother and I had stood for the same office. Would we have shown such brotherly love? I guess we might have. (Needs a second opinion this one.)

It reminded me of two stories from Thomas Merton’s Wisdom of the Desert Fathers. One very virtuous abbot was at the same time very human: he couldn’t get over his anger with his brother. Another couldn’t get angry with anyone, let alone his brother, and felt that he had to, otherwise his faith and his sanctity couldn’t be tested. He tried to get angry, and he failed.

I think in this case the Milibands got it right, and it was in a curious way good to see. This is probably the first and last time they’ll be compared to the desert fathers. They should be grateful!

 Cameron and Clegg act like new-found brothers of course. We have a new breed of brothers.

Returning to my earlier blog, Reasons Not To Be Cheerful….

What’s wrong with optimism? I’ve been asked. Nothing, I’ve replied. In fact it’s the only way to be. I’m passionately of the half-full, not the half-empty school. What concerns me is a gaggle of optimists, a new movement, made up of optimists. While believing in half-full we have by definition to be aware of, no believe in, half-empty too. If they’re good reasons to be optimistic there are equally good reasons to be pessimistic. We need to be aware how easily one can pass into the other and back again.

That’s where Matthew Taylor  talking of optimists as if they’re a movement slips up, and where Ridley as a proponent of the same gets it wrong. Optimism is rational, but as a movement it easily becomes the opposite, when the additional impetus it gains as a movement carries us places we shouldn’t go.

I too believe in the power of the free market, the resourcefulness of mankind, and the internet amazes me, and it’s already changed my life and will some more no doubt. But I also see the limitations of each.  To take one  example  I mentioned, America has to face up to the fact that its economy is funded by the Chinese, and all that follows from this. Chinese free enterprise isn’t the same as what we know, and treasure, in the West.

America under Clinton and Bush was so sure of its direction, but look where post-financial crisis (if post we are) it is now. In hoc, and no easy way out.

Let’s be unfashionable.  Satire gets an easy ride at the moment.

Quoting WB Yeats:

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.

Is it about time we mocked the mockers and put them back in their cage? The trouble is, they look pretty immune. No-one out there dares challenge them. If we mock them, they mock us, and they’ve got the airtime and we haven’t.

Satire surrounds us in the media, with Have I Got News For You primetime, and seemingly endless other programmes looking for the opportunity to get a laugh out of people or events.

Much satire is simply no longer funny. Am I alone in thinking that Have I Got News For You no longer passes that test? But you can argue that satire doesn’t have to be funny, it’s enough to be ingenious or witty.  Have I Got News fails again on that count.

Satire does have a key function, attacking pomposity and self-regard, bringing us all down to earth when we fly too high.  But these days it’s in a world of its own, self-referential, unchallenged.

It casts its net so wide, draws in so many, and lampoons anything it can find that will get half a laugh. It’s also looking all the time for new ways of being funny, and that often means pushing the boundaries out, making satire more cruel. The old jokes seem tame.

I’ve always found the celebrity argument a pathetic one: they put themselves out there, so they are open season when it comes to criticism and mockery. Not true. If they court celebrity for its own sake, that of course is a different matter.

Any satirist has to ask themselves:  are they putting more into life that they are taking out? There’s very little enlightenment out there, so is entertainment a justification?  Maybe the entertainment is better than I think it is.

The likes of Jon Stewart are excused any brickbats from me. He’s someone who understands what he’s satirising.  He actually has something funny and useful to say.

Going back in time we had Yes Minister. Ministers had some credibility then, so the satire hit home. They have these days very little left to them, but that doesn’t stop the mockery.  

Satire also changes those it satirises. Public figures will happily, or usually unhappily, appear on Have I Got News For You. They want to be seen to be cool and funny, to be seen to be able to laugh at themselves. But this often suggests they don’t take themselves, or their colleagues, too seriously. They’re looking for a little showbiz glamour, but it’s at a high cost.

(If they’re not good at being cool and funny, then best they stay out of public life, however much they might have to offer.)

They also see, as John O’Farrell argues, that ‘power has ebbed away from Westminster, the media has grown in influence and research…The Fourth Estate has eclipsed the other three. The best satirists have realised this and look beyond personality and caricature to influence the new corridors of power.’

John O’Farrell is specifically referring to the likes of the apparatchiks who seeks to influence ministers in The Thick Of It. So it’s the process they’re lampooning, but that reflects back on the politicians, who employ or have to suffer them.

It’s also clear that not only does the media dominate but that it is invulnerable to criticism of itself, or to satire. Have you seen the Barclays brothers, Telegraph owners, satirised much recently, even though they should be, in their island redoubt, hidden away behind their delusions of Hearst-like grandeur?

If we do get politicians and policies taken seriously in this world then they have to have a hell of a lot going for them. Our first instinct is not to take them seriously, our second to doubt their motives, our third to distrust the policies themselves.

Satire and its current bedfellows, ridicule and scorn, have got above themselves. But what recourse have we?

[Ref: Mock The Weak, John O’Farrell, The London Library Magazine, Spring 2010]

Thinking about the way we talk to each other.

I’m often accused of disagreeing, not I hope in a disagreeable fashion, but when someone mentions the weather’s nice I’ll say, ah but there’s a cloud in the sky, or, it will rain later. There’s much to be said for agreeing and amplifying. Not disagreeing. By disagreeing you take over the conversation, put it on to your territory, and you shouldn’t be surprised if the conversation ends there.

If it’s about the weather then maybe it should of course…

Attitude is important. Respond aggressively, even if the comment itself is harmless, and that simple maybe unintended response can set off a train of events.

Argument is a very different matter. Whether agreeing or disagreeing the same principles apply. Don’t argue for the sake of it, and answer the point just raised before setting out one of your own. Find agreement before disagreement. Keep to common ground where possible and build on it. The two sides should be closer together at the end than at the start. How often is it the reverse! As we argue we pull apart, and usually end up holed up in our own encampment, repelling boarders, quite happy with the walls we’ve built – but apart from having isolated ourselves having achieved very little.

Arguments that win the day are usually cogent, to the point and unemotional. Make it emotional, and you get an emotional defensive response.

I remember with my own children how I’d get angry and lose an argument. I may have won the war: the following day they’d do what I asked them to. Maybe with kids that’s the way it has to be sometimes. And with adults: sometime emotions break down barriers, if not immediately, then on reflection, as the dust settles.

That doesn’t invalidate my point. Aggression and emotion are stock-in-trades for many of us, but they don’t usually get us very far. A few years ago I read Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, and it changed the way I look at things. That’s a subject for another time. Enough to say now that if we make our starting-point the common ground between us, and debate rather than argue, we’ll get much further much quicker.

It won’t happen in politics, and we shouldn’t expect it to. Human nature is what it is. But we can rein in our impulse (I wouldn’t say our natural impulse – I’m not certain that’s what it is) to confront, and do so only when the occasion requires. I like the idea of that Cabinet table with the coalition ministers sat around it and Vince Cable and George Osborne hobnobbing and finding common ground.

It’s curious to see Matthew Taylor (Reasons To Be Cheerful?, 1st June) giving credence to what he describes as the new optimists. There seems very little that’s new about them. Matt Ridley (new book, The Rational Optimist) argues that markets have in the past and will in the future deliver to us all the benefits we seek, David Eagleman argues how the internet will help us avoid the problems that have brought down previous civilisations, and climate change critic Bjorn Lomberg  finds answers in human ingenuity and the resilience of the natural world.

I see no reason to treat them as a new school of thought. There is a great danger in false categorisation. The optimists represent a mindset that has always been with us, a necessary balance maybe to all the pessimism and talk of a broken society that the press and pre-election politicians latch on to.  But we shouldn’t hallow it with the name of a movement, and give it momentum.

Taking each of the three areas mentioned above:

There’s good evidence for the unsustainability of the current Western model, taking as one key example the $900bn Chinese debt that’s been built up to fund American consumerism. (Matt Ridley, as George Monbiot points out, was chairman of Northern Rock, and there, under Ridley’s nose, is another example.)  It can’t go on, and yet how can it be stopped? All the technical knowhow and human ingenuity in the world won’t be enough. We may also find that China becomes the driver of both the world economy and political economy. There’s much evidence to suggest that in the face of global threats societies are becoming more closed. Ironically, that’s the direction the American right is headed, as it becomes more parochial, more defensive, and argues for new trade barriers, just the environment in which technology and ingenuity won’t flourish.

It is impossible to predict how the internet will develop over the next twenty years. There is good reason to be fearful, as undifferentiated knowledge substitutes expert and researched opinion, as free removes (by definition) both monetary and intellectual value. It’s hard for a society fragmented by myriad opinions to retain homogeneity and identity.

And it’s not enough to argue that technology will find answers to climate change issues, that growth will not be impaired by the finite nature of natural resources. I’ve no arguments with it as a proposition … but there is no evidence to support it. We’ve coped in previous ages but we’re now in a global world and we can’t rely on empire and the endless discovery of new mineral resources to bail us out.

There is another scenario for the world, where we identify and move toward self-sufficiency, and put all our efforts, all our ingenuity and technical skills, into making economic and social improvement sustainable. But if the new optimism holds sway there will be no place for it. We’ll be in a world of random accumulation, feeding on the kinds of hope which always get dashed.

Matthew Taylor is allowing his concerns to identify a new enlightenment for our times to lower his defences. Improvement at a personal, political and business level should be a core aspiration, but we should be aware how each generation mixes failure and success, that material improvement may facilitate happiness, but cannot be its cause.

He makes it clear that he is still ‘with those who say we need a changed consciousness to meet new challenges and to escape the dead ends of consumerist individualism’, and yet he also argues that currently the new optimists have the best tunes.

I thought at one point maybe two years ago that come the election I might vote for Tory for a change.  I wouldn’t like all their policies but as someone who prefers country to town, is proud of being British, fascinated by our history, a royalist at heart, then it could make good sense.

But the Tories today talk endlessly of the broken society, and my problem is that I have a positive take on society and what over the years has been achieved by people at all levels. I also believe in the goodness of human nature, that most people I meet behave honourably or that they will behave honourably if I behave that way toward them, and that goes for all of us with each other.

That said I’m not remotely content with where we are now. There are grave inequalities, inefficiencies, disasters across the country, some deeply embedded in life and the economy . Malice rears its head all too often. While we have the politicians we deserve – we view politicians they way we want to view them, whether or not they deserve it, we have a popular press we don’t deserve, quite without any accountability to anyone apart its owners and their desire to push agendas, readership and profits.

And yet, does that any or all of that add up to a broken society? Even the press has its good points.

Cameron with his ex News of the World press officer pushes an agenda the popular press laps up, whether true or not.  He was expected to say last Tuesday (and I believe did say): “The broken society is not one thing alone. It is not just the crime. It is a whole stew of violence, anti-social behaviour, debt, addiction, family breakdown, educational failure, poverty and despair.”

My response to that is that it’s shameful, arrant rubbish.

That’s why in a nutshell I can’t vote Tory.

If I can’t stomach press reporting I turn to columnists, to the likes of Daniel Finkelstein, Libby Purves and others. This morning I felt let down. Libby Purves began her piece on youth unemployment by a detailed recounting of a tragic suicide of someone who couldn’t find work. Way too emotive, and makes it much harder to discern the real truth. She ends with a moan about over-regulation as a barrier to companies taking on young people. Also a mention of immigration, as if well-motivated and often well-qualified people from Poland would be doing the same jobs as kids coming out of school and university.  It’s as if governments are wilfully culpable and that they and countless others haven’t been trying to solve this problem for years – years when it got worse during the boom years and entrenched itself in the recent bust. Yes, they failed, and they failed bigtime. We all failed. But not for want of trying.

There’s a much bigger picture here and it will take sanity, not screaming to sort it out, co-operation, not taking sides.

The fact is government have got it wrong. I think targets of 50% of university places for young people don’t help because it needs focused training and a focus on real jobs from 18 onwards. Not pieces of paper.  But that’s not a moral failing. Apprenticeship schemes can also help, but industry has to buy into them, and it hasn’t done. Training schemes of one kind or another are laudable, but they don’t guarantee jobs.

Young people often get a lousy press, and that doesn’t help. They’re considered a risk to employ just as car insurers are wary of insuring them.

Over-regulation I’m sure puts companies off, because they may want to take chances employing young people but daren’t.

At the other end of the spectrum the pension age is to put back, and that means people in their 60s holding on to their jobs for longer.

So where will these jobs for young people, and over-60 (and indeed 65) year olds come from? Out of the ether? Maybe in boom times we’ll all suddenly have jobs. (Unlikely.)  And we’ll then all lose them again when the downturn comes.

All this suggests a very different approach to employment is needed, with more focused training, on the real needs of the economy, a wider employment catchment involving shorter hours and more people working, lower pay and lower prices, pensions contributions payable by law from an early age, an end to student fees so everyone starts employment unburdened and only pays out for future benefits not past burdens, all in all a less fevered approach to work – work as hard as ever but not for as long as before.

Much of this may be unworkable or too radical, and even against human nature, but we are haring off in the wrong direction at the moment. Libby Purves’s moaning certainly doesn’t help.  We know the situation is bad. Many people young and old, in and out of government, in business and out of it, in all areas of society,  are working hard on answers, and getting it wrong maybe more than they’re getting it right. But we need to recognise they’re trying, and all of us together to focus on a bigger picture, on the longer term.

Matthew Taylor mentioned the Left’s obsession with the betrayal myth in a recent blog. It’s not just the Left. These days the press encourage us to think we’re being betrayed all the time.

I proposed a moratorium on newspapers on Twitter today. Also I think on weekly columnists. Only write when you’ve something to say.

Murdoch’s takeover of the Times all those years ago and his intrusion as an outsider into British politics has worried many of us for a long time. The paper is good in parts, very good, but we have to be ever-watchful for the hand of Murdoch.

Its coverage of Copenhagen was one egregious occasion when it was visible in the Times’s inexpicable drift in its main reporting into the doubters’ camp. Nothing overt, just a predisposition, which meant we couldn’t trust what the paper said.

The US healthcare bill is another example. Obama gets it through Congress. There’s a very pro-bill Times leader, but on the news pages we find a commentary from an unreconstructed Republican, ex-leader of the Senate. Good to have some balance one might argue – but it was the only US-sourced commentary in the paper. The rest of the reporting was UK-originated. The Fox line in the USA we can be sure is virulently anti-bill.

And then there’s Tory education policy here in the UK.

There’s a basic contradiction between Michael Gove’s desire to impose a more traditional curriculum and the freedom he’s keen to give parents to set up and run their own schools. Parents are unlikely to be queuing up to launch new schools teaching a traditional curriculum. A few may, but most will go off in unpredictable directions. The Times in a recent leader belatedly realised this, but it feebly soft-pedalled the contradiction. ‘First traditional reform [curriculum]’, then ‘radical change [organisation]’: ‘If Mr Gove becomes Secretary of State …it seems an easy life is not on the agenda.’

What price a serious critique?

The Times set itself up as The Thunderer two centuries ago. I think ‘wimp’ or ‘toady’ might be better, as The Thunderer finds itself emasculated by its owner’s party preferences.

A brief mention, courtesy of my daughter, of Colin Hay and his book Why We Hate Politics.He traces the rise of political disenchantment across a range of democracies. Unsurprisingly he finds that institutional apathy has been replaced  by a wide range of political and social activity which isn’t tied into the old hierarchies.

I’ve only seen his book in summary and I’m assuming he examines some of the issues that arise from this. With the demise of the great ideologies, communism, socialism, fascism, we no longer vest in the state all our hopes and expectations. Capitalism thrives, but it’s unshackled liberal capitalism that’s in vogue. Without the expectation that we can be lifted up by a hand that’s beyond and greater than ourselves, we’ve lost a sense of where we fit in the political system. We don’t want the state interfering, but we do want it providing, a very hard balance for politicians to strike. 

Out of this Hay conjures and  defends ‘a broad and inclusive conception of politics and the political that is far less formal, less state-centric and less narrowly governmental than in most conventional accounts’.

How Hay suggests power is devolved down to different levels I don’t know, but one comment struck me. ‘The political realities we witness are shaped decisively by the assumptions about human nature that we project onto political actors.’

We see good in many areas of our local lives. With an endless diet of negative news we see evil in the grander scheme of things.

We can see politicians either as champions of the local at a national level, or just by the process of elevation transformed into a self-serving coterie. Events of recent years have firmly rooted politics and politicians in the latter camp. More often that not without justification, but it seems that it’s what we expect, so it’s what we think we get. And just in case there’s any doubt in our minds, there’s the press to reinforce this view many times over.

There are many definitions of Occam’s razor, but two strike me.

–       “pluritas non est ponenda sine necessitate”, or “nature likes things as simple as possible.”

–       the principle that entities should not be multiplied needlessly; the simplest of two competing theories is to be preferred

The one is a law of nature, the other a principle.

**

The human tendency to multiply, to diversify, to spin off, to find other points of view, to tear down and rebuild, to endlessly theorise, to generate endless legislation… It’s all distracting, self-justifying, time-consuming, and does a good job filling in that awkward time between birth and death.

The second definition keeps its focus narrow, avoids the every day. It tidies Occam and his razor away into a philosophical or scientific sphere, where I know it does a good job.

The first, the original definition, is Occam’s. Nature takes the simple route. It’s a principle that should apply to the wider world, to everyday life, but such is the crazy untameable force of the human mind that nature doesn’t stand a chance.

Occam got it right. We need to step back, tame our minds, and be more a part of nature, recognise its slower pace, focus on the way it does things simply.

Occam is due for a revival.