Why love trumps economics | Victoria Coren

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:00 GMT

The government harps on about 'priorities', the economy being its first. How very wrong

There is a dangerous piece of rhetoric floating around, increasingly popular with politicians, which says the government should forget gay marriage and concentrate on "the things that really matter".

Defence secretary Philip Hammond is the latest to thump this tub, explaining: "Clearly [gay marriage] is not the number one priority. If you stop people in the street and ask them what their concerns are, they'll talk to you about jobs and economic growth… The government has got to show that it is focused on the things that really matter."

Personally, I never stop people in the street and ask them what their concerns are. I don't know if Philip Hammond does. If so, perhaps this flawed reasoning extends nationwide. Or he's only stopping people in Downing Street.

George Osborne said something nearly identical the week before; that gay marriage is "not a priority of the government" because the government is "focused on the really important issues that matter to people".

Mr Osborne said that he personally is in favour of gay marriage. What a perfect position he finds himself in, politically: pleasing supporters of same-sex matrimony with his own endorsement, while reassuring opponents that the government's not seriously considering it.

Those in his party who are revolted by gay marriage use the same handy argument, that there are "more important things to think about". It's a clever way to reject the issue without screaming: "Ugh, two men at the altar! Probably wearing dresses! And with big moustaches! Big moustaches and dresses at the same time! That reminds me, I must ring my mother."

They know better than to reveal the full terrifying vision of social collapse that a gay wedding triggers in their minds: a church full of crop-haired anarchists, most of them speaking foreign languages; teenagers snorting heroin off the altar, most of them on Facebook; women publicly breastfeeding in the pews, most of them bishops; two newlywed drag queens high-fiving as a vicar in hotpants says: "You may now fist the bride."

No: far better just to say they're more interested in the economy.

I don't mean to suggest that my own first reaction to the idea of gay marriage was free from nerves, uncertainty or reflex stereotyping. But, as with most things, my immediate conservative instincts fell away with a bit of proper thought. I won't explain why I'm now in favour, because that isn't the point. I have my opinions and you'll have yours; my worry is the argument, whether you support change or not, that it's "less important" than the economy.

Please let's not nod along with this idea until it feels like a truism. It's a dangerous way of thinking. It may even be that kind of thinking that got "us" into economic trouble in the first place.

The economy in this country – the basic, central core of what an economy is – is extremely healthy. We have an abundant climate, hardy British labour for building and farming and crafting, and brilliant inventive minds at work. If those gambling international speculators, who create nothing and build nothing, with their massive fantasy "derivatives market" and their mind-blowing "trillions of debt", all disappeared tomorrow, we'd still have an economy. We might not have flat-screen TVs with 200 channels – and City traders might not have private jets – but we'd still have food and coal and tables and new ideas. Greece is about to default on its debt and opt out of the whole mad lending scheme; perhaps we'll watch that country invent democracy for the second time.

We'd also still have love. Stripped of our credit cards, our electronic goods, our super-fast broadband, our international travel – and even of our welfare system based on cash and paperwork rather than simple sharing – we'd still have men and women, and men and men, and women and women, who felt joy and safety and hope, making promises and planning futures, because of this free and powerful human instinct alone.

The stark revelation, a few years ago, that all of the numbers on all of the screens meant nothing, that there was no gold, that it was all debt, that the emperor had no clothes, made us feel terrified and powerless. It's too much to confront directly, like staring at the sun: the realisation that it's merely empty digits on a screen that entitle some people to helipads and swimming pools, others to dying on a trolley in a hospital corridor.

We know now, but we can't seem to change it. The more powerless we feel, the closer we huddle to what we can control: our own promises, to our own loved ones. Those tiny, enormous, emotional contracts between one person and another.

If a historically marginalised group of us want to make those contracts formal, in the sight of God, the way it has been done by the majority for thousands of years, how dare anyone say this is "less important" than money? Stand against it if you will, but don't dismiss it as trivial.

Thoreau wrote, in 1863: "If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business."

I have a new daydream, of a parallel world, where our democratic leaders say: "We'll do our best for economic growth, but our priority is to concentrate on the things that really matter to people."

Philosophy

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:09:00 GMT

Study of how to think about ideas and ask questions about truth, right and wrong – includes ethics, history of philosophy, logic

What will I learn?
If you wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats wondering what life is all about, then a philosophy degree should sort you out. Or at least point you in the right direction.

Philosophy tackles questions and concepts that others tend to take for granted. What is the difference between a reason and a mere rationalisation? What does it actually mean to say that one event causes another? What does it mean to describe some ingredients as "natural"? What is private property? When can a scientific theory become a scientific fact?

Students studying philosophy can also find themselves engaging with modern social and political concerns, while confronting questions of personal value systems, social critique and moral life.

Philosophy is a subject to ponder (for example, 2,000 years ago, Pontius Pilate was supposed to have asked the question: "What is truth?", and we still haven't formed a satisfactory answer), giving students the space to debate the views of others and formulate their own opinions.

You can expect to study different thinkers and traditions of thought, from Plato and Aristotle through to Marx, Kant, Nietzsche, Russell and Derrida – philosophers who academics say have helped shape western thought.

Modules you are likely to cover include critical reasoning, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics and political philosophy, as well as the philosophy of science, literature, mind, religion language and maths. Philosophy also addresses questions that most of us think about but have a hard time discussing: Am I really free? What is the meaning of death? Do we ever really know what other people feel or think?

Philosophy connects with many other subjects and can be studied as a joint degree, so you could pair it up with history, politics or law, for example, which could offer an interesting focus for your philosophical musings.

What skills will I gain?
A good philosophy course teaches you how to think about issues systematically. You will develop important key skills in areas such as oral and written communication, critical reading, constructing and defending an argument, and independent research. Whatever your future choice of career or sphere of activity, the skills you acquire alongside the intellectual and imaginative challenges you will tackle through your studies will prove incredibly valuable to you in any field.

Completing a philosophy course shows employers you are an all-rounder – a mature, thoughtful, rational and articulate individual.

You will also have learned a significant body of knowledge that spans thousands of years.

What job can I get?
Recent research into graduate prospects shows studying philosophy develops skills that are highly valued by employers, such as verbal reasoning, creative thinking, presenting a clearly formulated and coherent argument, analysing dense and difficult written material, distinguishing the relevant from the irrelevant, and carrying out independent inquiry.

Philosophy graduates pop up in a whole range of fields including consultancy, journalism, publishing and law, local administration, project management, teaching, librarianship, the civil service and banking.

And then there's the creative professions. Hollywood is crawling with former philosophers: Bruce Lee, Susan Sarandon, Harrison Ford. The composer Phillip Glass studied philosophy; so did film-maker Joel Coen.

The financial sector is another common destination for philosophy students. The American businessman George Soros studied philosophy, and Aristotle famously reported that Thales (celebrated as the "first philosopher") managed to corner the local market in olive oil!

Studying the philosophy of law could open doors to the legal profession, while business ethics modules could serve you well in the City.

Some graduates go on to further study and a career in academia and research. Others undertake further training to become schoolteachers.

What will look good on the CV?
• The ability to analyse in a multidimensional way
• The ability to think creatively
• Self-motivation.

Why every government should keep an empty seat for a philosopher king | Mark Kingwell

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:30:00 GMT

Plato was right: the ideal society needs truth-seekers as rulers – but with a twist

It may rank as the most notorious single claim in the history of philosophy. "Until philosophers rule as kings in their cities," Socrates casually tells his young friend Glaucon, "or those who are nowadays called kings and leading men become genuine and adequate philosophers ... cities will have no rest from evils."

This startling assertion comes some distance into Plato's dialogue Republic – at 473d, in the conventional pagination – but it introduces the work's main character, the so-called philosopher-king. Socrates has defined the philosopher as not just a lover of wisdom but as a special kind of seer, someone dedicated to knowledge of capital-T truth. It follows that this exceptional fellow is the sole person fit to rule any city, including the ideal city he is sketching for his interlocutors.

We might immediately wonder: does he, or Plato, mean this seriously? There is a good deal of destabilising evidence. Socrates himself says a couple of times that he hesitates to make the claim, knowing how odd it will sound. And in the part of the quotation I elided above, he notes that existing philosophers, assuming there are any, will probably have to be forced to rule. This press-ganging of the wisdom-loving soul parallels a more familiar argument, namely that anyone actively seeking political power is thereby disqualified for it precisely on that account. Only the person who does not crave control can be trusted to exert it.

Elsewhere in the dialogue, meanwhile, there are scattered clues that the whole ideal-city set up, including the philosophically minded ruler, is a veiled warning that thinkers ought to steer well clear of politics. Force and deception will be necessary to turn an unruly populace toward the truth, he notes, without mentioning that this seems to set up a performative contraction: how can a loyal servant of the truth use deception as means even to a good end? And, in a blood-chilling passage, Socrates drops a hint that no ideal city will be possible without first getting rid of everyone over the age of 10. Call it the Clean-Slate Premise. Ouch.

Despite all this, Plato will be forever associated with the idea of the philosopher-king, and indeed the notion of a perfectly enlightened ruler is a spectre that haunts all politics. Every elected official, from the lowliest alderman to the president of a major nation, is doomed to measured against, and fall short of, this towering ideal of perfect knowledge in the service of justice.

At the same time, the idea of a philosopher-king sounds a different kind of warning: not for philosophers to avoid politics, but for citizens to be on guard when any self-styled thinker or social engineer gets his hands on the reins of power. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" the Roman poet Juvenal wondered, in his Satires – "Who guards the guardians?" (Or, if you are an Alan Moore fan, "Who watches the Watchmen?"). It is a very good question, especially when those guardians come armed with some big-plan ideology, a few willing henchmen, and a taste for utopian social reform. Commitment to the truth sounds like a good thing, but experience shows that implementing an ideal social scheme all too quickly gets all too messy.

Plato himself was wary of political power. The treatment of his philosophical master, Socrates, under both oligarchy and democracy, was not encouraging; it was the latter form of rule that led to the frame-up trial which sentenced Socrates to execution by hemlock, which goes some distance to explaining the strong anti-democratic flavour of Plato's thought. His own attempt to mold Dionysius the Younger of Syracuse into a sort of philosopher-king, was an abject failure. The youthful tyrant was addicted to luxury and the indulgence whim, and found his Greek visitor's epistemological advice tiresome.

Invoking this story, the critic Mark Lilla has thus spoken of "the lure of Syracuse": an irresistible temptation among certain intellectuals to set the political world to rights – usually with disastrous results. Witness, among others, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger (on the German right) or Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault (on the French left). These life-of-the-mind dabblers, philotyrants, betray their own philosophical commitments even as they wreak well-meant havoc on the ordinary citizen. The enlightened despot inevitably becomes a dangerous criminal lunatic.

Or do he? It is easy to overestimate the impact of ideas on politics, and for every Stalin or Pol Pot in history, forcing his people in the Procrustean bed of ideology, history offers literally thousands of good or merely average leaders who muddled along to more or less positive effect. As someone who professes the subject, I can tell you that most politicians, and most voters, have little real interest in political philosophy. Nobody has so far asked me, but I figure I have the answer to the problem of the philosopher-king. Don't worry, it's not to grant me absolute power, much as I might covet that on certain days. It is, instead, to borrow a page from a different, and more ironic, tradition of ancient wisdom than the Greek philosophers.

Jacques Derrida, puzzling over the problem of the modern university, suggested that the best course to follow was to have a philosopher in charge of each and every one of them. Some of my colleagues seem bent on making this happen: philosophers are over-represented in university administration. But Derrida went on to note that no actual colleague, however brilliant, is sufficiently enlightened to qualify as a true philosopher. Therefore the chair of the university president should remain empty.

The empty chair is a striking part of the ethic of hospitality enacted by the Seder dinner: a chair for the guest who may arrive at any moment, for whom a place must be kept.

The practice has analogues in other places. Gatherings of PEN, the international freedom of expression group, always feature an empty chair for a missing writer, in prison or under house arrest elsewhere in the world. Somewhat less sublimely, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos apparently insists on having an empty chair at every company meeting: the chair represents the customer, according to Bezos "the most important person in the room".

There it is – not the customer, I mean, but the chair. Instead of staging acrimonious elections for the post of president or prime minister, rather than arguing over who mismanaged a budget or failed to lower unemployment rates, we should simply hold regular viewings of the empty chair at the summit of all governance. Behold the absent philosopher-king, the infeasible ideal ruler, whose always imminent, always postponed arrival may guide us in the endless self-and-other relation that is politics. See how infinitely, impossibly wise!

Deepak Chopra may be wealthy, but even he knows that's all an illusion | Sue Blackmore

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:00:02 GMT

The guru's twisting of 'spirituality' to tell his followers that they can be rich and stay young misses the point of enlightenment

Deepak Chopra is "very wealthy". He told me so himself, leaping to his feet to defend his personal brand of spirituality, and pacing up and down in front of me. "Spiritual people should not be ashamed of being wealthy," he declared. I did not disagree.

All this took place at Toward a Science of Consciousness, a biennial conference in Tucson, Arizona, where I was invited, along with Menas Kafatos and Leonard Mlodinow, to debate with the spiritual guru and purveyor of Ayurvedic medicine.

Chopra is used to debating with scientists, indeed his book with Mlodinow, War of the Worldviews, inspired the title of our debate. These science v spirituality debates can be rather frustrating because Chopra uses lots of scientific ideas in his books and talks – from quantum mechanics to evolution – but he tends to twist them just at the crucial point. For example, he claims that consciousness not only gave rise to the entire universe but also directs evolution. This means we are all evolving towards a higher state of consciousness. Nice thought – popular thought too – but it kind of misses the whole point that evolution by natural selection (and related processes) is a marvellously mindless process that does not require a designer or the power of consciousness to produce its wonders.

But my arguments took a different tack. I chose to tackle his brand of "spirituality" rather than his wobbly science, although I think he treats both in the same disingenuous way. He takes their underlying, and often uncomfortable, insights and then twists them into something far more palatable – into something everybody would like to be true.

The problem, as far as consciousness is concerned, is the same for both science and spirituality – it's dualism. We seem to be conscious selves having a stream of mental experiences in a physical world, yet there cannot be two kinds of stuff – the physical and the mental. Scientists tend to make matter primary and cannot explain how a physical brain creates subjective experiences; Chopra's version of spirituality makes consciousness primary but cannot explain how consciousness creates matter. Meanwhile mystics and meditators throughout the ages have said all this is illusion – ultimately "I" am not separate from the world around me. Seeing the true nature, or becoming enlightened, means seeing through the illusion to oneness, or realising non-duality.

I have been training in Zen for 30 years as well as being involved in consciousness research. So I am familiar with both sides. That's why I agreed with Chopra when, in his "workshop" the night before (actually a solid, three-hour lecture), he said: "There is no separation between mind and body … Self and other co-arise and fall away all the time."

"I am not a dualist," he proclaims. But he is. "How do you wiggle your toes?" he asks. "Isn't your mind sending an order to your feet?" or, "Before a brain can register a thought, a mind must think it … every step of the way is mind over matter … We override our brains all the time."

Aha – so there's a "me" that overrides "my brain". This is straight dualism and is precisely what most spiritual traditions deny. Their teachers know that denying the persistence and importance of our very own self is painful, as the Buddha did. They know it is hard to accept our self as an ephemeral construction (to put it in scientific terms), or something that arises and falls away all the time (in spiritual terms).

So Chopra twists his "spirituality" right back on itself into the old, familiar and comfortable idea that "I" exist, "I" control my own body, "I" am important and may even live forever. In his book Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul he gives "the soul the attention it deserves": a dualist project if ever there was one.

I'll give two further examples. In Ageless Body, Timeless Mind (two million copies sold) Chopra describes those timeless experiences familiar to long-term meditators and those who have spontaneous or drug-induced mystical experiences. The world does not disappear, yet self, time and space cease to have any meaning. All is one and time is gone. Whether you come at this from a scientific or spiritual perspective this makes sense as a process of dropping the usual illusions of self and separation.

Yet for Chopra this is "the quantum alternative to growing old". Through developing the timeless mind "the effects of ageing are largely preventable", he says. So he has slithered from what I think is a genuine insight about the nature of self and time to claiming to prevent ageing. Indeed, he claims that "in moments of transcendence, when time stands still, your biological clock will stop. The spirit is that domain of our awareness where there is no time."

The biological clock will stop? All those multiply-interlinked chemical and biochemical processes that provide aspects of timing in a complex body will stop? I doubt it. His evidence includes the effect of meditation on the enzyme telomerase, which he interprets as proof that consciousness has the power to slow ageing. I interpret it as that meditation, with all its effects on attention, relaxation and attitude, has positive health benefits too.

Finally there is that question of wealth itself. I ended my presentation on his mega-bestseller The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, where Chopra considers "the creation of wealth". One might be forgiven for thinking he is talking about "spiritual wealth"; about the joy, equanimity, compassion or peace that may result from spiritual practice. But no. He is urging us to align our consciousness "with the subtle yet powerful, unseen forces that affect the flow of money in our lives".

What then of enlightenment? Aside from his video game promising "a soothing journey to enlightenment", in his lecture Chopra described enlightenment as "getting rid of the person that never was". I agree with him (again). This is the whole thrust of the spiritual journey, that you discover that you aren't, and never were, who you thought you were. The feeling of being a powerful entity who persists through time and who will either die or live on when your body dies is an illusion. Yet it is surely precisely this illusory self who craves an "ageless body" and an eternal soul, and who longs for success, material wealth and "control over the flow of money".

One who has transcended the ordinary illusions of self and duality might or might not be wealthy, but they would surely not crave power and money or encourage others to do so. This is why I concluded by saying: "Deepak, you may be happy to call this 'spirituality' but I am not." And this, in turn, is why he leapt so eagerly to his feet to defend himself and his enormous wealth.

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Lovers come and go. Friends remain for ever. That's the myth, anyway | Mark Vernon

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:00:01 GMT

Nietzsche's notion of a 'star friendship' is a useful way of thinking about the end of a relationship with someone who isn't a partner

We expect marriages to get rocky and families to provoke pain. But friends tend to be presented in a mostly happy light: think Sex and the City, or Friends. Bumps and scrapes between Samantha and Charlotte are in the plot but only so they might be resolved. Lovers come and go. Friends remain.

This idealisation does not help us in real life, where friendships do not just have entertaining ups and downs, but disturbing fights and bitter endings. Such a reality is demonstrated in new research based on data collected from the Mass Observation Project, just published in The Sociological Review.

Prof Carol Smart and her colleagues argue that some friends can be dumped quite easily. These are "simple friendships" – people we know for fun, say, so when the fun ceases the relationship is dropped or drifts away. But "complex friendships" – people to whom we were close, as soulmates – prove more distressing.

One woman is typical when she confessed that she stuck with an old friend out of responsibility:

"I have an ongoing friendship with a divorced man … who is a good friend in many ways, but who can be very overbearing, loud and insensitive … and he has an anxiety problem. I am sorry for him but find myself totally drained after a day in his company."

The idealisation of friendship comes through in the research too. Some insisted that you should not abandon old friends, ever. "I'm loyal towards my friend," said one participant, before admitting: "This sounds awful, but I don't get a lot out of the friendship any more." Another person made the arresting observation that the way someone talks about their friends opens a window into the soul, "through which a person's moral calibre could be assessed".

Interestingly, the research advises caution when it comes to reconnecting with old friends. Meeting college or childhood friends can "call up the ghost of former selves, causing regret, embarrassment and discomfort".

Part of the problem is that friendship has no institutionalised life course. When you fall in love, you will think about moving in, about engagement, about marriage, about children, about divorce, about how to get along with your ex. The pathway is not trekked by everyone, of course. But the marital pattern provides a template against which to chart your love life, even when you honour it in the breach. Further, the institutional nature of marriage and marriage-like relationships means that help can be sought when things go wrong.

Not so with friendship because the course of a friendship has no such pattern or support. That is part of its appeal, in fact – friendship as the relationship of freedom. You did not choose your family. You realise that you had little conscious sense of why you chose your lover, once the romance quietens. But you did choose your friends, apparently. And then something goes wrong. You are left floundering.

Perhaps there should be friendship counselling too. It would recognise that friendship is vital to human wellbeing because this form of human love gets under our skin quite as much as any other, for good and ill. But in the meantime, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has a useful metaphor to offer.

He knew a thing or two about amity's calamities, having once been a friend of Wagner. The experience of the break-up seems to have led Nietzsche to develop the notion of "star friendship".

Stars are distant, like the friendships of yesteryear. They look bright, as you remember the good times. But the great thing about stars is that they don't cast a shadow over you now. So too might old friendship, once a blessing, now broken. It is not easy to find the place where they don't cast a shadow of guilt or bitterness or loss. But the star metaphor might keep you headed in a better direction. It holds out the hope that one day you will wake up and realise that you're over the friendship, it was good, and all will be well.

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On being an atheist diagnosed with MS | Peter Thompson

Thu, 03 May 2012 10:57:33 GMT

Yes, I sat in the car and cried. But why should it not happen to me? There's no rage, as I've no sense I was selected for this

It was pretty well exactly at this time last year, in the middle of writing the sixth of my columns on Marx for Comment is free that I had to take a quick break and go and get the results of an MRI scan from the doctor. Thinking it would just show that the prolapsed disc that I had to have removed 20 years ago was giving me some problems, I was actually left floundering when the doctor read the report, handed it over to me and explained that in fact I had multiple sclerosis. All of those weird symptoms that I had put down to stress, overwork, RSI, the prolapsed disc and all sorts of other things suddenly fell into place. But at the same time everything else fell out of place. Having read more times than I care to remember the cliches about people being poleaxed or speechless it was now my turn to stay silent.

I sat in the car outside and cried. I mean, I had always known that I was going to die, but now I knew I was going to die, and there is a real difference between those two things. Two short words from the doctor turned the theory into reality and I went through several of the stages of grief within the space of about 10 minutes: shock, disbelief, anger, despair, resolve. But like the MS (so far) I seem to have had a rather mild version of grief. If people have been discussing recently whether a true Christian can get depressed then I think for me the same question applies to a true atheist. After all, what is there to get depressed about? Rather than ask "why me?" the real question is, well, why not me? Death has to be put into its philosophical context and for me that starts with Heidegger's Sum Moribundus (being towards death): I die therefore I am. The only certainty in life is death. Sod taxes, they can be avoided, death can't.

Also, there is no anger because I do not have any sense of having been selected for this. Life is a series of contingent events thrown at us and out of which we have to make a convincing narrative for ourselves as individuals and collectively. This narrative is what I call a "metaphysics of contingency" and it is at the root not just of religious thinking, but also of all the ways in which we try to create meaning within a meaningless and non-directed existence. Religion, culture, politics, theology, philosophy in all its wonderful forms is, when it comes down to it, nothing more than a rage against death. As Nietzsche points out, we are nothing but clever animals who think they have invented knowledge. One day, billions of years hence, the sun will expand and "the clever animals will have to die". When I occasionally visit a religious service, what always strikes me is the vehemence of the rage against this recognition of entropy and death, the hope in the light of salvation.

For an atheist and a happy and optimistic nihilist like me, who doesn't mind that there is no point to any of this, that it just is, something like this just lines up in the queue with all of the other contingent events that confront us. For me it is the absence of salvation that is our great hope, because it is the absence that creates the salvation and makes me realise that it is down to us to find it, just as it is the very non-existence of God that forces us to invent him. Maybe Ernst Bloch and Jürgen Moltmann were right when they said that only an atheist can be a good Christian and only a Christian can be a good atheist.

One year on there is hope – that most tenacious and essential of all emotions – in that I have not had any relapses, am not having any treatment and have improved my lifestyle, which actually makes me feel much better than I have done for many years. It is thought that within 10 to 15 years science will have found a stem cell cure for multiple sclerosis and, of course I hang on to that hope too. Science is not my god, but it may well be my salvation. And I have gone back to expecting to live for ever, which I will of course, even if that is only another few decades.

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Now everyone is connected, is this the death of conversation? | Simon Jenkins

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:30:00 GMT

As our meeting places fall silent, save for tapping on screens, it seems we have mistaken ubiquitous connection for the real thing

I first noticed it in a restaurant. The place was strangely quiet, and at one table a group seemed deep in prayer. Their heads were bowed, their eyes hooded and their hands in their laps. I then realised that every one, young and old, was gazing at a handheld phone. People strolled the street outside likewise, with arms crooked at right angles, necks bent and heads in potentially crippling postures. Mothers with babies were doing it. Students in groups were doing it. They were like zombies on call. There was no conversation.

Every visit to California convinces me that the digital revolution is over, by which I mean it is won. Everyone is connected. The New York Times last week declared the death of conversation. While mobile phones may at last be falling victim to etiquette, this is largely because even talk is considered too intimate a contact. No such bar applies to emailing, texting, messaging, posting and tweeting. It is ubiquitous, the ultimate connectivity, the brain wired full-time to infinity.

The MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle claims that her students are close to mastering the art of sustaining eye contact with a person while texting someone else. It is like an organist playing different tunes with hands and feet. To Turkle, these people are "alone together … a tribe of one". Anyone with 3,000 Facebook friends has none.

The audience in a New York theatre now sit, row on row, with lit machines in their laps, looking to the stage occasionally but mostly scrolling and tapping away. The same happens at meetings and lectures, in coffee bars and on jogging tracks. Children are apparently developing a dexterity in their thumbs unknown since the evolution of the giant sloth. Talk is reduced to the muttered, heads-down expletives brilliantly satirised in the BBC's Twenty Twelve.

Psychologists have identified this as "fear of conversation". People wear headphones as "conversational avoidance devices". The internet connects us to the entire world, but it is a world bespoke, edited, deleted, sanitised. Doubt and debate become trivial because every statement can be instantly verified or denied by Google. There is no time for the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Socratic dialogue, the skeleton of true conversation.

There is now apparently a booming demand for online "conversation" with robots and artificial voices. Mobiles come loaded with customised "girlfriends". People turn to computerised dating advisers, even claim to fall in love with their on-board GPS guides. A robot seal can be bought to sit and listen to elderly people talk, tilting its head and blinking in sympathy.

We have, says Turkle, confused connection with conversation – "the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship". Human friendship is rich, messy and complicated. It requires patience and tolerance, even compromise. As we push other people off into a world of question and answer, connection and information, friendship becomes ersatz virtuality.

In his history of conversation, Stephen Miller points out that "most Americans are nowadays concerned more with improving their sex life than their conversation life". Even the phone is passé. Those who used to call a friend in trouble now send a text. Phone calls are to register urgency or shout anger, with corresponding loss of nuance and sensibility. From Mailer to Eminem, the modern cultural hero is expressionist. He or she has "attitude", and to prove it uses the F-word as often as possible.

Miller notes that public discourse is dominated by contention, by "intersecting monologues". Anger, lack of inhibition, "letting it all hang out" are treated as assets in public debate, in place of a willingness to listen and adjust one's point of view. Politics thus becomes a platform of rival angers. American politicians are ever more polarised, reduced to conveying a genuine hate for each other.

Likewise, the lack of tolerance in American Christianity can be as frightening as it can in Islam. When I once professed support for IVF, a man glared across the table, tight-jawed, and asked: "What does it feel like to be a mass murderer?" With such people there is no conversation, only a tiptoeing from the room.

All that said, the death of conversation has been announced as often as that of the book. Samuel Johnson and David Hume worried that the decline of political conversation would lead to violent civil discord. George Orwell concluded that "the trend of the age was away from creative communal amusements and toward solitary mechanical ones". The philosopher Michael Oakeshott professed himself desperate to "rescue the art of conversation". Somehow we have muddled through.

The "post-digital" phenomenon, the craving for live experience, is showing a remarkable vigour. The US is a place of ever greater congregation and migration, to parks, beaches and restaurants, to concerts, rock festivals, ball games, religious rallies. Affinity groups frantically seek escape from the digital dictatorship, using Facebook and Twitter not as destinations but as portals, as route maps to human contact.

A hundred online universities are no substitute for a live campus any more than Facebook is a substitute for sex or Twitter for debate. Gatherings such as Burning Man and Coachella have revived the medieval pilgrimage, with tens of thousands crossing mountains and deserts to spend from $100 to $1,000 a weekend to commune with like-minded souls. They talk. They even converse.

Somewhere in this cultural morass I am convinced the zest for human contact will preserve the qualities that Plato and Plutarch, Johnson and Hume identified as essential for a civilised life, qualities of politeness, listening and courtesy. Those obsessed with faddish connectivity and personal avoidance are not escaping reality. They are not TS Eliot's misanthropic Prufrock, "a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas". Deep down they still crave friendship. They just want a better class of talk.

With that in mind, my editor has asked me to offer up a few practical suggestions and conversational cautions.

How to open a good conversation:

1) Immediately show an interest in the other person.

2) Try to extract an opinion of some sort, and reasons for it. Never disagree with it openly, but try to construct a dialogue based on it.

3) Never ask intimate questions, unless invited to do so.

4) Always be the one to change the subject if the going gets rough.

5) Try to leave the conversation in good repair should it be interrupted.

Five of the worst conversational openings:

1) You must be very busy these days.

2) Do you live round here?

3) Do you have any children?

4) Will it never stop raining?

5) Gosh, this party is boring.

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Machiavelli's The Prince, part four: benevolence to complement brutality | Nick Spencer

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:00:00 GMT

It is the model prince's humanity that makes him so disturbing. He's more amoral than immoral – only staying in power matters

More than any other political theorist, Machiavelli's reputation precedes him. Some people talk about Rawlsian ideas or Kantian ethics or a Hobbesian world – usually those who want to sound clever and educated – but it's perfectly fine to use the word Machiavellian without claiming to have read The Prince. Everyone does and everyone knows what it means.

It can come as something of a surprise, then, to find that Machiavelli wrote in The Prince that "a man who becomes king … must make it an absolute priority to win over the affection of the common people", or that "sensible rulers and well-run states have done all they can … to keep the people happy and satisfied; indeed this is one of a ruler's most important tasks."

The ideal ruler is not, it seems, a dagger-wielding psychopath. On the contrary, he "should go about things … humanely". Nor should he be a leader in the sense of inspiring terror in everyone around him. On the contrary, "a king must guard against being despised and hated", both by noblemen and commoners.

Noblemen, or at least some of them, must feel comfortable speaking honestly to their prince. A leader who "trusts no one makes himself unbearable". Accordingly, "he should make it clear that the more openly [ministers] speak, the more welcome will their advice be".

Respecting commoners is, if anything, more important still. "People's aspirations are more honourable that those of the nobles," Machiavelli admits. Therefore, "a ruler must avoid any behaviour that will lead to his being hated or held in contempt".

This is more than hot air. It means that the ruler should "respect" the "guilds and districts" into which "every city" is divided, and "go to their meetings from time to time, showing what a humane a generous person he is". It means that "if he really has to have someone executed, he should only do it when he has proper justification and manifest cause".

And it means that he should instate and protect sound public institutions. France, he says, is a one of the better governed states of our age, "full of good institutions", the most important of which is "parliament and parliamentary authority". "There couldn't be a better or more sensible institution," he gushes, "nor one more conducive to the security of kind and the realm."

None of which sounds particularly "Machiavellian".

It will be clear the Machiavelli's model prince is no political Satan, bidding "evil, be thou my good". Indeed, were he to have been so, he would, paradoxically, have been less shocking and somewhat easier to deal with. Monsters, after all, are manageable. Remorseless sadism may nauseate us but if we can convince ourselves that such people are completely different from us, not even of the same species, we do not feel quite so threatened by their actions.

By contrast, it is precisely because its model prince is recognisably human, valuing many of the things we value, and pursuing paths that we ourselves would advocate, that The Prince is so disturbing. He is one of us, too realistic, too credible to be readily dismissed. You may not always admit so in public, Machiavelli whispers to us, but you too think like this, don't you?

Machiavelli's moral universe is not one of unredeemed or unredeemable immorality, therefore. It is subtler, more amoral than immoral. By all means, govern well, execute sparingly, respect institutions, and invite honest advice, Machiavelli says, while in the same breath telling the prince that he must execute some of the coldest and most brutal acts of political violence.

So, for example, he reports that there are three ways of keeping control over newly conquered but previously self-governing states: "Reduce them to rubble … go and live there yourself … let them go on living under their own laws … and install a [puppet] government." Each has its own merits but "the truth is that the only sure way to hold such places is to destroy them". That isn't mandatory. You may decide not to raze them, in which case "the best way to hold a previously self-governing city it with the help of its own citizens". But it is still an option.

Machiavelli doesn't advocate violence for its own sake. On the contrary, he repeatedly insists that such frenzied aggression is counter-productive. What is shocking is the way in which the brutal rubs shoulders with the benign, the vicious with the virtuous in a matter-of-fact way. He is not so much saying the morally wrong way is the necessarily right way for a prince to go about his business. Rather, he is implying that the morally right way is simply irrelevant. What matters is staying in power.

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Machiavelli's The Prince, part three: the personal in the political | Nick Spencer

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:33:23 GMT

If the author's diplomatic career saturates The Prince, so does his desperation for redemption after his fall from grace

The Prince was a book of its time both politically (as we saw in week one) and intellectually (last week). But it was also a personal book, and we miss something of its power if we ignore its biographical context.

Machiavelli's family was neither wealthy nor well-connected. His father, Bernardo, was a lawyer and humanist who diligently grounded his son in the studia humanitatis but was unable to arrange for him a life of aristocratic luxury or even a cushy government stipend.

Instead, although Machiavelli's early years are poorly documented, it seems certain that it was a combination of humanist education, hard work and intelligence that earned him a major appointment in 1498. Machiavelli was as close to being a self-made man any anyone in Renaissance Florence.

As secretary of the Ten of War, Florence's foreign affairs and war committee, he was the city's highest-ranking diplomat for 14 years, leading embassies to and spending months in the courts of the French king, the pope, the holy Roman emperor, and others. The Prince was written by a man who, as he informs Lorenzo de' Medici in the dedication, had "knowledge [that was] gained through long experience of contemporary affairs". When it came to geopolitics, Machiavelli knew whereof he spoke.

The author's diplomatic career saturates The Prince. Alongside the Greek and Roman models so favoured by humanists, the book is populated with contemporary examples and lessons, many of them transposed, almost verbatim, from Machiavelli's personal correspondence and legations. Thus his breathless praise for Cesare Borgia's ruthlessness, his admiration of Pope Julius II's boldness, and his criticism of the Emperor Maximilian's ineptitude passed largely unaltered from diplomatic communiques into The Prince.

Even when his diplomatic memos are not quite so obvious, Machiavelli's experience remains in view. His time at the French court taught him that the Florentine view of their city's power and importance was utterly naive and inflated. If the republic wished to survive it needed to recognise how the real world worked. The Prince offered some candid and blunt advice along these lines, explicitly drawn from a career at the ambassadorial coalface. The author was, in effect, leaking the diplomatic cables in order to help "save [Italy] from the cruelty and barbarity of [the] foreigners" encroaching upon it.

The Prince is even more personal than this, however. In 1512, the Medicis, with papal encouragement and Spanish help, defeated the Florentines and dismantled the republic. Machiavelli found himself out of favour and out of work. Worse, he was under suspicion for plotting against the new ruling clan and was subsequently tortured by strappado, in which the body was hoisted to the ceiling by wrists bound behind the back and then dropped to the floor, thereby usually tearing the arms out of their sockets.

Machiavelli survived, maintained his innocence and was released. But the experience marked him. "Fear means fear of punishment, and that's something people never forget," he wrote in the chapter 17, on cruelty and compassion.

The Prince was Machiavelli's attempt to worm his way back into favour following this disaster, and is marked not only by examples drawn from his diplomatic career but by a heartfelt plea for preferment. This entailed the mandatory obsequiousness that came with such "mirror for princes" books: "your illustrious house … favoured by God and church … [is] well placed to lead Italy to redemption," he writes towards the end of the book.

More strikingly, however, it also involved a personal entreaty that sounded clear and early in the book. The dedication explains how The Prince's wisdom derived from what the author had "discovered and assimilated over many years of danger and discomfort". The book was written because the author was "eager myself to bring Your Highness some token of my loyalty". And it was hoped, the dedication concluded, that "this small gift" would encourage "Your Highness" to "look down on those far below" and to see "how very ungenerously and unfairly life continues to treat me". If there is a dark and a desperate tone to The Prince, it is because the author's life had, of late, taken a dark and a desperate turn.

The sensitive diplomatic material and the personal nature of The Prince helps explain why, although written in 1513, the book was not published until after Machiavelli's death, over 15 years later. For all its subsequent fame, it had little immediate impact, at least not in the way Machiavelli had desired. The Prince failed in its mission and Machiavelli lived the rest of his life in political obscurity.

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Michael Sandel: master of life's big questions | Observer profile

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 23:08:23 GMT

The political philosopher made his name at Harvard with crowd-pulling lectures, is now wowing audiences on Radio 4, while his new book offers an eloquent argument for morality in public life

On the surface, there is nothing unusual about Radio 4 devoting a three-part series to a political philosopher. After all, Rousseau, Marx and Mill are just the kind of subjects on which the station has built its intellectual reputation. But listeners to last week's opening episode of The Public Philosopher would have noticed that, unlike those three giants of the discipline, the philosopher in question is not in the least bit dead.

At 59, Michael Sandel, who is professor of government at Harvard, is probably the most popular political philosopher of his generation. His work has drawn plaudits across the globe and in British politics his admirers include Ed Miliband, David Willetts and John Cruddas. Three years ago, he was chosen to give the Reith lectures, which were also broadcast on Radio 4. Since then, his international renown has continued to grow. Although he may never attain the status of a household name, he has already become something of a legend in the lecture hall.

His long-running Harvard course on justice regularly draws more than a thousand students. He has also taken an adapted version of the lecture on the road in America, India and the Far East. Last year, he appeared on the cover of China Newsweek. The attention Sandel enjoys is more akin to a stadium-filling self-help guru than a philosopher, yet in a sense self-help is precisely the message he brings. But rather than instructing his audiences to maximise earning power or balance their chakras, he challenges them to address fundamental questions about how society is organised.

In the first of the Radio 4 lectures, which were recorded at the London School of Economics, he asked the assembled students if universities should give preference to applicants from poor backgrounds. In an earlier series of lectures broadcast on BBC4, he asked if it was fair that Wayne Rooney earns more than a care worker.

Sandel believes that philosophy is not "distant and abstract" but, instead, a function of the "hard ethical" choices that life throws up. What's more, he argues that it's vital for the democratic health of society to be able to identify the big questions that lie behind everyday conflicts and presumptions.

His method is not to lecture from on high but to lead a kind of Socratic debate in which members of the audience tackle moral conundrums from opposing positions. With his ready smile and self-deprecating wit, he has a knack of encouraging those less learned than he is to voice their opinion.

His hold over audiences is perhaps all the more impressive given that he neither looks nor sounds like a crowd-pleaser. A high forehead stretching back into a long patch of baldness, a slightly stiff gait and a careful voice have drawn comparisons with Montgomery Burns, the evil businessman in The Simpsons. As several writers for the show attended Harvard, an urban myth has grown that Burns was an elaborate joke on Sandel, the joke being that Sandel is all about the communal good, while Burns, to put it mildly, is not.

Whatever the truth – and the writers have denied any link – Sandel has no need of The Simpsons to create on-stage drama, although he has referred to the show in a debate about the relative virtues of Shakespeare and popular television. In keeping with Sandel's open-ended approach, the outcome in that instance, as usual, was not conclusive. Yet if there are no definitive answers, the audience invariably comes away with a deeper understanding of what role we expect higher education to perform or what it means to be "fair" or why it feels wrong to kill one person to save five others.

Sandel's overriding aim as a philosopher is to bring morality back into political debate. He maintains that classic liberal discourse is locked into the morally neutral perspective of utilitarianism. In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill made the case that people should be allowed to do whatever they wished, as long as it did no harm to others. Ever since, says Sandel, political philosophy in relation to the state has concentrated on quantifiable concepts such as benefit and ignored moral judgments such as virtue.

This, he contends, has been a mistake, especially for liberals, who have ceded the moral terrain to conservatives and the right. He wants to return the discussion to the Aristotelian notion of the common good. The problem, as his critics have stated, is who decides what the common good is and what kind of coercion is required to implement it?

In his book The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, the NYU law professor Stephen Holmes placed Sandel in the category of "soft antiliberals" who "demilitarise the ideals of 'virtue' and community, using these watered-down terms where their predecessors would have invoked 'manliness' and 'das Volk'." Holmes's point was that in the absence of force, people cannot be compelled to make virtuous choices and the force required to do so would be excessive and illiberal. As the historian Niall Ferguson put it in a debate with Sandel: "I just see Robespierre every time you use that word [virtue]—the embodiment of republican virtue, sending people to the guillotine."

Sandel has two propositions concerning the common good. He wants to push back the pervasiveness of markets, to which end he is about to publish his new book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. While this will endear him to progressives, his other proposal may not – he wants there to be a greater commitment to public service and, specifically, military service.

More than putting forward any particular initiative, Sandel seems most interested in stimulating a debate about the underlying moral impulses that determine how we view the world. "We can't decide any of the questions we argue about," he says, "without implicitly relying on certain ethical ideas, certain ideas of justice, certain ideas of common good. We can't be neutral on those questions even if we pretend to be."

Born into a Jewish family in the American Midwest, Sandel cites two major experiences that shaped his intellectual outlook and choice of profession. While still a student, he was an intern at the Houston Chronicle in Washington DC and, due to a shortage of staff, he got to cover the Watergate hearings. At the tender age of 21, he realised that political journalism would never again be so exciting. Shortly afterwards, he took up a Rhodes scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. His intention was to study welfare economics but the philosopher Alan Montefiore suggested he needed a more theoretical grounding and Sandel duly went off on holiday with works by Kant, Arendt, Nozick and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, one of the most influential texts in modern political philosophy.

Teaching at Oxford at the time were two of the leading thinkers in the field. Ronald Dworkin was lecturing on the philosophy of law and Charles Taylor had just arrived as professor in political philosophy. Taylor became a friend and mentor to the younger man and encouraged him to develop his critique of Rawls. Rawls had produced a detailed argument against utilitarianism that Sandel found persuasive, but he also saw a major flaw in his conception of society. In 1982, in his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Sandel argued that in Rawls human beings were removed from the social ties and contexts that gave purpose to their lives. They were left "without moral depth".

"My main quarrel with liberalism," he has said, "is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights –I believe rights are very important and need to be respected. The issue is whether it is possible to define and justify our rights without taking a stand on the moral and even sometimes religious convictions that citizens bring to public life."

Sandel, who rejects hardline secularism, welcomes religious input in the political arena. He points to Martin Luther King as a leader who used his religious conviction for a wider communal purpose. Some critics have accused Sandel of being disingenuous in this respect, because King only referred to universalist, and not divisive, aspects of religion. But regardless of its appeal or authority, Sandel still values the voice of religion.

"If everyone feels they are heard," he explains, "even if they don't get their way, they will be less resentful than if we pretend we are going to decide policy in a way that is neutral."

This desire to pay testament to all shades of opinion is what transforms his lectures from an intellectual presentation into a civic event. If politics often leaves us feeling bad, Sandel is a political philosopher who makes us think about what it means to be good.

The problem with Julian Baggini's secular state | Jonathan Chaplin

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:00:08 GMT

Many religious citizens will be grateful to Baggini for marking out some promising shared ground, but the devil is in the detail

Living in a heathen state might not be as bad as religious believers had feared. If I've understood article eight of Julian Baggini's heathen manifesto correctly, many religious citizens should be able to affirm quite readily three features of the secular state that he summarises.

First, religion has a legitimate place in politics. Unlike those on the control-freak wing of secularism, Baggini has no desire to banish religious or other worldviews from public life or to stop their adherents invoking such beliefs in policy debates. So presumably it's fine, then, for Operation Noah's recent Ash Wednesday Declaration not only to cite the familiar grim statistics about climate change, but also to quote ancient Jewish sacred texts and lobby the government accordingly. By implication, it's equally legitimate for secular humanists seeking the legalisation of assisted suicide not just to confine themselves to the prosaic legal language of rights, but also to appeal to deeper and more expansive convictions such as that human dignity ultimately resides in the capacity for moral autonomy (a view represented in chapter 2 of the Falconer commission report).

Second, while democratic debate should thus not be arbitrarily hampered by restrictions on religious or other worldview-based ideas, the state "should not give any special privilege to any particular sect or group, or use their creeds as a basis for policy". Actually, the two parts of that claim are distinct. One is that the state should treat groups holding various worldviews even-handedly, for example by avoiding funding or granting access to one while arbitrarily excluding others. The other is that the state should refrain from officially invoking any worldview or creed in publicly justifying any of its policies. So state officials shouldn't quote the Bible as official justification for the 2008 Climate Change Act, and nor should they cite a humanist doctrine of the primacy of moral autonomy in support of a law allowing assisted suicide. In other words, while we citizens can appeal to such grounds, ministers and civil servants shouldn't, even if they personally endorse them.

Third, in democratic politics, people should "formulate and justify policy in terms that all understand, on the basis of principles that as many as possible can share". Christian philosopher Christopher Eberle calls this the "obligation to pursue public justification" and commends it as part of a wider "ideal of conscientious engagement". That is, citizens who respect each other as equals should do their best to appeal to public norms their fellow citizens can affirm or at least acknowledge as valid, and not just for the obvious pragmatic reason that they might actually be listened to.

Many religious citizens will thus be grateful to Baggini for marking out some promising shared ground. But when we try to specify the precise meaning of the second and third features of his secular state, we rapidly find ourselves in territory that is hotly contested both within and between religious and secular worldviews. "State neutrality" implies some notion of equal treatment. But while it plainly rules out the official "establishment" of a worldview – Christianity in the Roman empire, Islam in Iran, or atheistic communism in the USSR – it is far from obvious what else it implies. Does it exclude all and any state funding of faith-based schooling, as in the US, or does it require a pluralistic European model in which several religious and worldview-based schools are funded proportionately? Does it mandate equal recognition of all conceptions of "marriage" or only those honouring the equality of men and women (or men and men, and women and women)? Appealing to "neutrality" doesn't solve questions like these, but merely prods at a hornets' nest of vigorous disagreement. Neutrality itself is an empty concept that is parasitic upon a prior social ontology that takes a view on the nature of the entities among which the state is supposed to be neutral.

Specifying what "public justification" amounts to is no less demanding. After an exhaustive analysis of what the term might actually require of participants in democratic debate, Eberle concludes that both religious and secular citizens may, despite their best efforts, find themselves coming up with justifications that turn out to seem invalid by many members of the public. And this isn't a sign of epistemic failure, only of the inherent limits of rational communication in a morally fragmented culture. The problem isn't unintelligibility: any passably educated secular humanist can make sense of an appeal to an ancient Hebrew text, just as a reasonably well-informed Muslim can make sense of a Kantian conception of human dignity. The problem is incompatibility; the deep chasm separating one citizen's deepest worldview commitments from another's.

More troublingly, the requirement to justify one's policy commitments only in terms of supposedly "shared principles" can serve to entrench the discursive hegemony of whatever happens to be the current majority position – such as the stubbornly persistent yet irrational faith, shared by every party except the Greens, that endless growth of GDP is the only way out of recession and even the only route to address global warming. Marginalised minorities know all about the power of such hegemonic convictions when their dissenting demands run up against what a complacent majority takes as self-evidently true.

The high principle of article eight of the heathen manifesto has flagged up an important debate. Let's now take up the difficult work of analysing what it might actually mean on the ground.

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In praise of … philosophy on the radio | Editorial

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:04:36 GMT

No smouldering TV dons, no heart-rending case studies in a new Radio 4 series – just an invigorating use of the Socratic method

Something extraordinary has happened on Radio 4: at 9 in the morning, a programme was broadcast about philosophy. The presenter wasn't some smouldering TV don, and there was no heart-rending case study or tricksiness. Instead the academic Michael Sandel took an LSE lecture hall through an intellectual puzzle: should poorer students be given preferential treatment for university places? The audience argued it out – Georgia pushed for a system based purely on merit, while Faisal noted how many of his Bangladeshi friends were unable to pursue their studies for lack of cash – and were subtly encouraged or challenged by the Harvard professor. Few producers are brave enough to build broadcasts around the Socratic method, but in Sandel's practised hands the discussion felt accessible and invigorating. If this is the future, it sounds decidedly like the past – and all the better for it. Roll on next week's episode.

Machiavelli's The Prince, part two: humanism and the lessons of history | Nick Spencer

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:00:03 GMT

The Prince follows humanist convention in commending virtuous rulers such as Marcus Aurelius – but subverts it by praising tyrants for their cruelty

It is a sadness of the present age that "humanism" has become such a narrow and partisan term, effectively denoting atheism with a bit of good PR. It wasn't always like that. Machiavelli was the inheritor of a tradition of humanism that dated back to the 14th century and was far from anti-Christian.

As ever more ancient manuscripts were discovered in monastic libraries in the middle ages, a new attitude to the classical world emerged. Cicero, Tacitus, Thucydides and Lucretius were valued, not only for their rhetorical brilliance but also for their fundamentally different view of the world and, in particular, of human nature.

Humanism contended that contrary to received wisdom, formed and sustained under the shadow of St Augustine, human corruption was not total. Humans could make meaningful choices about their lives and destiny. They could be genuinely virtuous. Human dignity lay not so much in the possession of an immortal soul as in the capacity for and exercise of freedom. Fortune (which could be influenced) as opposed to Providence (which could not) became the presiding genius. Humans were made for excellence. All this was achieved within a thoroughly Christian framework. Embracing ideas of dignity, freedom and excellence did not entail rejecting Christianity, merely the Augustinian flavour of it to which most people had become accustomed.

It did, however, involve a different attitude to the world, to work and, most noticeably, to education. This was partly in who should be taught: now all gentlemen would benefit from studying, not just those destined for the church. But it was also in what should be taught. Scripture and scholasticism gave way to the thought and literature of the classical world, without which no education could be considered complete. This was, in Quentin Skinner's words, an "almost embarrassingly long-lived" idea, shaping the English educational system until the time of Harold Macmillan.

The Prince stands firmly within this tradition. The whole "mirror for princes" genre, of which it is the most famous example, although having pre-humanist roots, was a typically humanist enterprise, in particular the way it chose to affirm rather than renounce worldly ambition. Within The Prince, as with other such books of advice, examples from the ancient world dominate. "A ruler must … exercise his mind [by] read[ing] history," Machiavelli advises Lorenzo, "in particular accounts of great leaders and their achievements."

The lessons of history need not be on the individual scale. Machiavelli was fond of drawing examples from the Roman empire, explaining, for example, that its stability was rooted in how "the Romans … never put off a war when they saw trouble coming", or that its collapse was triggered "when they started hiring Goths as mercenaries". If contemporary rulers sought greatness, there was no greater example than the Roman empire.

Personal models were, however, more important. "Take as a model a leader who's been much praised and admired and keep his examples and achievements in mind at all times," Machiavelli advised. This is what ancient leaders themselves had apparently done – Alexander the Great had modelled himself on Achilles, Caesar on Alexander, Scipio on Cyrus – so it stood to reason that what was modern ones should do. The Prince is peppered with such examples, legends like Theseus and Romulus, or emperors like Marcus Aurelius, Pertinax and Alexander, "benign, humane men who led unassuming lives, loving justice and hating cruelty". It is, however, also populated by other ancient figures, who were ruthless, manipulative or plain brutal.

This in itself was not unprecedented. The tradition of learning from the mistakes and faults of others was itself an ancient one. What Machiavelli did, however, was use such moral monsters for affirmative rather than censorious purposes. These people were worth studying not because they were wrong, but because they were strong.

Thus, in the same way as he drew a positive message from the example of Cesare Borgia as we saw last week, he also wrote about emperors like Commodus, Severus, Atoninus Caracalla and Maximinus, men who were "extremely cruel and grasping", not to condemn but to learn from them.

Hannibal, for example, is lauded in a chapter about cruelty and compassion because he led "a huge and decidedly multiracial army far from home" in which there was no sign of dissent or rebellion. How? Machiavelli's answer is simple. It was his "tremendous cruelty". Stories like this illustrate how Machiavelli simultaneously used and subverted the humanist historical tradition. "Historians are just not thinking," he writes tetchily at one point, "when they praise [Hannibal] for this achievement and then condemn him for cruelty."

It was entirely right that fellow humanists should seek to learn from history. But they should at least do so honestly.

What Debord can teach us about protest | Meghan Sutherland

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:25:29 GMT

The Society of the Spectacle urges us to rethink the relationship between activism, philosophy and pleasure in everyday life

What is "the society of the spectacle"? In the opening thesis of his book of that name, Guy Debord offers a concise explanation. "The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Reading these lines today, you might wonder why Debord's concept of spectacle has gained a reputation for being oblique and elusive. In the context of 21st-century culture, these words sound less like philosophy, and more like a straightforward description of the dominant role that profit-driven media spectacles play in the communication flows of public life, from the DSK affair and the royal wedding to the News of the World debacle.

If we go on to read the 200 additional theses on spectacle that proceed from here, each one as grim and sweeping as the first, this feeling will get worse. In one, Debord defines the spectacle as "the economic realm developing for itself", which is to say in the sole interest of expanding new markets for profit – a prospect all too familiar to anyone who has ever owned an iPhone or iPad that was rendered obsolete before the wireless contract required for the privilege of buying it.

In another, he writes: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images," a characterisation that is just as easy to envision as the triumphant motto of Facebook or YouTube as a screed against the experience of "generalised separation" that Debord deems the only form of social unity available in such a "relationship". Again and again, then, the image of spectacle finds its most immediate expression in the infrastructure that binds the market imperatives of capitalism ever more tightly to the mass-mediated communities of "social media", not to mention the industry of personal data collection and micro-targeted viral advertising that drives it. If the spectacle exists, as Debord tells us, "wherever representation takes on an independent existence" then it's safe to assume that the computer-manufactured credit derivatives associated with the collapse of the American economy in 2008 count as one of the many forms of the spectacle.

The danger with this reading – the spectacle as a retroactive name for the social alienation of modern media culture – is that it turns Debord into a prophet who simply confirms everything we already know and further cements its inevitability. In other words, it is to make The Society of the Spectacle into precisely the kind of spectacle that Debord warns us of in thesis five, where he insists that the spectacle is not a simple product of mass media, but "a weltanschauung that has been actualised, translated into the material realm – a world view transformed into an objective force".

The question, then, is how to read Debord more philosophically. At least to my thinking, reading Debord's idea of spectacle in this way begins by recognising that when he uses the terms "image" and "representation", he is using them both literally and as metaphors. He is referring not only to the images that appear on a television screen or in a magazine, but also every "vision" of an ideal social whole, whether it comes from the commercial world or from philosophy and art. Put otherwise, Debord is pointing to the pose of intellectual and physical passivity we adopt when we entertain a vision of total social unity that can be abstracted in a theoretical formula, a political slogan, a product or a picture. He is pointing to the ease with which the very ideal of social unity can be appropriated and sold back to us in the form of material goods and political imperatives whenever we allow someone else to tell us what it is, should be, or can be.

He is highlighting the ways in which this process of social abstraction actually codifies a current order of social existence by removing it from the dynamic material vigour of our own lives, minds and activities. And while the ominous possibilities of such a scenario certainly apply to the promise of social "connectivity" that comes pre-loaded on Twitter and all the other technological gadgets and apps that so consume us today, they apply just as much to the orthodox communism of the Stalinist state; to the abstract vision of universalism that drives transcendental philosophies and religion alike; and to the global entertainment franchises that dominate 21st-century life, including everything from Britain's Got Talent and its countless national counterparts around the world to the World Cup.

Accordingly, Debord's concept of spectacle may hold the greatest importance for a discussion of the big ideas of today because it serves as an emphatic reminder that unless we take pleasure in thinking dynamically about the role spectacles play in shaping our social existence, we will find ourselves as extras in whatever scene they establish. At a moment when the spectacle of the global stock market is increasingly taken for granted as an indisputable justification for dismantling various social programmes, we must learn to mobilise the critical resources of spectacle as ingeniously as Debord's own text does.

Doing so will not only require that we continue to make a spectacle of our dissent, gleaning lessons from the protest movements taking shape around the world, from Wall Street to Cairo. It will also require that we redouble our efforts to challenge the systematic elimination of philosophy departments and humanities funding from university programmes all over the world – a project of austerity economics that deems the study of ideas simultaneously elitist, irrelevant to the "real" world and without market value. For as Debord makes clear, when we allow the pleasures of living and acting to become severed from the pleasures of thinking and looking, The Society of the Spectacle can mean only one thing. And it will do so until we learn to reconnect them.

The Big Ideas podcast: Guy Debord's 'society of the spectacle'

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Published in 1967, Guy Debord's book La Société du Spectacle ("The Society of the Spectacle") is nothing less than a radical attack on modern society, in which, in Debord's words, "being" had declined into a state of "having", and "having" merely meant "appearing".

But what exactly was the spectacle? Was it consumerism? Was it mass media? And how does Debord's theory let us understand modern spectacles such as the London Olympics and the royal jubilee?

In the latest episode of the Big Ideas podcast, Benjamen Walker talks situationism with Guardian columnist John Harris, academic Meghan Sutherland and Debord archivist Emmanuel Guy