A Flood of Bollocks

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There is, as my grandma used to say, "high ding-dong" over David Cameron's visit to Rwanda during a time of "disastrous" flooding in Southern England. (For readers outside of the UK, David Cameron is the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons and Conservative Party leader - the man who would be Prime Minister if the Tories win the next election.) I've just been listening to Jeremy Vine's show on BBC2 - the middle-class population of Britain's phone-in rant-a-thon - and the consensus is that Cameron is an almighty idiot, a weakling, has lost the next election already, and generally speaking the country is going to the dogs.

If ever evidence was needed that people in Britain have lost all sense of perspective, you just have to listen to the Jeremy Vine show on days with relatively "big" news stories like this ("big" in the sense that there's a lot to get sanctimonious and high-horsey about). The comments by listeners have uniformly managed to epitomise almost everything that I hate about the UK, and England in particular, being as they are ignorant, ill-thought out, prissy, moralising nonsense of the worst kind, but I can identify three distinct strands or themes:

1. David Cameron, it is said, is the Member of Parliament for Whitney and as such he should be in Whitney at a time of crisis to help sort things out rather than "gallavanting around" abroad. Why this should be isn't particularly clear: from what I can gather the fire service and the armed forces have the situation well in hand, and the flooding is hardly Hurricane Katrina (it's a level that would be considered laughable in most other countries) - but no, Cameron should be back home stealing ghastly photo opportunities and making cheap political points by pretending to help fill sandbags and showing how deeply compassionate he is, rather than trying to do something of value in a country benighted by genocide and famine which is hoping to join the Commonwealth and drag itself up out of the gutter. In other words, most people in Britain think it is more important for a leading politician to act in the name of cheap propaganda and superficial emoting rather than do real work to aid developing nations.

2. David Cameron is the latest in a long line of British politicians to, apparently, put the needs of poor people in foreign countries above those of the British public. The indignance in people's voices is strident: why do politicians show all this concern for the populations of Bangladesh and Rwanda and The Philippines and Iraq but not US!?!? The answer - that in fact people in this country are spoiled and pampered and wrapped in cotton wool, and really our politicians should be doing a hell of a lot more to help those in the developing world - sails right over their heads, like a cool breeze on a summer's day.

3. David Cameron is Leader of the Opposition and should therefore be "opposing" Gordon Brown - in other words he should come back to the UK and start criticising the government for all the mistakes it has allegedly made. He should be taking Gordon Brown to the cleaners and making him "answer to the British people about what has happened". Wherease the truth, as any sensible person can see, is that David Cameron well understands that floods are an act of God and there's nothing much the government could have done about it - so what's the use in criticising? He should in fact be being applauded for showing principle and restraining himself from making cheap points. But then again we're dealing with shrill idiots.

Anyway, the whole thing is just too depressing and silly for words. What's most stupid of all is how fickle everybody has been. Only a year or two ago Middle England was falling over itself to kiss the feet of King Cameron, and here he is making one error of judgement (in the sense that he critically misread the capacity of the English for disproportionate outrage) and people are already predicting he'll lose the next election. It just goes to show how much superficiality reigns in contemporary British politics.

The Chewing of Ears

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I read an article today which purported to hold proof that "men are no less chatty than women". That's right: "the common notion that women are the more talkative sex has been dispelled by scientists in the US".

It's only when you read the body of the article, though, that you realise that in fact the study in question has actually proved that men are less chatty than women (by 546 words per day). Not only that, but "the researchers admit that their findings may not apply to all men as they only studied university students". In other words, all they have really managed to prove is that university students like to talk a lot (big surprise) and that female university students talk a bit more than male ones.

The point being that the story is complete nonsense, barely worthy of anybody's time, and yet it probably required a reasonable amount of man-hours and cash that could have been better spent on something worthwhile.

I'm interested in the way the article was written, though, because it suggests to me a certain bias that I've always suspected the BBC holds, and which it recently more or less admitted to, in favour of liberal politics.

One of the core values or beliefs of liberal politics is the idea of the "blank slate": namely that nurture usually trumps nature and that men and women's behaviours and attitudes are defined mostly by the environment. Men and women, in other words, are not equal-but-different, they are in fact mostly the same.

Regardless of my own personal opinion on the nature/nurture debate, it does seem that this article is evidence of that institutional bias towards the idea that men and women are in essence the same - because it twisted the facts of the story to create the impression that scientific evidence indicated one thing, when in fact it didn't.

Anyway, as is plain for all to see, in the chewing-the-hind-leg-off-a-donkey stakes women always win hands down. You can't get much more scientific than that.

Equality and Proportionality

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I've been watching Save Planet Earth on the BBC these last couple of nights. It's nice to get the chance to see intelligent programming about the environment that doesn't mention carbon footprints and emission trading (yawn). Instead, the series has focused on plain, old-fashioned conservation: protecting endangered species from disappearing.

It has concentrated to a large extent on what is, to me, the key issue regarding conversation - namely the importance of balancing the progress of the developing world with the safety of animal populations in those areas. The programmes have been very careful to highlight the importance of incorporating the needs and desires of local people into conservation efforts; hence tonight's episode (on the Ethiopian Wolf) devoted some minutes to investigating how environmentalists in Southern Ethiopia concentrate much of their efforts on educating people in sustainable farming and development.

I'm all for supporting such projects, but whenever I hear about them I'm always reminded of the apparently inescapable hypocrisy of the West - the different standards we set for developing countries and ourselves. We've seen it most recently from the attitude towards China's rising carbon emissions; people worry and fret that "two coal power stations open in China every week" - the implication being that China is the real threat regarding climate change and the rest of us need not bother doing anything about it - forgetting that, per capita, Western countries produce vastly more Carbon than China. But we also see it in the conservation movement. Western countries have been singularly poor at conserving their animal populations - wolves, bears and wild boar were hunted to extinction over a few hundred years in Britain, for example - and yet we're the keenest to force other people in the world to inhibit their own development in order to protect other animal species.

I'm sure that it can be argued that we, in the West, having effectively destroyed our countries as natural "wilderness" environments, are now in a good position to persuade people in the developing world not to make the same mistakes that we have. But I'm not so sure. That position, I think, would require a genuine recalcitrance on our part which doesn't actually seem to be there. (It might be demonstrated by a greater willingness to reopen areas to wilderness.) As it stands, our position is essentially that people in developing countries should make sacrifices for the environment that we never made during our development, and which we are still largely unwilling to make. Do as we say, in other words, not as we do. I hardly need point out how inadequate that is.

It reminds me of a statement I read recently made by a Chinese representative to the Human Rights Committee in 1997, in defence of his country's human rights record. "The developed Western countries," he said, "have the unshirkable responsibility for the human rights problems the world faces today...how come 1.3 billion people are living in poverty? Does it have nothing to do with the aggression, exploitation and plundering by the colonialists of the past? Isn't it the consequence of the irrational international economic order established by the developed countries?" One is tempted to note that much the same argument can be applied to environmental issues: the West is largely responsible for the damage that humans have done to the natural world, and yet we are mostly happy to foist future responsibility, and blame for current problems, onto the Third World. Why, when we abused our own environments during our industrial development, do we expect other countries to do the opposite?

That doesn't mean that efforts don't need to be made on the part of developing countries to protect their natural places (nor to protect the human rights of their citizens); it just means that those efforts should be concurrent with equal and proportionate efforts on our part, too. Otherwise our hand-wringing and moralising is worse than meaningless.

Lyrebirds and Suchlike

In the woods of Southern Australia there lives an animal called the Lyrebird, a large songbird with an extraordinary ability to mimic sounds. It generally does this in order to attract mates, which it does by putting on a show on a little staging platform in the forest, dancing around and imitating the calls of all the other birds around it. (Why the female should find this ability attractive is a mystery; it is probably to do with the principle of positive feedback loops in sexual selection, whereby a slight, random female preference for an aspect of male morphology grows exponentially as the genes for the preference and the morphology become linked; the behaviour becomes steadily more attractive because it is attrative.)

In recent times, though, the bird has taken to imitating not only other bird calls, but also sounds produced by humans - such as camera clicks, chainsaws, car alarms, car engines and rifle shots. It does this with uncanny accuracy, intertwining such sounds seamlessly into its song.

The bird's ability is, I think, by turns charming and horrifying, and in its own way a strange commentary on the modern world, in which we could say that the "sounds of the forest" as we traditionally understand them - bird song, the wind rustling through leaves, the movement of small animals in leaf litter - are only as much a part of life in the average forest as are the noises of chainsaws, rifleshots and car alarms; human development and overt influence now permeates the world to a degree which must have been inconcievable even a century ago. I've never subscribed to the view that indigenous peoples left their environments basically untouched (even the most 'primitive' societies manipulated forest fire and seed dispersal to their own advantage) but even so, it cannot be argued that our time has brought anything less than an astonishing level of human presence and human technology throughout the world.

It makes me wonder about global warming. I've often thought that the global warming bandwagon serves to distract people from other, perhaps more pressing, environmental concerns, and that it's important to note that, while climate change may threaten certain ecologies in the long term, in the short term far more pressure is being placed on the natural world by basic, old fashioned human expansionism - and we shouldn't let ourselves off the hook in that regard by focusing all of our energies on the bluff and bluster of the lobbying surrounding global warming.

War...huh!

A good edition of BBC Radio 4's Start the Week this morning; argumentative and heavyweight, which is as it should be. I was interested most of all to hear that James Kent has made, in conjunction with five musicians in various "war zones" around the world, a War Oratorio of five pieces of music which are going to tell us, basically, all about how terrible war is.

I find it odd that people are still making things like this, when it seems that everything that can possibly be said on the subject of "the horror of war" has been said: We get it already, war is a bad thing, and despite his apparently novel means - telling us war is bad through music - I don't really see what Kent is adding to the contributions of Wilfred Owen, Joseph Heller, or, more pertinently maybe, Edwin Starr. In fact, the more that anti-war "art" is created, the more I feel that it becomes less about genuine pacifism and more about being hand-wringingly sensitive and compassionate and, dare I say it, holier-than-thou. There's little more satisfying than showing just how morally superior a person you are than pointing out how much you like to see wrongs righted and pain eased - and look, I've even written a piece of music to prove it!

Moreover, it has to be said that the apparent purpose of such art - making people think (really think) on some new, deeper level about how terrible the whole thing is, and thereby bringing about peace - is self-evidently false. We are awash with anti-war sentiment - barely a day goes by without some form of sanctimonious demonstration against Tony Blair or George Bush, or a new film/play/book/oratorio coming out and reinforcing our understanding of how War Is Hell - and yet wars go on being fought with depressing regularity, just as they have since time immemorial. In fact, one of the most, if not the most, important themes of world history is the very obvious truth that human beings really do rather relish the opportunity of killing each other in organized ways. This is not only evident from a cursory glance at a history book, but also from the studies of anthropologists, who have estimated that at any given time 68% of hunter-gatherer groups are actually at war, 20% have been at war between five and twenty five years in the past, and all others have been at war at some time before that (Divale, W. T., 1972); and that "conflict, rape, revenge, jealousy, dominance, and male coalitional violence are human universals" (Keeley, L. H., 1996).

The question, to my mind, should not then be "how can we reinforce how terrible war is?" but rather "why is it that we seem to enjoy warfare so much?" That is the one that needs to be answered if we are serious about eradicating warfare; and yet it is one that artists seem keen to avoid.