George W Bush » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

A while ago I posted this piece on the virtues of pursuing excellence compared to the downsides of competition:

Everywhere that commerce gets involved in what used to be public spaces, there is the same tendency to make exclusive of each other different products and services supplied by different providers. From software such as Microsoft Office which locks you into proprietary data formats to supermarkets with private malls and parking places which can only be used for a certain time and only for a certain purpose, the desire by powerful companies to own our physical and intellectual spaces only seems, as time goes by, to march unstoppably onwards and upwards.

And yet commerce wouldn’t have to be like that if excellence rather than competition were the name of the game. A massive evolutionary step forwards it – indeed – would be, in fact. And perhaps, in a way, we are in the anteroom of such a step forwards: whilst the web is still in its relative infancy, we – even so – are able to perceive on the social horizon many tendencies and tools which might allow for a perfect perception of true excellence – above and beyond the tricks of marketing and persuasion which currently tend to cloud realities.

I then went on to conclude that:

In the name of competition, specialisation arose. Through this process of specialisation, disconnection began to spread. Now we only know how to keep a community together by creating as big a sense of distance and difference as possible from those beings we are forced unerringly to compete against. By creating a worldwide web of interconnectedness on the back of such specialisation, we have created an impossibly gigantic circle the squaring of which can surely only break us.

My conclusion? We either stop using, at least as we have done to date, that specialisation I mention to advance our society – or we work out some pretty convincing alternative way of overcoming the Chinese walls that are breaking up our ability to share our evermore uncommon experiences.

Either way, it’s going to be an uphill battle for the cooperative instincts at the heart of humanity.

And an example, perhaps, of where a progress measured only empirically distorts a wider understanding of what excellence – and, as a result, our society itself – should really look like.

In the above piece, I set out the arguments in favour of moving on from the age-old competitive instincts of Darwinian capitalism to a more objective, more reality-grounded, more cooperative-focussed, goal of achieving excellence in all fields.

Yesterday, however, I was minded to recapitulate: I finally saw the film “El Caballero Oscuro: La Leyenda Renace” (the Spanish dubbed version of “The Dark Knight Rises”, the final film in the Christopher Nolan take on the Batman mythology). Amongst many other wonderful things (Blake is almost like a Luke Skywalker reprise; Catwoman a Hans Solo delightfully playing off the moral centre thus constructed), the film talks of the dangers of a just revolution – even when you are right, by acting on such righteousness you may further contribute to the destruction of civilisation.

And part of this righteousness lies in our competitive pursuit of excellence above all. If we teach, through our consumerism, our children and youth to believe in absolute notions of value for money, of best is first, of maximising outcomes in everything we do and everyone we get to know, we can only conclude that excellence must be applied to every field of human endeavour.

The nominal baddie in the film goes by the name of Bane. (The bane of Batman, in fact – even as Robin John Blake alludes to stealing the latter’s right to an autumnal morality, as the Batcave substitutes his beloved attachment to good policing.) At one point in the narrative, Bane and his gang invade Wall Street’s Stock Exchange. The following exchange sets up their moral justification for their violent occupation of those who have used other tools to commit injustices:

“Esto es la bolsa, aquí no hay dinero para robar.”

“¿De verdad? Y vosotros, ¿qué hacéis aquí?”

Which loosely translates as:

“This is the Stock Exchange, there’s no money here you can steal.”

“Really? And you lot, what are you doing here then?”

In this film, we see how the absolutism of corporate competitiveness has led all kinds of human beings – both good and manifestly evil – to acquire the same mindsets of excellence in what they do. Bane’s plan is as coherent and thought-through as any marketing of a global brand has ever managed to be: even, perhaps, as ingenious and effective as that plan which has sold us the narrative that contains his story.

“The Dark Knight Rises” explains history quite magnificently. From the dangers of a new French Revolution to the unhappy reality that, sometimes, evil individuals operating on the backs of masses do change the direction of humanity, Nolan’s images underline how fragile the order which contains our worst instincts really is.

In the light of the above, then, do I still believe in cooperative excellence over competitive Darwinism?

I think I do.

But after watching Nolan’s film, a single caveat: sometimes, civilisation needs uncivilised means to put evil genies back in their bottles. The problem we have, when we decide this is the case, is that the process we use to choose who and when is still fraught with the unempowering hierarchies of old.

We cannot solve our crises of morality if the genie-containing procedures are not in themselves shared moral acts.

That a Tony Blair or a George W Bush take it upon themselves to lie to us (as, in the film, Commissioner Gordon did to his people for eight long years about the true nature of their alleged saviour Harvey Dent) in order, that is, to save us from our enemies … well, this is not only immoral but also – as we have seen in both the cinema and our own realities – rankly inefficient. If for no other reason, then, than that of saving pecuniary pain, we should change not only when we go to war (whether figurative or literal) but also how we make that decision.

Perhaps, in truth, we need a little less excellence than we have always assumed. Perhaps it is time to stop stretching the envelope so competitively. Perhaps the mirror image of the Apples of this world truly is the Banes of cinematic existence.

Perhaps it is time to be less human – and more humane.

Yup. That’s how I feel today. I’m scratching my head and wondering exactly what the real aim of the Tory side of the Coalition is.

And I am fiercely dragged back to the time of Iraq when we didn’t know if it was WMDs, oil, democracy or Bush’s presidency which truly was at stake in that terrible lead-up to outright conflict. So what are they looking to detonate here then? Woodlands? The NHS? The Labour Party itself?

Or is it more a very British way of doing stuff?

Slowly I am beginning to wonder if the latter isn’t the case. As politicking begins to enter a mire of managed soundbites on the one hand and legal recriminations on the other, it doesn’t half seem as if we’re importing lock, stock and barrel the impasse of anti-consensual politics which – at least from the outside looking in – is what American democracy appears to exemplify.

What if it wasn’t really any of these things I mention which the Tory side of the Coalition government (that is to say, David Cameron and his closest cronies themselves) were interested in pulling apart? What if, instead, it was process they were actually looking to destroy?

Oh, the irony of it all! To employ the figure of coalition government – about as anti-Thatcherite in its assumption of the importance of fudge as you could possibly get – in order that the British way of getting things done (often, the essence of fudge) could be dismantled in a period of five short years.

Yes. Irony is the word. Whilst the radicals, in the figure of the Tory side of the Coalition, dominate the stage once more in their violent desire to uproot all those cosy ways of solving problems we have been so eccentrically familiar with, we find our only alternative to sitting back and waiting for the many axes to awfully fall is to make use of the headlining tactics of our lawyerly friends so beloved of our American cousins. We ourselves are participating in the process of turning our constituency-connected MPs into little more than empty mouthpieces, fearful of putting their feet in their mouths. As Chris points out:

But this is not the debate we’re having. Instead, we’re seeing three ugly aspects of our political culture.
One is a tendency to view all political utterances through the prism of whether or not they are “gaffes” – the effect of which will be to discourage plain speaking, or indeed speaking at all.
A second is an atavistic tribalism, which leads both Ed Miliband and The Sun to demand Clarke’s resignation, both on the grounds that he is not “one of us.”
And this leads to a third aspect – the tendency for politics to be reported in terms of who’s up/down/in/out – terms which are to a large extent uninteresting tittle-tattle.
Meanwhile, the real substance of proper politics is forgotten.

This, then, is the wholesale importation of a political culture which has turned into entertainment the otherwise serious business of improving the lot of men and women. David Cameron’s goal wasn’t the woodlands – because he seemed to give in quite amicably when he saw the opposition was there. It’s not even the NHS – except inasmuch as the NHS represents quite symbolically all that good socialism is capable of achieving. (And in Cameron’s world, remnants of this ilk are hardly the most convenient things to have hanging around - reminders as they are of the truly possible alternatives to the Darwinism of the extreme right.)

No. Just as Bush used Iraq to keep his constituencies well onside, and WMDs, oil, democracy and most of the rest of the mix were simply things to keep us distracted in the meantime, so Cameron is using the tangibles which raise our progressive hackles (disability benefit, the NHS, the police, the education service, the woodlands, the Murdochs, playground fees and so on) in order to distract us from the far more pernicious objective that underlies what’s really going on: that is to say, the broader aim of destroying forever the bonds and mediums of exchange which have served to tie together even the most contrary of opposition representatives.

It is the virulent atavism, to use Chris’s phrase, which terrifies me most in all of this. Cameron and his closest cronies are looking to foment a kind of civil war – just as Bush and his closest cronies looked to do so in post-”shock and awe” Iraq. They are looking to generate that dynamic which says: you are either with us or against us, but never will you be able to choose to station yourself in the middle. Most Labourites, if asked, would express pure hatred for everything the Lib Dems represented prior to the forming of the Coalition government in May 2010. (It is not uncommon to hear them described in Labour circles as Fib Dems.) And yet, in the light of what has happened since, it seems to me that if Cameron is to the Coalition what Bush was to Iraq, then the Lib Dems are to Cameron what Blair was to Bush.

Bush used Blair. Whilst Blair believed in right and wrong, Bush believed in saving his own skin. From the perspective of most involved, at least at grassroots level, the same could be said to be true of Cameron and the Lib Dems.

And as Iraq served to enrich the ruthless amongst us, so Cameron’s Britain will eventually destroy all those beautiful British processes which historically allowed the humble to surface, communicate and survive.