Slippery Pages – Review of Hwang Jungeun’s ‘I’ll Go On’

It is in the language of applause that the first alarm bells go off. Talk of subtlety and hidden meaning are not problems in themselves, but when reviewers are also regularly calling it bold, and are widely divergent on what that meaning actually is, then at the very least something unusual is happening. A soft, fluffy story is also a profound attack on the ravages of capitalism. The tender, overly-emotional conversations are rugged criticisms of modern life. The petty, struggling characters are symbols for mystical nuance. Haunting yet mundane, beautiful yet non-descript, subtle yet gritty, messy yet clean, light yet dark, delicate yet rough, lyrical yet basic. Hwang Jungeun’s second novel, I’ll Go On, is none of these things; and so this confusion tells its own story.

The first truthful thing that can be said about I’ll Go On is that it’s not very good; and certainly not as good as the author’s first book One Hundred Shadows. But this is an attempt at replication, or at least a continuation of style. Writing about love at the wrong end of Korean society is not new. What distinguished Hwang Jungeun was the disconnected build-up of tension, the haphazard threads that never really connect, the fringed love story, the asexuality of the female leads, contrasted with the desperate romance of circling men, the hopelessness of love, lives of simplicity and isolation, and a shamanistic overlay that avoids the pitfalls of feeling contrived. Jungeun lives in a forgotten world, where nothing ever properly manifests, nor is it even properly hinted at. From the outside, the reader finds themselves cheering on the peripheral characters, hoping that they can break into that miserable – and impervious – centre stage.

This type of writing won’t appeal to too many, but it does have an audience; most centrally Han Kang. It is not an exaggeration to say that Kang is Korea’s most prescient writer: the literary moments of Kim Young-ha, Shin Kyung-sook and Hwang Sok-yong have definitively waned over recent years, leaving Kang and her brand of dark, odd, tragedy, largely alone in the fame-induced world of Korean-English translation. When someone like this writes something like this about your book, you are an overnight success: “There is an unforgettable, curious beauty to be found here”. Hoisted to this platform, the problem comes when you look down in search of something new, and you try to unnecessarily force language to reveal what just isn’t there: “That’s how it generally is with Aeja’s stories. There as potent as a putrid peach or the most enthralling of poisonous spells.” Or “The food he cooked up had that elusive quality that could only be described as the presence of flavour.”

Jungeun now writes with a conscious understanding that she is being watched, and that a particular style is expected from her. So gimmicks appear, and the mental ticks of an author trying a little too hard begin to show up. Pregnancy takes on an early importance in I’ll Go On, yet instead of building it into the story, or opening up connected threads, Jungeun simply has the older sister repeat the thought over-and-over: “a dream foretelling pregnancy”, “wouldn’t a danpung leaf mean it’s a girl?”, “maybe it really was a pregnancy dream”, “Nana might be pregnant”, “Nana is pregnant”, “Is Nana pregnant”, “Nana might be pregnant”, “She was, in fact, Pregnant?”, “Or simply that she’s pregnant? Pregnant: Nana may be pregnant.” To get a proper feel for just how imposing this is, these selected references come from a single six page fragment of the book.

Nana, the younger sister, is the saving grace for this narrative. Her voice arrives at just the right time, disaffected and cold, but considerably more interesting and likeable than her sister Sora. The choice to have her speak in the third person – referring to herself by name – might have some value, but again it repeats much too often, becoming more of a nag than a genuine literary device. And marching forward, oblivious to this overbearing clang, the author is soon filling whole paragraphs with the echoes of sounds: swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish; zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig; sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa. This is laborious, and a chore to get through – it comes across as an insult to the reader’s intelligence; an angry teacher committed only to rote learning because she doubts her students’ attention span, and their grasp on subtlety. Even as the story improves, it becomes harder to stomach.

In her exertion here, Jungeun explicitly gives away her most fundamental literary device: the promise of delayed satisfaction that never arrives. Ideas, characters, thoughts, emotions are always introduced in unsatisfyingly small tastes, and then abandoned, only for them to return later, still fleeting, still undeveloped, and often just a rehash of the original. Again though, now the game she is playing is all the more crude and obvious: “The conversation veered off course and I didn’t get a chance to ask if the dream was about her” and “I’d resolved to be upfront about it next time I saw her, but in the days that followed I found myself unable to broach the subject.” In One Hundred Shadows the romance is delayed from start to end, and the internal reflections play to the same pacing of the story. Now with I’ll Go On everyone’s lives unfold just as slow as before, while every thought is rushed impatiently onto the reader. The loops and disconnected pacing becomes so much at times that it feels like the entire narrative here could be reduced to a single, honest, five minute conversation between the central characters.

These missteps undercut the truth that Jungeun is, in fact, onto something here. Writing about the simple and the unglamorous in a society running desperately in the other direction certainly has its appeal. People on the dirty fringes reflecting on their precarious lives, their matter-of-fact acceptance of pain and discomfort, the slow and silent people whose constitutions just won’t let them join the race outside, the overwhelming tedium of it all; those with the time and isolation to think and reflect. Jungeun’s characters talk openly, and bravely, about themselves – ruminating over life while moping about the present moment – yet remain at an uncomfortable distance, leaving the reader in expectation and hope that more is happening behind the scenes, that the show continues despite them leaving the theatre. This is a poke at Proustianism, but looking inwards doesn’t automatically make something insightful.

Take the following (representative) semi-conscious ticks of language that might sound evocative until they are spoken out loud:

“I am not making this up.”

And

“I ask myself”

Or this type of lazy attempt to philosophise life, death and metaphysics.

“Are you dead or are you alive?

In certain moments, this is what I ask the moth.

Dead or alive.”

[Repeated again a few lines later] “Which are you: dead or living?”

Attempting to force shamanistic nods where they don’t belong:

“Better if she’s not in the world

I am, and will remain. Sora

I mean to end my days as Sora.

To become extinct.

The last of the tribe called Sora.”

Or simply thinking that obvious and childish hermeneutics can pass as something profound:

“This wont do, Nana tells herself.

Any more talk and Nana might burst into tears, and when Nana cries, Sora cries – which makes Nana cry in turn, and Sora will cry because now Nana’s crying , which will make Nana cry which makes Sora cry.”

And

“Naghi was small then, and young, though he’s not small any more, nor young. Nana and I were small then, too. But not now, we’re not kids any more.”

[And then later] “Nana and I were small. We’re not small any more.”

This backyard spiritualism might connect with the flow of One Hundred Shadows, but this is a very different book; without the horror-like imagery and relentless – yet uncertain – danger, this feels like a simple lack of concern; that the author has allowed her default, automatic self to pollute the story. The language lacks any trace of refinement, the philosophy is shallow, and it reads like an inside joke – significant only to the people involved in its manufacture. Perhaps the damage was done by that first early success. As the author is constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to clone the old recipe for changing taste buds and a new undercooked dish, so it seems are the publishers. Warning signs were there for everyone when I’ll Go On was marketed almost exclusively on the reputation of the previous book.

There is a darkness here that never arrives, a statement on materialism that is never spoken, and a collision of worlds that never make contact. Just like her characters, Hwang Jungeun fails to step forward, fails to leave history in its proper place, and fails to be genuine. Instead we have a trundling mess of a book and an exposed lesson in bad conceptual writing. Which opens up a question about the title: the phrase ‘I’ll go on’ is used regularly in the story, often as a way to exit a paragraph or section of text without first winding things up. It could mean ‘talk’, but at this stage of reader dissatisfaction if feels a lot more like ‘endure’. It all predictably ends on this note as well, by which stage the intended exclamation has entirely worn off; now void of all surprise and purpose. But it is welcome, if for nothing else than to shake away the final pages where – without any priming – dreamcatchers are being hung with serious intent, in-between discussions about dinosaurs and extinction, as if everything had been building inexorably to this moment; ending as it began: mundane.

The Samsung Wars – Review of Geoffrey Cain’s ‘Samsung Rising’

It begins with sulphur and fire, “angry, thick, green-gray smoke”. Phones are exploding and pockets are literally burning. Once loyal customers are gazing pensively at their still room-temperature Galaxy Note 7’s as if they are unpinned grenades – expensive, newly-minted, and ticking.

The public fear and panic is manageable, phones and batteries can be replaced, and the next product will clear the air. The laughter and mockery though – the damage to reputation – isn’t. It speaks to an old hangover – the cough at the end of a long cancer. The Republic of Samsung was again crumbling, under the weight of its own corporate culture.

This is where Samsung Rising kicks off, and it’s where our author, Geoffrey Cain, also enters the story. As a young, hopeful, foreign correspondent trying to look behind the manufacturing, behind the technical details and mistakes, and into the syndromic world that let it all happen. It’s an unspoken story that everyone seems to know their own small, limited part of, and for which everyone has a different name: “the Church of Samsung”, “the Samsung Way”, “the Republic of Samsung”.

A citizen of the Japanese empire, and a relatively lucky one at that, founder Lee Byung-chul stumbled home after a lengthy night of “gambling and dominoes”, looked down on his three sleeping children and suffered a collapse of conscience: “I’ve idled away my time. It’s time to set an aim to life”. He was 26 years old. The Three Star Shop (‘Samsung Sanghoe’) was soon launched, selling dried fish and vegetables. Then its grocery stores, breweries, newspapers, universities, sugar refineries, fabrication, banks, insurance companies, department stores, fertilizer, and semiconductors. Within a handful of years, Lee has travelled from delinquent stop-out to the richest man on the peninsula.

It’s a dubious tale, and it’s self-told with a soon-to-be-familiar spiritual loftiness. The Samsung machine wants us to believe that while for the rest of us rock bottom is a complete mess of dignity, morality and thought, they are built from sterner material. In Lee’s lowest moment he is still polished and clean; a walking, talking ubermensch preaching to the world quasi-religious gems like “in the future, one person will be feeding thousands more”.

Cain does an admirable job of not scoffing too loudly at this – leaving the space for his reader to indulge privately. It’s not just that Samsung Rising has more important targets in mind, but also a certain contextualisation: the truth of Samsung’s origin doesn’t matter as much as that the story is told, and told in this specific, calculated way.

Newly independent but firmly authoritarian, Lee “built his fortune” in Korea the only way possible, “using political savvy”. Which is a long way around saying ‘corruption’. And there is no escaping the dubious place that Samsung held at this time, the all-too-close relationship with government and national exploitation, but as Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee and certainly Chun Doo-hwan, are remembered for all their missteps, Samsung has walked through history – hand-in-hand with these men – and yet has done so sporting a proud, and largely untouchable, shine.

So the prescience here, and public relations campaign, deserves respect. It certainly takes some explaining. How is it possible that the same average citizen condemning the bribery of former President Park Geun-hye, is also so comfortable defending the company who paid the bribe, shouting proudly on the same street corner barricade “Samsung built this nation!”

Why, for that matter, is the nepotism between Park and her life-long friend, Choi Soon-sil, so unforgivable, but Vice Chairman of Samsung, Lee Jae-yong, can undercut his shareholders for personal gain and be welcomed back into the centrality of Korean life.

At every step, through every administration – authoritarian and democratic – Samsung was there in the shadows, watching, and participating in, the tragedies of the modern era. There were times that Samsung didn’t have much choice in this, held hostage so-to-speak (most notably by Park Chung-hee) by the nation-building whims of Korean leaders. But not many hostage takers reward their victims with anything other than freedom – what Samsung got for its cooperation was the wealth and resources of an entire nation.

Aristocracy has something to do with this, but not everything. The Lee family has kept close circles of marriage, tying business to political influence. But none of this comes close to touching the royal status of Park Geun-hye, as the daughter of former-leader Park Chung-hee, and someone whose mother was assassinated whilst serving as first lady. Yet all of this quickly turned liability when political scandal hit – ‘Korea’s Princess’ was accused of acting like a princess, and  “within weeks, President Park’s approval rating collapsed to 4 percent” and the “largest protests in the nation’s democratic history took place”.

But Samsung endured, in body and image. The rise and success of founder Lee Byung-chul is still a part of Korean folklore, young boys and girls hear about it in the same tones – and with the same constant echo – as they do Tangun, King Sejong, Commander Yi Sun-Shin, or Hong Gil-dong. And that was always the idea!

At some point early-on in the Samsung narrative, the Korean company became the Korean nation. Early advertising campaigns laid the ground – “fifty years with our minjok (a term that translates loosely to ‘Korean race’ or ‘racial nation’)”. This connects Samsung not with the South Korean republic, but with divided histories, an uncertain future, and with Koreans North of the 38th parallel. To hate Samsung is to hate Korea, and to hate yourself as a Korean… so no wonder the company has thrived so well!

What makes this even more remarkable is just how un-Korean Samsung are behind all the smiles and advertising. Despite nodding proudly to the minjok, Lee Byung-chul wanted it reformed, to show more “loyalty”, “patriotism”, and more “capacity for unity and diligent work”; he wanted it to be more “Japanese”. Even in 1968, once the foundation of Samsung was firmly established, Lee would “secretly bring in Japanese experts” to “teach my engineers”. And when this growing empire outlived its teacher (prevailing in the ‘Sony Wars’) it moved west to the United States in search of the design expertise and marketing techniques that it needed to challenge Apple.

If authenticity is a weakness of Samsung, ambition certainly isn’t. Behind it all is a strange, fanatical, cringe-worthy culture that worked wonders until it spectacularly didn’t anymore, and which resists change to this day. Cain speaks of an episode in 2010 where new recruits are seen lined up in battle formation, all wearing the “military dress of a French musketeer”, and cheering in unison “Youth with boiling blood, conquer the summer season”; a banner reading ‘PRIDE IN SAMSUNG’ hangs over a nearby hillside.

From Apple’s Steve Jobs, to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sony’s Akio Morita, the tech world has no shortage of eccentric leaders and cult-like employees, but none of it comes close to Samsung. Beyond the Hitler Youth-like display above, employees often start their days by watching thirty minute recorded sermons from the chairman, where he seems to spend less time on motivation and more on absolution, asking his employees to “examine their morality and rediscover their pasts.”

Written by a journalist, Samsung Rising is as comfortable as you would expect. The prose is appropriately invisible, chapters begin and are interlaced with personal stories, and the fuzzy technological and economic details are as clear as they are ever going to be. A large chunk of its Korean audience are sure not to like it though – Geoffrey Cain has laid out the rise and success of an extraordinary company, with all the mess, disgrace and ego un-redacted.

There will be an instinct out there to defend Samsung here, as one might a family member, someone who you owe so much to. And that is exactly why this book needed to be written, and perhaps could only be done so by an outsider looking in. We all know Samsung’s side of this argument, what their tint on their own history is… the other side needed telling; and how refreshing it is.

‘The Disappearance of the Western Libido’: Review of Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin

Michel Houellebecq is an unpleasant visit from an old friend, banging too loudly too late at night. He hasn’t phoned ahead, doesn’t take off his shoes, pushes his way inside, wakes your sleeping children, makes sexual advances towards your wife, collapses into your favourite chair, and demands that you breakout the alcohol…and not the cheap stuff.

Shaken from your comfort, your routine, and your lazy night in front of the TV, the unpleasantness is also exactly what you have been needing. The old painful stories come fast, and his memory is better than yours. He reminds you that there is a person – someone he intimately recognises – underneath it all. He reminds you of something long forgotten – how bad it can get for some people out there… how bad it has been for you.

Houellebecq always writes to a theme, as if himself addicted. And Serotonin – his latest book – embraces this addiction as closely as any other: a “small, white, scored oval tablet”, a “perfect drug, a simple, hard drug that brings no joy, defined entirely by a lack, and by the cessation of that lack”. And chasing old dragons, it starts with life at an early end; and with sex.

Florent-Claude Labrouste is a mildly successful agricultural bureaucrat in a wildly affluent world. His unglamorous work flushes his lifestyle and his savings each month, enough to support a much younger girlfriend for whom he has an uneven contempt. He hates Paris but he lives there, he hates his name but won’t change it, and now in his late forties, with his parents both dead in a carefully planned suicide pact, he is alone, uninvolved, confused by it all, but not particularly saddened.

In a sign of just how poorly tuned he is, Florent-Claude does a little research, and discovers to his shock that “in France, abandoning your family is not a crime”. This is all he needs to nonchalantly cut himself loose into the world once more, with a pocket full of anti-depressants:

“My planned deliberate disappearance had been a complete success, and now there I was, a middle aged Western man, sheltered from need for several years, with no relatives or friends, stripped of personal plans and of genuine interests, deeply disappointed by his previous life, whose emotional experiences had been variable but had had the common feature of coming to an end, essentially deprived of reasons to live and or reasons to die.”

It all feels very cavalier, like an inmate escaping over a prison wall only because he wants to try something new, and only because it is easy; not because the freedom outside is alluring in any way. And if you don’t look very hard Serotonin can do this to you, as Florent-Claude stumbles through life defining choices with the same matter-of-fact numbness that he opens the fridge door each morning.

It is easy to sense Michel Houellebecq getting angrier and angrier with each book – not through his characters, but with his readers and with his reviewers. By definition clichés stick, and the label of ‘nihilism’ has become the dismissive stain that passers-by smear across his writing, and then walk away through the crowd, confident and reassured by all the smiles and nodding faces.

This is all wrong! Books like Serotonin stare into the darkness, but there is never an embrace; they are not happy tragedies, just tragedies in themselves. And they are obvious mirrors of their author, who drinks too much, battles depression, thinks constantly about suicide, obsesses over sex, and dislikes so much of what he sees changing around him.

Between Submission (his previous book) and Serotonin, Houellebecq returned to live in his native France, and so the setting for his new novel is also, once again, France. He also got married… for the third time. His new wife is of Chinese heritage, and just like that the permeating, casual racism shifts to a new target. The old favourite – “Arabs” – still get a mention or two, but now it is mostly all Asian, orientalist, and just distant enough to give some cover for his new source of writing inspiration.

The live-in girlfriend that Florent-Claude dislikes so much, and whom he abandons in the night, is Yuzu, his “Japanese companion”. She only ever watches Japanese TV, is always distracted by her phone, ghosts her way unseen around his house, spends his income, and gives Florent-Claude the impression that she is using him as an excuse to avoid returning home, where a long-overdue marriage into one of Kyoto’s elite families awaits her.

The lightness of it all is played up – “it was then that I realised I would forget Yuzu very quickly” Florent-Claude thinks aloud as he walks out of the relationship – but the social dislocation feels real, as does the cultural gap between them. The growing awareness that two people from such different backgrounds, for all they have in common, will always have more pulling them apart than holding them together – a lifelong battle that few people survive.

There is so much of Houellebecq in his writing that it makes the reader shift uncomfortably in their seat, nervous to turn another page, as if peering through his diary. You have his permission, but it still doesn’t feel appropriate.

And like a teenage girl with a crush, everywhere you look he is passionately hung-up on small details. Cars are never just cars, they are a “4x4 Mercedes G350 TD”, a “Volkswagen Beetle”, or a “diesel 4x4”. Computers are never just computers, with the reader carefully lectured on the dimensions of the “MacBook Air”, what it is made of, and how much it weighs. And new to Houellebecq’s fascination, now guns are also not just guns, they are a “357 Magnum”, a “short-barrelled Smith & Western”, and a “Steyr Mannlicher HS50”, all described down to their minutia.

Watching themes repeat like this across his novels, you can easily see the strange human author behind it – someone enchanted by brochures, travel guides, and “roadside assistance organisations”. And yet still, somehow, people find a way not to take him seriously.

In Houellebecq’s obviously finest piece of literature and prose, The Map and the Territory, he inserts himself as a significant character, and talks of being unable to write for weeks due to adolescent laziness, while wallowing in front of the TV watching modern cartoons. This was almost immediately laughed off as an overdone attempt at humour and self-mockery. Literary geniuses of his kind shouldn’t suffer in this way! Yet based on everything we otherwise know about Houellebecq, this is almost certainly pure autobiography.

He is dismissed as a nihilist in exactly the same way. It is an easy label and an easy truth. But the very thought of everything being meaningless is an insult to what Houellebecq creates, and to what Serotonin is. By its own definition, nihilism is not this targeted, this clear-eyed, this peculiar, nor this angry – it can’t be without becoming something else entirely… Michel Houellebecq is something else entirely.

It is also in the early moments of this novel that Houellebecq is in his sexual pomp. Everywhere that Florent-Claude looks he sees it, and contrasts it to the impotence that his new anti-depressants have caused in him. When he finds footage of Yuzu at a “canine mini gang bang”, he feels “disgusted”… but only “on behalf of the dogs”. He watches retirees “finishing their lives peacefully”, walking from “bar to beach, beach to bar” cheerful despite their “drooping buttocks, their redundant breasts and their inactive cocks”.

Sex burrows its way into everything, in wonderfully overbearing and graphic ways. Seeking help for his depression, Florent-Claude’s doctor prescribes that he try out the “prostitutes in Thailand”, they are, after all, “almost therapeutic”. And later when he finds an old school friend wallowing alone after his wife has run off with a new man – and their kids in tow – he instinctively recommends that he “take a Moldovan girl” as a cure-all; “they’ll wake you up with a blow-job” having already done “the milking” of the cows, “and breakfast will be ready as well”.

It feels outlandish at times, like a hand being overplayed with impossible sexual expectations, but after eight novels – none of which deviate from this script – it is clear that Houellebecq thinks that he is onto something. And who knows, maybe he is, maybe “with sex everything can be resolved, and without sex nothing can”.

This is half the vessel of Serotonin, and it would have been enough for the old Michel Houellebecq. But since the success of Submission with its social commentary on Islam, he seems to want firmer targets now, harder meaning, something beyond literature. Yet another indication that the nihilist label doesn’t apply.

This time it’s the European Union, and “European bureaucracies” – the world that Florent-Claude helped to create before he abandoned his job along with his girlfriend. It is slightly manufactured, and written in the same inquisitive tone that Houellebecq normally writes about vacations and overseas travel. The nationalities of everyone we meet are always meticulously noted down, and the finer details of their behaviour explained away by this:

“How could a Dutch person be xenophobic? That’s an oxymoron: right there: Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best”.

Houellebecq is trying to tear down the dream after it has already turned nightmare – trying to redraw the romantic lines of Europe. In this, Florent-Claude fantasises constantly about a “chestnut-haired girl” who once playfully flirted with him at a gas station. He mentally fills in her personality – honest, caring, instinctive, passionate, traditional – and thinks of chasing her down and of them finding happiness together. This is played-off against the efficient, mechanical, dull, and yet still numbingly pleasing, Yuzu – the European Union from design to reality.

The grocery store shelves are stocked with “fourteen different kinds of hummus” from “every continent”, and yet it is all very unsatisfying. Its an idea that dies with age, failing – just as Florent-Claude’s relationships do – with the growing gap between love and its interests – “the desire for a social life fades with maturity”.

The European dream is constantly shadowed back to the time of the “French peasantry”, “aristocracy” and of “Christian Knight[s]”, the “Franco era” and unmistakably the recognition that “libertinism” is no longer “reserved for a composite aristocracy”. It is now for everyone… to everyone’s harm and dislocation.

At a previous stage in his career, when life was enough in itself, Houellebecq wasn’t so clumsy with his symbolism. Here the reader is being swallowed by what the author is trying to do… and conscious of it. There are more clichés this time around, more laboured turns of phrase, and more noticeable attempts at humour than usual.

The imperfections are everywhere and obvious: he waits too long, repeats too much, hurries forward unexpectedly, words echo sentence-after-sentence, the choices of language are curious, the prose feels absent minded at times and less polished, sentences occasionally run half a page in length, and yet somehow – just as with all his other novels – it fits the mind perfectly.

It’s a puzzling thing to watch. At other times in his life, Houellebecq fancied himself as a poet, a philosopher, and a public intellectual, publishing across the spectrum of non-fiction. In this, he was always desperate, mediocre and unsuccessful. Today he makes up for that rejection by indulgently forcing backyard metaphysics – lessons in “Plato”, “Schopenhauer”, Kant”, “Heidegger”, “Bataille”, “Epicurus”, “Stoics”, “Cynics” “Greek[s]” – into his novels. It never flows to the natural conclusion that he thinks it does, and at times sounds like the ravings of a lost-in-himself conspiracy theorist. And yet, again, somehow, it all fits into place. Houellebecq is doing something here that is incredibly hard to pin down.

A new crutch is offered this time – God. He is everywhere in the opening pages, only to be forgotten in the most pregnant moments later on. But the whole book has this feel to it – like the first half was written, put aside, and promptly forgotten about; then the second half started a year or so later, without the author bothering to check where he was up to. And yet when its starts up afresh, it starts well…

At about the hundred page mark, the sex fades out and the changing mood of the author can be sensed in the changing prose, changing rhythm, pacing, and the poise of the characters. It’s as if Houellebecq has finally cleared his throat, emptied his purse onto the table, and with all the contrived meaning for his book finally out of the way, he is now just writing. It is suddenly more comfortable, more instinctive, and less funny.

After a long stay in a hotel, Florent-Claude heads to Normandy to visit that old school friend of his (abandoned by his wife and kids). The two men haven’t seen each other since university, and “’I have nothing to eat…’ were the first words with which Aymeric welcomed me”. The lives of two friends collapsing in different directions, at different speeds, but under the same weight of life and women:

“In the middle of our own dramas we are reassured by the existence of others that we have been spared”

The pages begin to burn now. All around them the pressures of globalisation are shredding the profitability of honest farming. And instead of taking “a Moldovan girl” as Florent-Claude suggests, Aymeric – in a foreshadowing of the Yellow Vest movement – takes to fighting the European Union directly. There is a German birdwatcher who turns out to be an active paedophile – the only real concern that our leading character has for the sexual victim (a ten year old girl) is to hope that “he paid her”. And soon a young child, of similar age, is being lined up through the clear scope of the Steyr Mannlicher HS50 –“never had I breathed so slowly, never had my hands trembled so little”.

It all ends with a sad, overdone crescendo that can be felt coming long before it hits. And it only hits because Houellebecq unmistakably has an audience beyond those people appreciating his literary style. Authors don’t sell as many books as he has without it.

Houellebecq is always a reflection of his readers and their lives. Desperate vacuums of existence, tragedy, and failed expectations; whole societies for whom “A big swerve had occurred some years before and we had deviated atrociously from our normal destinies”. Lives that seem to resist all neatness and happiness; and who find human relationships impossible. People collapsing in tandem with the world around them – “That’s how a civilisation dies; without worries, without danger or drama and with very little carnage; a civilisation just dies of weariness, of self-disgust”.

These are the people that we tend to notice only when they find a little internal peace. When they lie down on an old blanket, find their position, focus on their breathing, empty their minds, become one with their surroundings, be present in the moment, and embrace either their spiritual or murderous side: “shooting has a lot in common with yoga”.

There is an automatic, reflexive, broken feel to some of this. Which is only further credit to the mind and the creative powers of Michel Houellebecq. He is clearly doing something extraordinary with Serotonin… and with all his novels. In the not too distant future, when some of the fear and disgust has worn off – and once people finally get a handle on just what he is actually doing here (and why it works so well) – university students will pack lecture halls just to try and share in some of that understanding.

Today he remains, deservedly, controversial – a bully yelling angrily into the timid and fragile faces of modern society. And yet who is to say that a little blunt, Houellebecqian conversation, isn’t exactly what we are all needing. Something to help counter the harm and the horror out there, awaiting us all:

“The Aymeric I had known: a nice guy, nice to the core and even good; he had simply wanted to be happy and had devoted himself to a rustic dream of durable, high-value production, and to Cecile, but Cecile had turned out to be a fat slut excited by life in London with a high-society pianist; and the European Union had also been a fat slut”.

Comfort Women and the David Irving Problem

History is always painful – go back far enough, and everyone is either a victim or a perpetrator. So in the middle of a fast moving trade war with Japan – prompted by a Korean Supreme Court ruling allowing for the seizure of assets from Japanese businesses as compensation for the crimes of the colonial era – the moment, once again, feels ripe; and everywhere you look, protective instincts are firing loudly. This is understandable, but it’s also a mistake!

At the centre of all this is the issue of the Korean comfort women, and the lingering feeling that justice hasn’t yet arrived – but that it is achievable, if history can only be sheltered from distortion and doubt. The real risk here comes from a much more subtle, and much more pernicious, place. In fact, it is only by protecting the memory of the comfort women, that they are being harmed at all.

At the end of the Second World War there was a contagious – and well-deserved – feeling of guilt running through Europe and the world. The full extent of German war crimes was quickly coming to light, and though the allied forces had fought on the right side of things, and of course hadn’t perpetrated the Holocaust themselves, they also hadn’t acted as swiftly as they could have to stop it.

Trying to make up some of this ground, the prospect of a Neo-Nazi rebirth was taken incredibly seriously. Soon there was a movement to protect the memories of the dead, and a standardised history was being written into both culture and law. Anyone daring to challenge this was soon facing a court summons, or being successfully ostracised as a dangerous bigot. A tripwire was laid across peoples’ minds.

And it largely worked! Those people still willing to push up against this barricade tended to all look (shaved heads, tattooed faces, and hand-me-down military fatigues) and sound (Aryan nationalists, racial supremacists, and conspiracy theorists), the same. The enemies were obvious, unsophisticated, easily ignored, and not a threat to anyone beyond the reach of a right hook or a steel capped boot…until David Irving came along.

A British historian of once-considerable reputation, David Irving had built a long career around doing the type of things that very few people could, or cared to: searching for lost archives, chasing down old reference points, comparing witness testimonies, translating and retranslating primary sources, and checking the work of his colleagues.

The presentation and discussion of history can be glamorous, but the work of historians – what it takes to build that story up – never is. Not too dissimilar to the work of a cold case detective shaking around for new leads, it involves years of tedium, painstaking effort, and countless dead ends – scouring the world for snippets of information, that may, or may not, exist at all.

What Irving did for our understanding of the Second World War and the Nazi period is immense; worthy of admiration and respect. He made everyone a little smarter and better informed, he brought truth into our lives – but he also did something else. At some point along the way this great historian of fascism also became a fascist historian.

And it’s here, in this so unlikely of places, where all the danger lies.

Irving had been hugely influential in proving that the ‘Hitler Diaries’ were a fake, in explaining – through lengthy biographies – the roles of key Nazi figures such as Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, and Joseph Goebbels, and had exposed the documents linking Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill to be fraudulent.

While doing this type of investigative history, Irving – in a few, now infamous, cases – asked his colleagues for the underlying proof and sources of their information. He would often be referred on to the work of another colleague, only to have that colleague then refer him on to another. And, when finally at the bottom of this attribution ladder, the last historian in line would refer him back to the first – a complete, and self-perpetuating, circle of misinformation.

So having spent his career fighting in the trenches of truth and academic rigor, when David Irving turned double-agent he intimately knew the weak spots in the line; where his former allies were most poorly defended.

Over the years, Irving had also managed to have the plaque outside the gates of Auschwitz changed, revising the total number of people killed there down from four million to one million (Irving continues to argue that it should be lowered further to 300,000 to match the 1947 ruling of the Kraków court that convicted and hanged the twenty Nazi’s deemed most responsible).

And it was here, challenging this figure, that Irving was first called a Holocaust denier from both those in, and outside of, his profession. Auschwitz had become sacred ground, and the symbolic heart of the larger Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry. So, as the logic went, what kind of person would spend their time picking across the details of what happened there, and then try to minimise the extent of the crimes? What kind of person other than a Holocaust denier that is?

The answer should have come loudly, decisively, and from all corners, back at those people daring to make this claim: ‘any historian worthy of the name!’ Or anyone interested in the truth for that matter.

The horrors of Auschwitz are still horrors whether the official number is one million or four. Still it felt to many as an assault on the memory of those who died and suffered there. And so without recognising the wolves that were being welcomed through the doorway, these forbidden questions, and the policing of history, was allowed to continue. Once unfairly labelled (as a Holocaust denier) in this way, secondary charges don’t tend to stick quite as well, and so Irving had cover to match his expertise – as well as a fragile target.

By treating Auschwitz with kid gloves for so many years, by not running an exhaustive documentation, by not critically examining the witness statements, the people trying to protect its memory had inadvertently made it weak and vulnerable.

Soon Irving was asking technical questions about gas delivery mechanisms, the size of incinerators, the locks on doors, the architecture of ceilings and walkways, the chemical compounds of the gases used, the staining of walls, the thickness of glass windows, inconsistencies in witness statements; and claiming that Auschwitz didn’t have any gas chambers at all, that it wasn’t an extermination camp, that “more women died on the backseat of Senator Kennedy’s car in Chappaquiddick than ever died in that building”.

David Irving had become the Holocaust denier that people had previously misattributed to him. He was picking into the tiny minutia, selectively mistranslating documents, twisting certain facts, and simply choosing not to apply the same level of intellectual rigor to information casting doubt over the Holocaust as he did for information supporting it. He was trying to rehabilitate the image of Adolf Hitler by tearing down what we know of his crimes.

Very few people in the academic world could see what he was doing, because very few people had ever approached the issue in the same critical way. Irving had an almost free run of things, publishing countless books, lecturing across the world, and making easy work of anyone willing to publicly debate him.

At a similar time, Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, decided to look into the Holocaust denier community. Trying to treat “history as a science”, Shermer first approached the community itself and asked for a charge sheet – a list of their evidence and their arguments. He then shopped this list around a number of reputable historians and found to his horror that they had no response to, and couldn’t explain why, the majority of the charges were false.

Shermer had to build the defence himself, from the ground up – and in a similar way, things slowly caught up with David Irving (now widely discredited). But it took time, and before a defence of the Holocaust could be properly constructed, conspiracy theorists and racists had their moment in the sun, and everyday people with even less understanding of this history than those flat footed academics, were forced to doubt everything that they once believed to be true.

What Irving did – a reputable researcher deciding to subtly shade information just enough to cast doubt over an entire field of scholarship – might appear as something incredibly hard to ever fight against. But the gates were held wide-open for him, and inside he found people (his former-colleagues) already belly-up, and unable to defend themselves.

The parallels with South Korea today, and the question of wartime comfort women, is unmistakable; all the way down to the openly drawn equivalences to Nazi war crimes, and between the symbolisms of Japan’s ‘Rising Sun’ flag and the swastika.

From documentary evidence and witness testimony, we know that a large number of South Korean women and girls were abducted from their homes by the Japanese imperial army, and – in a pattern repeated across occupied countries – forced into sexual slavery. In some cases they were lured with the promises of work or education, in others they were simply kidnapped.

The same aura and culture of untouchability is there too. This painful history has been spun into modern Korean nationalism, bilateral relationships are collapsing under its weight (as can be seen with the current trade war with Japan), and academia is being suffocated – always around eerily familiar questions: the numbers of victims and the nature of the crimes.

A few lucky historians have stepped into this space, dared to dispute the narrative, and have managed to walk away with their careers intact. But they have all tended to be foreign-based. Sarah Soh, of San Francisco State University, in her outstanding work ‘The Comfort Women’ – with access to newly opened Japanese archives – showed that the “Korean patriarchy” were equal and willing collaborators in this forced prostitution. And that the label of ‘war crimes’ is only applied today because “that makes it easy to pin the blame on the policies of imperial Japan”.

Based in America, Soh’s book was rightly praised, and she was elevated to the heights of her historical field. But inside South Korea, things work a little differently.

In 2013, Park Yu-na of Sejong University, published her own deeply researched book on the topic, ‘Comfort Women of the Empire’, which challenged the testimonies of some of the victims, and showed beyond the obvious crimes of sexual slavery, that there was also a “comrade-like relationship”. Moments of compassion, loyalty, and even love. Without anyone seriously questioning the veracity of her claims, Yu-na was criminally charged, convicted, and had her book removed from circulation, for inflicting “mental stress on the victims [comfort women and their families]”.

Suncheon National University fired one of its professors in 2017 – and he was later sentenced to six months in prison – for daring to say that some of the comfort women were actually willing prostitutes. Something that Lee Young-hoon of Seoul National University has staunchly supported, while also claiming that the total number of victims is dramatically over estimated – it should be 5000 rather than 200,000. His new book, ‘Anti-Japan Tribalism’, is currently doing the rounds, and the war machine of those people trying to both muzzle, and prosecute him, are at his door as we speak.

There is something noble in trying to protect the memory of the victims of such unspeakable crimes – especially as less-and-less of them are around to tell their stories. But the difference between 5000 and 200,000 is not insignificant, and just like at Auschwitz the question of what happened to the Korean comfort women should bear out through the historical record. It is for historians to argue and debate, not for politicians to make laws about.

Erecting statues and memorials in front of Japanese embassies and consulates, as the Korean government has done in Seoul and Busan – in violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations – is no substitute.

In 2005, David Irving was imprisoned in Austria under a three year sentence (he only served one) for ‘trivialising the Holocaust’. He came out of this looking like a martyr for freedom of speech, while his accusers – in fearing what he had to say so much that they locked him up – looked like they had something to hide. Years earlier, Irving dragged Penguin Books, and the author Deborah Lipstadt, into court claiming that he had been libelled by Lipstadt calling him a holocaust denier. In this case it was not the plaintiff nor the defendant that was on trial, but history. All of Irving’s slights of hand were slowly picked apart by expert witnesses (other historians), and Irving was exposed before a global audience.

Those people challenging the history of the Korean comfort women might all be wrong, but by silencing them rather than disproving them, it makes it appear like they are all on to something. It makes it seem like there is a conspiracy theory at play, a reason why they are not being debated on the merits of their arguments.

By censoring people and research in this way, it also has the unhappy effect of blurring the distinction between those witness statements that are authentic and those that are not. There is real abuse and suffering in this history, and the testimonials of victims are the most important insight into this, but by not rigorously analysing these personal narratives and then dismissing the ones that don’t stand-up to questioning, it clouds the accuracy of them all. Disprove one, and suddenly there is an excuse to reject them all.

What is missed in all of this, is that truth has a rare quality which distinguishes it from falsehood – it is never weakened by criticism, only ever strengthened. The more it is challenged and attacked, the clearer it becomes. It is only when people – through misguided prohibitions – try to shield it away into darkness, that it grows into something fragile.

Honest people can have honest debates. They can be wrong. And they can change their minds. When this isn’t permitted, the academic field – and everyone in it – becomes weaker, more vulnerable, and ripe for exploitation. After decades of suppression and a lack of critical attention, a space was opened-up inside the history of the Holocaust, a space that David Irving could emerge from and still appear credible, honest and diligent. All the memory laws in the world couldn’t stop this from happening.

The enemies of truth and civilization are not always as clumsy and easy to spot as we might hope. Occasionally they are sophisticated – credentialed even – with long-term, war-like strategies for smearing everything that we care about. If the comfort women issue continues to be protected as sacred ground, as something that cannot be touched, something impervious to new or contradictory evidence, then soon-or-later a David Irving-type figure is going to walk onto this manicured stage, and then burn everything to the ground; with truth becoming indistinguishable from falsehood.

The European Court of Justice: Jew Hatred by Other Means

There is an odd hope out there in the world about how the human mind works. And so we tend to associate the act of banning something – be it through law or social norms – with the act of curing it. This is never more obvious than with racism, where the silencing of certain bigotries makes everyone instinctively feel that those bigotries have disappeared, that the hatred has turned to love, and the discrimination to acceptance.

The ruling of the European Court of Justice this past week has exposed just how flawed and naïve this type of thinking is. Following in the steps of poorly intentioned street activism – the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) – the Court ruled that all products made in Israeli settlements must be labelled as such, and cannot be sold as ‘products of Israel’.

On the face of it, this might not seem like anything to be concerned about, but in the details of it are the unmistakable – and now legitimatised – returning shadows of a long bottled-up anti-Semitism.

From the Court’s own language, this was not a pro-Palestinian outcome; it was only, and explicitly, an anti-Israeli one. The new labelling requirements apply to the occupied territories, so Syria and the Golan Heights are pulled into the fringes of this as well. And with it, anyone trying to justify this ruling in terms of encouraging the peace process, creating a two-state solution, or by the rights of the Palestinian people, are championing something that just isn’t there.

Still – based on what the Golan Heights are today – the Court’s decision is targeted at Israel alone, mentioning (to the exclusion of all other countries) that anything Israel produces in any territory that it didn’t control prior to 1967, be marked as coming from “Israeli Settlements”. Syria might have been dragged into this (in part), but only Israel was on trial here.

Which is where all of this gets so pernicious. Any impartial law, or Court ruling, no matter what it is, needs to satisfy a fundamental criteria – it needs to be universal. It must apply only to crimes, and not to people. Anything short of this is not only discrimination, but selective persecution. An infamous, but telling example of this has been American President, Donald Trump’s, attempted ‘Muslim travel ban’. This was shot down as unconstitutional because the Trump administration was labelling Muslims as security risks, rather than first defining what constitutes a ‘universal’ security risk, and only then applying it to individual Muslim’s if, and when, they fit the category… along with everyone else.

The European Court of Justice turned this around. If their ruling had come with, or as a result of, a universal standard that read something like, ‘any products made within any occupied territory must be labelled’, then there would be no argument here. But China is not required to label its exports as ‘Made in Tibet’, nor Morocco as ‘Made in Western Sahara’, Armenia as ‘Made in Azerbaijan’, Turkey as ‘Made in Cyprus’ and ‘Made in Syria’, nor Russia as ‘Made in Ukraine’, ‘Made in Georgia’, and ‘Made in Moldova’.

Instead the European Union has passed a law that applies to only one possible defendant.

The Court has shown no intention to broaden this out for other countries, and so is now signalling to Europe – and the world – that it is okay to legislate through double standards, just so long as you are targeting the Jewish state.

This is not just an unhappy accident, nor an aberration of some kind.  The precedent was already there, carved deep into our most fundamental institutions.

From 2006 to 2016 – a period that witnessed the Arab Spring and its suppression, multiple Russian invasions, and China’s crack down on Xinjiang, amongst others – the United Nations Human Rights Council during its first decade in operation passed 68 condemning resolutions against Israel… and only 67 against the rest of the world combined. The countries with zero condemnations in this period included China, Russia, Somalia, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Iraq, and Cuba. 

The United Nations General Assembly, from 2012 to 2015, adopted 97 resolutions explicitly criticizing member states, 83 of which were targeted at Israel alone. 

With the exception of Syria during the height of the violence in 2013, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has never issued a country-specific resolution… apart from when it comes to Israel, for whom they have averaged 10 each year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) only adopts resolutions for global health issues, and no individual country is ever singled out for condemnation… no other country besides Israel that is, who have had an entire annual resolution created just for them: “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan”.

Even the International Labour Organization (ILO) – charged with improving labour conditions, increasing wages, fighting unemployment, and protecting workers’ rights around the world – have decided that the only country-specific report that they will produce is one targeting Israel.

As this washes over you, it is important to remember that, in their region of the world, Israel is the only liberal democracy, the only country that operates under the rule of law, that has a real separation of powers with an independent judiciary, has free and open elections, a free press along with freedom of speech, and legally protects the fundamental human rights of minority groups (women, religious, and sexual).

The European Court of Justice is simply the latest in a long list of institutions and countries that have decided to single Israel out, not for its behaviour, but simply because it is Israel.

It comes back to the question of what people do when their deeply-held bigotries are suddenly denied to them. Pushed underground, yet with their minds unchanged, these feelings are unlikely to just disappear. Instead they re-emerge with new faces, and subtler forms of expression, that skirt those new legal and normative barricades.

It’s an unhappy accusation, but what could possibly explain this pattern of behaviour – or these types of laws – other than anti-Semitism. Sure it’s less direct, but it is no less obvious – when the expression of Jew hatred becomes unacceptable, try your hand at the hatred of Israel instead. When you can’t get away with persecuting Jews, why not just transfer that anger over to persecuting the Jewish state.

This is what the start of a pogrom feels like – each small step legitimates the next. And so what is happening here should make everyone feel uncomfortable. The European Union has violated its own official standards, the rulings of multiple courts, as well as its own obligations under the World Trade Organization, so that it can once again pin a yellow star on the collars of every Jew, and on the doors of every Jewish business.

Putin’s Memory of the Berlin Wall

Lessons are always learnt from different directions!

As the world came together this past weekend to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was understandable triumphalism in the air. Desperate not to miss such an opportunity, political leaders were falling over themselves to stand beside this memory, to cheerlead the victory of liberal democracy.

And quite right too! This was the dizzying end of the Cold War, the reunification of a long-divided Germany, and the public failure of the promise of totalitarianism. Yet as the concrete was being torn down all those years ago, the losing side was internalising a very different lesson. A new, evolved, despotic Russia, was being dreamt up in that very moment.

On the ground, in the thick of this upheaval, was a young KGB (the Soviet Union’s spy agency) officer who had spent the previous four years uneventfully running cables back to Moscow. This was the edge of the Soviet empire, the signs of the coming collapse were unambiguous, and then-Lieutenant Colonel, Vladimir Putin, expected more from his government.

The protests and discontent were there to be seen – as was a natural target for this anger. The Stasi – East German secret police – had run an elaborate surveillance system over the decades, stretching themselves into every inch of their citizens’ daily lives through a vast network of informants, and had formed a brotherly relationship with the KGB.

When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the slow pace of history lurched forward. A few weeks later, on December 6th, those same crowds stormed the Stasi headquarters in Dresden – directly across the street from the KGB headquarters where Putin was hastily burning every document that would catch light.

The furnaces overflowing, Putin understood the more pressing challenge suddenly before him. At some point, when the crowd had grown bored of sifting through the Stasi offices, the KGB building would likely be next. Understandably worried about what might happen, Putin first called the local detachment of the Soviet military for support, and then went out to meet the protestors on the street.

Those protestors remember that “an officer emerged - quite small, agitated”, who went on to explain that he was just a minor cog in the Soviet system – claiming to only be a translator – but that the building was a military installation, and that Moscow would always defend it: “This is Soviet territory and you're standing on our border” – “don't try to force your way into this property. My comrades are armed, and they're authorised to use their weapons in an emergency”.

The crowd lost their nerve – and yet they had no reason to.

Putin’s phone call for military support was met with complete abandonment. The Red Army officer on the other end of the line replied that “we cannot do anything without orders from Moscow” and “Moscow is silent.”

It is hard to overstate what this moment did to the young intelligence officer. Driving back to Russia with his family and what was left from their life in East Germany, Putin discovered his own country in freefall, changing before his eyes – his hometown of Leningrad was even being renamed St Petersburg.

Unemployed, disillusioned, and angry, Putin first thought about becoming a taxi driver. But soon he was leaning on his old spy network – and the connections he had made in East Germany – to propel himself up what was suddenly a much shorter, and easier to climb, political hierarchy. Ten years after that low moment in Dresden, Putin became the President of Russia.

His personal history would become Russia’s neurosis. The fall of communism – and the fall of the Berlin Wall – was, in Putin’s own words, “inevitable”. But the retreat of the Soviet Union wasn’t. He believed that if those Red Army tanks had rolled down the streets of Dresden, and other cities like it – if aggression had been met by aggression – then it all could have been held.

There is no reason that a dictatorship can’t adapt to change – it is only when they ‘go silent’ that history runs over them. After becoming President that first time, Putin announced to his nation: “He who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart; he who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head.”

That ‘silence’ has forever haunted Putin, and the once unquestionable idea that Russia belongs at the table of great powers, bestriding the world, and dictating the fates of other countries. It is also from that ‘silence’ that things today begin to make a little more sense.

When crowds form on Russian streets, or when neighbouring countries dare to step away from the Russian orbit, they sound like echoes from a painful history. The fear comes back, as do the memories of weakness, of a once-great empire falling to its knees, and of the passive ‘silence’ that let it all happen.

For better or worse, Vladimir Putin is now likely to fight this to the end – and Moscow is now always likely to be a noisy neighbour.

Pleasure in the Pain of Climate Change

The goal of climate change activism is to be the exception. To be the one civilization that avoids extinction, that continues, and thrives into the future. And yet the central message of all these groups is ironically the one thing that will ensure the opposite happens.

The first inklings of the problem before us happened quite early, with a series of published scientific estimates in the 19th century. By the mid-1960’s people were beginning to approach things a little more seriously, with the creation of climate institutes under the direct funding and support of national governments.

Then it was the eye-catching spectacles of climate summits, all the while evidence mounting up, and the scale of the looming crisis stretching far beyond ordinary points of panic. Yet behind all of this, much-too-much time was lost with insincere debates about the underlying science, all to the detriment of conversations about what we should actually be doing in response.

A relative afterthought, and without the same levels of energy, scrutiny, and creativity that have been applied to analysing the problem itself, the world has stumbled into a single pathway out of this crisis, a single solution, all bound-up in a single policy. Namely, limiting our carbon outputs by punishing economic activity.

There are a number of problems with this. As a species we have consistently shown on this issue – and others similar to it – a deep, and so far unshakable, psychological resistance to sacrificing in the present moment for the benefit of our future, or of altering our standard of living in any way.

And despite our early start on climate science, a full enough understanding of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions didn’t come about until it was, by any reasonable consideration, already too late to avoid catastrophe, due to the ‘lock-in’ effects of carbon in the atmosphere.

It’s unsettling to think that an existential crisis might sneak up on us in this way, risk bringing the whole project of humanity to its knees, and leave so little obvious recourse. No doubt this is what arouses so much of the climate activism we see, as it gets louder and more intrusive each day. Fear motivates, even when things are at their most hopeless.

But the hopelessness being felt around the issue of climate change today, has nothing to do with climate change at all, and everything to do with that question of what we should do. Though it is popular to think otherwise, we are not boxed into a catastrophe here, for the very reason that we –as a species – have been in this exact same position many times before.

Whether it was new tools for hunting, the development of farming techniques, safeguards on the spread and use of nuclear weapons, or now a solution to climate change, there is a tried and tested pathway out of existential crises of this, and every, kind: technical innovation.

In many ways this is the obvious solution, but it is also the only one available to us. And around the world embryonic projects are trying to do just this with biological carbon capture, chemical sinks, iron fertilization of the oceans, aerosols in the atmosphere to precipitate cooling, and much more. But the resources are just not there, no international treaties have been signed, and there is no galvanised and dedicated community of supporters; no coordinated full-court push of any type.

All the funding, all the initiatives, and all the climate activism, are still devoted to doing the one thing that we know won’t work: finding new, and harsher, ways to punish economic activity. Why we would do such a thing requires an explanation – an answer to which lies deep and forgotten inside ourselves: our love of punishment.

We have a range of modern ideas about what punishment should be, why we do it, and what we are hoping it will achieve – typically explained through some combination of ‘deterrence’, ‘retribution’, ‘reformation’, ‘reparation’ or ‘prevention’. But to only try and understand punishment in this way – as a form of behaviour modification – is to ignore its genealogy, and the real value it often still holds. 

Originally a philologist by training, Friedrich Nietzsche saw that punishment was something much more instinctive than all of this, something that comes to us naturally, a long way removed from carefully structured responses to carefully designated undesirable behaviours. But also something rarely understood, even by those people administering it.

The link between the German words for guilt [Schuld] and debtor [Schulden] are a bold reminder of this forgotten history. But it is also there in the records of every known civilization – an explanation of punishment that sounds a lot more like a business transaction than a behaviour modifier.

Within our foundations of justice is a deeply entrenched idea that our actions have a cost, and that this cost must be paid in full – a debt being owed. And then also attachments of guilt to those who fall on the wrong end (as ‘buyers’ or ‘debtors’) of this relationship. We hear the hard echoes of this today when prisoners and victims talk about ‘debts to society’.

What is slightly less obvious, but just as strong, is the pride associated with those people in the position of ‘seller’ or ‘creditor’. This is why it was once so natural for debts to be passed on and transferable between family members – justice came with a sense of exchange, of compensation, and above all else measurement.

It is here that the question of punishment becomes the question of pain. Traditionally creditors would extract their payment – their justice – through torture and humiliation. Everything has its equivalent price, especially when it comes to dishonour, harm, and offense. So in Nietzsche’s words, it became common to “excise as much flesh as seemed commensurate with the size of the debt”.

But this is still only half the picture, it gets worse… We get worse.

Our desire to punish other people is also a means unto itself. Looking back into history again – and written into the founding documents of the three great monotheisms, and as far back as Homer’s account of the Trojan Wars – punishment has always taken on a festive-like quality.

On the ground, in daily life, things fared little better, with it being common for aristocratic weddings to include spectacles of torture and execution as part of the celebrations; and for noble households to employ someone for the sole purpose of being a destination for pent-up violence, someone on whom they could “vent one’s malice and cruel teasing”.

There is a truth here that can only be avoided through some effort – we punish others for no other reason than because we enjoy it!

Punishment is pleasure, it’s a moment when your enemy is presented to you, belly-up, prostrate, defenceless, and stripped of their rights to dignity and protection. It is an entitlement to be cruel, an excuse to express anger, and the right to mistreat someone else as beneath you.

There is nothing more pleasurable or festive than cruelty, and there is no more satisfying way to be cruel than through the righteous exaction of punishment.

With this still written into our culture as well as our penal codes, it begins to make more sense as to why our global policies to address climate change look the way they do, and why we are pursuing them with so much fervour, and so little scepticism. Policies that, even if enacted, and capable of reducing carbon emissions to zero overnight, would still do nothing to stop the future warming of the planet due to the high levels of carbon already ‘locked-in’ to our atmosphere.

This can be found in the language of our climate summits and their documents, with the repeated insistence that an arbitrary upper limit on greenhouse gas emissions be set, and then those countries found in breach of these limits be first named responsible, and then punished accordingly. In some instances “calculation kits” have even been handed out, so that states, businesses, and everyday people, can painstakingly tally-up their ‘historical responsibility’.

Climate change had its break-out moment at the Villach Conference in 1985, a conference that proclaimed to the world: 1. Harm had been caused to the environment by carbon emissions, 2. That We were to blame for this, 3. And so a cost was owed by us all, explicitly a sacrifice in our standards of living.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) dug deeper into the details of this ‘owed sacrifice’, creating a proportional framework for each state in terms of the harm they had already caused. Later, the Kyoto Protocols (1997) continued to narrow-in on this relationship between ‘harm-caused’ and ‘debt-owed’ by dividing responsibility between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries.

The informal Copenhagen Accords (2009) and the Paris Climate Agreement (2015) focussed most of their attention on creating a better monitoring and verification system for the implementation of climate punishment. When it became obvious that such a punishment regime could not be agreed upon, the conference instead decided to ‘name and shame’ violating countries (a social punishment in place of a physical/material one).

Even beyond such supranational organisations, the policy talk is remarkably consistent – involving very little beyond the proportioning of financial punishments through carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes.

At every step, the question of how to address global warming has been sidelined for, and dominated by, a process of microscopically calculating how much harm has been caused, carefully apportioning percentages of blame to match these calculations, and then insisting that punishment is exacted in full and public terms.

Which brings us back to those climate activists, and what motivates them each day to return to the streets and protest in ever louder ways. Their obsession with the problem before them is clearly genuine, and yet all they talk about is ‘punishments’ rather than ‘solutions’. Through their language, and written on their banners and graffiti, is an unmistakable link to our ugly past.

There is no talk of helping to reform or rehabilitate the perpetrators, instead everything is hyper-moralised and flooded with outrage. From this outrage you can hear the cries of an ‘aggrieved creditor’, someone who feels individually wronged, and so demands that the ‘debt’ be repaid in full.

We have an overwhelming instinct to punish people even when it is fruitless and counterproductive, because it satisfies something deep inside ourselves. So a solution to our climate crisis that involves removing carbon from the atmosphere, or artificially lowering temperatures by other means, would be unsatisfactory for many people, because it would also remove their entitlement to inflict related punishments.

The problem would be solved, but the heavy polluters would be excused of their debts, and climate activists would be denied their pound of flesh.

It is always tempting to imagine that the solutions to large and difficult problems are beyond our reach. And this is where the real danger lays. Our rapidly heating planet is not the first existential crisis to confront our species, and it won’t be the last. But if we allow global warming to pull us back into our primitive selves, and down a pathway of problem avoidance rather than problem solving, then even if by some chance we avoid the coming annihilation, the next problem – when it arises – will almost certainly destroy us instead.

The Blind Spot of Climate Activism

From Greta Thunberg at the United Nations to Extinction Rebellion on the streets of London, Climate activism is back in fashion. As the days edge forward and the planet continues to warm – as things become increasingly desperate – these moments of protest are only likely to grow larger, louder, and deliberately more intolerable. And they will also continue to fail, for the simple reason that they don’t understand who or what they are actually fighting against.

There has been enough modelling, enough resources, enough consensus, and enough opportunities to falsify the data, if it were possible. Indeed, the first hints of the problem came as early as the 19th century, from a series of scientific estimates for the warming effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases like methane.

More than half a century later, in 1965, the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in America oversaw the first thorough assessment of the effects of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Before long, the ‘Study of Man’s Impact on the Climate’ and the ‘Study of Critical Environmental Problems’ came to the same conclusions. The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) was soon formed, and the First World Climate Conference was held in 1979.

The cascade of new proofs, confirmatory information, and deeper understanding, hasn’t let up since.

It should now be impossible for any thinking person to deny that we live on a rapidly warming planet, or that We – human beings – are largely responsible for this. Just as it should be impossible to deny the existential risks associated with this changing climate. And yet this is clearly not the case!

In the face of such an overwhelming truth, and an equally overwhelming malaise of inaction, the rise of climate activism is understandable. In fact, they are taking their lead from what are – in this field – sources of authority.

From that First World Climate Conference in 1979, to a second in 1985 in Villach, Austria, onwards to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the 1997 Kyoto protocols, the ‘Bali Road Map’, the 2009 Copenhagen Accords, Durban in 2011, the 2012 ‘Continuation of Kyoto’, and now the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the international ambition has always remained the same – to pressure and shame governments and people into taking full, remedial, responsibility for their greenhouse gas emissions.

The idea is simple: if the overwhelming majority of the world’s population are aware that their everyday behaviour is causing themselves and their community future harm (with the associated costs of acting today vastly outweighing the likely costs of suffering through it tomorrow), and yet they still don’t make the necessary changes, then there must be something wrong with the message, or with its delivery.

So protests become louder and more intrusive, and instead of listening to statesmen and scientists we are lectured-to by well-known celebrities and frightened teenage girls. And yet with every escalation of this kind, with every new initiative, the same mistake is being made!

Step back from this for a moment, and imagine yourself in the middle of a quiet street. On the other side you see a close friend of yours walk out of a shop; you smile at each other and wave hello. Then suddenly you hear a deafening gunshot, and at the far end of the road you see a man aiming a high powered rifle. You jump instinctively for cover, and now laying on the ground you look up and see your friend standing unmoved, as if oblivious to what has just happened.

In a panic, you motion towards your friend, imploring him to run, to hide, to do something. He looks back at you, nods to confirm his understanding of the danger, and then starts walking casually toward the shooter. Another bullet fizzes narrowly by, and you shout a warning. You scream in the direction of your friend, telling him that there is a man with a gun, that he is trying to kill you both, and sooner or later, if your friend continues getting closer to him, then that is exactly what is going to happen.

His stride unbroken, and still walking towards the shooter, your friend turns his head to acknowledge what you have just said. He calmly explains to you that he fully understands what is happening, that he takes the situation seriously, that he absolutely does not want to die, and that you are both on entirely the same page here. He then turns away, and keeps walking.

You continue screaming, louder, clearer and with more visceral concern each time… your friend continues idling nonchalantly toward his certain death.

Whether you like it or not, the problem you are now facing has little to do with the armed lunatic firing bullets your way, and everything to do with the psychology of the friend you are trying to save. With the right planning the shooter could be dealt with, or perhaps simply avoided; getting inside the mind of your friend, and manoeuvring through the psychosis he is displaying, is a much less certain, and much less pleasant task.

This is where we are at with climate change, walking happily toward catastrophe while acknowledging that that is exactly what we are doing. And yet despite their experience in this, the broader community of climate activists seem to still believe that if they can only raise their voices loudly enough, if they can only repeat their message enough times, in slightly different ways, then they might finally break through from claiming peoples’ attention to also changing their behaviour.

The aim here, the purpose of climate activism, is surely to do more than just fight – it must be to win… and to survive.

In many ways, this mirror’s the current gun debate across America today. Whenever polled, an overwhelming majority of citizens support greater restrictions on the sale and ownership of firearms – pushed along in no small part by high rates of gun violence, and the particularly scarring episodes of mass shootings. After each massacre of this kind, a new energy is found, and all the talk is of ‘this finally being the catalyst for tighter controls’ – only for the moment to be lost, with most people soon forgetting about their own self-professed desire for change.

The future battleground for climate activism – and gun control for that matter – cannot be just a replay of the last one, only with the intensity dial wound up a few more notches. The enemy here is Us – human beings – and specifically human minds. There is something about our biology or our culture that turns us instinctively away from sacrificing for the future, and makes us resistant to problems of this kind.

To push ahead with strategies of pressure, shame and coercion, is to make the same blind mistake as those people on the opposite end of the climate debate who are still denying that the problem is real. From either direction, wishful thinking is not helpful.

Whether it is a technical innovation – something capable of removing carbon from the atmosphere – or a novel work-around for the psychological barriers within us, what we do know for sure is that the answer is uncertain, and perhaps yet unthought-of. The whole game from here out, must be to find it as quickly as possible. Yet it will only become apparent if we first acknowledge the actual problem before us, and stop trying to solve the one we wish we had in its place.

Greta Thunberg, Child Soldier

The way she was justified, is the way we should judge her.

It has been a month since Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, stole the show at the United Nations with her passion, her outrage, and her person. What everyone agreed upon at the time was that she made people uncomfortable – and, of course, that was the idea!

It was the fizzing emotions and the smirk of disgust behind American President, Donald Trump’s, back that drew the camera to her alone, but she was in New York with an entourage: a line-up of fifteen other teenagers, from across the globe, with only two things in common – their climate activism and their age.

Filing a civil suit against five ‘large polluters’, all selected for their greenhouse gas emissions and their ratification of the third optional protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the rich irony of the moment seemed to completely pass the audience by.

This protocol merely allows suits to be registered directly by children – and so there was no obvious gravity behind the actions themselves. And it’s not appropriate to expect those teenagers – Thunberg as their de facto leader – to understand exactly why they were there, why they had been chosen, and propelled into so unnatural of circumstances, so quickly… child soldiers rarely do.

The phenomena of children in combat – the real ones, with real weapons – only make strategic sense when you see them on the ground. There is little doubt children were first used in armed conflicts only as a desperate plan-B, simply because there weren’t enough available adults. But battlefield lessons are often the most quickly learnt.

With less developed personalities, and more vulnerable to influence, child soldiers are easier to recruit, cheaper to maintain, easier to manipulate, think less independently, and lack a true sense of fear and consequence.

So they are also more likely to follow orders, less likely to complain, more willing to undertake dangerous missions, tend to show more loyalty, respond more instinctively to the promises of reward or punishment, are more susceptible to group dynamics and promises of grandeur, and seek the comforts of family (with the military becoming a surrogate).

Children bring something unique to the table, something that unfortunately makes them incredibly effective military assets, and incredibly useful to the adult soldiers still in their ranks – they present a dilemma for the enemy.

It’s hard enough to ever get comfortable with the idea of killing another adult, even in self-defence. What happens then when you look down the rifle scope and see a child instead? Sure, they are uniformed, armed, and combat hardened, but in their face, their stature, and their voice, they are still very much a child, with everything that entails.

In short, child soldiers are effective exactly because they don’t play by the same rules. Do you hold your ground and engage them? Do you run away or surrender? Either way you lose!

This is why Greta Thunberg’s appearance at the United Nations was so effective and so unsettling at the same time. Most people – ordinarily deep in the opposing trenches of this conflict – suddenly didn’t know how to fight back… or even if they should. Those who did, suffered predictable battle wounds – accused of punching down, and bullying a teenager.

Her enemies were clearly rattled, but her allies should have been also. During her address – her voice quivering with outrage – Thunberg was angry, shaken, but above all fearful. You could feel the overwhelming weight of her burden – the long term environmental effects of climate change were being locked-in around her, and soon it would be her generation to bear the cost.

She was right to be worried! But just because a war is justified, it doesn’t then follow that children are justified in fighting it. All over the world today there are parents in desperate situations – with real world hardship and suffering at their door – looking down at their terrified sons and daughters, and instead choosing to force a smile, to lighten the mood, to change the subject; anything to distract from what is actually happening.

They are not in denial and they are not lying to their families – they are simply choosing to have the fight alone, so that their children can continue to be children.

Climate change inaction is the problem here, but it is not Greta Thunberg’s problem. The adults in her life have let her down. By her own account, Thunberg’s parents were resistant when she first started pushing them to lower their family’s carbon footprint. Eventually, of course, she won them around to their long denied ‘responsibility’ – increasing their recycling efforts, becoming vegans, and giving up commercial air travel.

Having recruited new soldiers to the fight, this should have been an end to the teenager’s tour of duty. Instead she was promoted and rearmed by various foundations, non-profits, and institutions like the United Nations.

It was visible then, and it is obvious still, that this is all taking its toll on Thunberg. In post-conflict zones across the world the physical and emotional consequences of battle on child soldiers is there to be seen. Forced into situations beyond their years, they are soon plagued by health issues such as depression, anxiety, and insomnia; not to mention extreme forms of post-traumatic stress disorder and life-long psychological distress.

Valued specifically for their youth, and so only useful in the short term, child soldiers – by what they are – burn out fast. At which point they are discarded and replaced by someone younger – someone with everything that was earlier prized in them. Damaged and no longer useful, they are dumped out into the sudden emptiness of real life – lost, confused, and a danger to themselves and others.

Seated in the audience, listening to Greta Thunberg’s own words - “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here”, “how dare you”, “You have stolen my dreams” – it was amazing that no one glanced around at the chamber they were in, stood up, took the microphone from her hands, and gently eased her off stage.

This was the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, charged with upholding the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and specifically these words: "the child, by reason of his [her] physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care”.

North Korea, Brexit and the Risks of Confederation

There is a single moment from history that should animate everything we currently think about North Korea.

In October 1973, First Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov, had a conversation with then-North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung. South Korea’s economic boom was pulling into top gear at the time, a Northern takeover of the South looked increasingly unlikely, and competition for the minds of everyday Koreans was being lost to the promises of capitalism.

With the battle for reunification looking more difficult, Kim Il-sung was entertaining a new strategy, and new terminology. Hearing it repeat throughout their conversation, Zhivkov asked his comrade “more specifically” just what he meant by “confederation”.

The Bulgarian was thrown off – how could two countries with such different political systems ever merge together short of complete consolidation. And yet, recognising the rapidly changing landscape before them, and their new limitations, this was seen from North Korea as a slow burn toward, and backdoor into, their control and domination of South Korea.

At first it wouldn’t seem like much, little more than a goodwill gesture of sorts. Both countries would retain exactly what they had, agreeing to nothing more than the coordination of a single policy portfolio, something that people don’t tend to feel the impact of in their daily lives – Kim Il-sung had foreign policy in mind.

“Both countries will act independently” and yet from that small, innocuous moment, “South Korea will be done with”.

Successful experiments are generally repeated. So foreign policy would soon enough become agricultural policy (“[we] will want to establish such cooperative farms there too”), then labour, transportation, the economy, and so on. And even before this, the blending of portfolios would mean both countries eventually reducing the size of their militaries (only logical considering that each would now represent less of a security threat).

And with joint control over foreign policy, American troops in South Korea would soon be withdrawn also. In a nervous panic, South Korea could try to block all further integration, or even the singular implementation of risky strategies like these, but the decision would not be entirely theirs to make. They would be part of a political confederation, and so their accomplice would get to have a say also.

This is where it all gets interesting. If it were happening today, South Korea would have twice as many citizens needing supranational enfranchisement than North Korea would (based on current populations). But no country is ever going to enter such an agreement as a less-than-equal partner. So voting percentages would be shared 50-50 between the two Koreas.

As a plural, open democracy, the South Korean vote would be split, whereas the North Korean vote would be stable, consolidated, and unanimous. From here the slope becomes easier to see.

Think about the European Union, its steady – decades long – process of integration, and the prison-like situation that Britain now finds themselves in, desperate to leave (Brexit) and yet frozen by the thought of how painful it all might be.

Before the European Union there was the idea of a united Europe – integrated, jointly prosperous, and no longer at war. Slowly things became formal: there was the Council of Europe in 1949, the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and the European Economic Community (EEC), the Single European Act in 1987, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and Lisbon in 2007.

It started with six countries and the single policy hope of rebuilding the continent through economic integration. As it now sits there are 28 member states, 24 official languages, a population over 500,000,000, a combined GDP of $22 trillion, a joint customs union, common citizenship, freedom of movement, its own legislative bodies and a vast array of European law, its own court system, its own currency, and now future talk is of a European army, and a completely unified single country –a United States of Europe.

The European Union has always had its detractors, but it wasn’t until Britain voted to leave that people began to see the trap they had so happily walked into. After three years of difficult negotiation, and constant forecasts of pain and catastrophe, the divorce still hasn’t happened, and very likely might never.

If this is what can happen when the risks are purely economic, imagine how much worse things can get when those risks involve warfare, conflict and loss of life.

From inside a confederated peninsula, South Korea would find it incredibly difficult to untangle themselves. Just as all the talk now is of Scotland and Northern Ireland when it comes to Brexit, there would be the immediate – and likely – prospect of certain provinces either disagreeing with the decision to withdraw, or being so ensnared that they might be left partially behind.

But this doesn’t come close to what Kim Il-sung was trying to explain to Todor Zhivkov all those decades ago by “South Korea will be done with”. After years of not treating the North as an enemy, of ever-deeper fraternal bonding and ethno-nation building, and with American troops long since farewelled, a retaliatory invasion from the North would look less like a threat, and more like a choice.

They could draw arms and fight their brothers and sisters in a second Korean War – likely to be more bloody and devastating than the first – or allow for the confederation to continue, with each day a little more sovereignty and control chipped away. South Koreans – comfortable, wealthy, and now unaccustomed to hardship – might plausibly see the gentle slide into authoritarianism and foreign domination as the lesser evil here. In fact, Kim Il-sung was betting on it!

None of this matters of course without those first foolhardy steps into confederation – something that current South Korean President Moon Jae-in has promised to achieve before the end of his term in office.

The Romance of Serial Killers

He confessed, which is an unhappy let-down for the imagination.

Before this Koreans could effortlessly build up the Hwaseong Serial Killer through terror and fascination into something pan-human – wintry, cunning, and penetrating. When hushed myth-telling and corner store gossip wasn’t enough, books, movies, and conspiracy theorising articles were pushed along by the public appetite.

Serial killers do this to us – they steal away our minds. When they remain at large, uncaptured, unreformed, and unidentified, decades of late night energy is spent thinking about them. For the residents of Hwaseong, greater-Gyeonggi Province, and South Korea as a whole, this produced three decades of hunches and tip-offs, over two million ‘man-days’ of investigation, the probing of over 21,000 suspects, 3000 people officially questioned, and the largest ever criminal case in South Korean history.

The most obvious analogy is always animal, some aberrant ‘man-killer’ – crocodile, lion, bear – that seems to develop a taste for human flesh; hunting through lust and excitement, rather than for territory, food or defence. In their menace this might be true, but psychologically it misses what crimes of this kind actually do to us.

There is something strangely personal about serial killers, something borderline romantic. Selective, and matching their victims to some internal ideal, they don’t maraud clumsily like a high school shooter. The crime scenes are extravagances, types of performance art; serial killers want to be chased, to be appreciated, perhaps even caught; anything to make their actions reciprocal. Just as with love, it is unbearable to be ignored.

With multiple victims over multiple years, they are creating a chilling body of work, a portfolio, and the development of their own artistic craft.

Sold as studies in omnipotence and domination, movies like ‘Memories of Murder’ – depicting the Hwaseong killings – don’t tend to come across as the cautionary tales that you might expect or hope for. They are rather archetypical lessons in romance – everything that the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ phenomena is also. And no different to the constant eroticisation of vampires and werewolves through movies and literature.

Serial killers touch the mind in just this way: told that one is stalking the night, prowling your neighbourhood, and the world begins to beat a little faster. The concerns and worries of everyday life disappear in an instant – it is hard to casually think about serial killers, you can only ever obsess.

But this is real, people suffer, loved ones die, families grieve, and communities are swallowed by fear (ten women were killed in Hwaseong). And yet if you pay close enough attention to how the human body experiences fear – elevated heart rate, sweating, dizziness, shortness of breath, muscle tension, goose bumps, upset stomach, inability to sleep, tingling limbs, clouded thoughts – it is remarkably similar to how the body also experiences excitement.

The Hwaseong Serial Killer strangled his last victim in 1991, and yet, just as it goes with love, his growing absence did nothing to dull the emotions. There was suddenly even more room, and more reason, for innuendo and rumour to take hold. Where it mattered – in the thoughts of everyday Koreans – he was still out there, perfectly camouflaged, and walking the streets perhaps just a step or two behind you.

Our better instincts don’t do us much good here. We tend to glamorise, and be attracted to, exactly what we know we shouldn’t. Whether it is rebellious youth, charismatic strangers, domineering tyrants, or wasted talent, one of the great challenges in life involves overcoming this urge to fantasize dangerous people and dangerous situations.

This runs through another – and much more visible – romantic archetype. The desire to win over and then tame menacing people – think ‘Beauty and the Beast’.

Perhaps this is so hard of a thing to overcome exactly because we also have it, dormant and unsatisfied, but unmistakably there, inside ourselves. A vicarious recognition that if circumstances had fallen differently, if we had grown up with different DNA, different parents, a different up-bringing, different experiences, then the pathway toward murder might not be so firmly closed-off.

But more than just feeling it in our anatomy, the quintessential serial killer is unashamed, unremorseful and generally uninhibited; a kind of open, uncomplicated honesty that we also value so highly when it comes to falling in love. They are not afraid of who they are, and they won’t be held back in expressing themselves.

Yet just as with all erotic ideals, they never survive contact with the real world. The Hwaseong Serial Killer – now identified and confessed – is a frail looking 56 year old man, so clumsy in his crimes that he was already in prison for murder, and so out of touch with his circumstances (he cannot be charged with any of his killings due to the statute of limitations) that he unnecessarily professed his innocence when first presented with the new DNA evidence, only to sheepishly come clean a few days later.

Which is exactly why serial killers seem to be a dying breed. In the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s, they were everywhere. Now the only ones popping up are the retirees and the geriatrics who barely remember who they are, let alone who they once killed. Where are the new generations of serial murderers? Already in prison! Arrested and sentenced before they could ever get started – advances in technology and methods of policing often mean that their first murder is now also their last.

Our misconceptions about serial murder are as rich and unsatisfactory as our misconceptions about love. The Hwaseong Serial Killer was always likely to be found in this way – inept, panicked and weak; a pathetic end to decades of undeserved grandeur. There are no deep waters here, nothing to deserve infatuation, no worthy aura; just as there are no such things as seductive monsters, only monsters…

The Consequences of Language

The moments that clarify this connection are always tragic. The students – all members of the Korean Progressive University Student Union – that broke into the American Ambassador’s residence in Seoul this week, are not the problem.

Once inside they were peaceful enough, but their protest – against Washington’s insistence that Korea pay a larger percentage of the costs for stationing American troops on the peninsula – did speak to something larger than themselves, something less visible and more troubling.

Think about how strange this is for a moment. A peaceful, open and welcoming country is now watching the spectacle of its closest ally battening down its embassy, increasing security measures, and fearful of the ordinarily friendly crowds outside their walls… all due to a fairly parochial economic dispute. Not the kind of thing that ordinarily gets the blood of students hot!

The problem here is language, and its stain across recent memory.

Anti-Americanism, if it is searched for hard enough, runs deep in Korean history. Despite all that American troops fought and sacrificed for in the Korean War, it is still common to hear angry tones on street corners today directed at former-U.S President Harry Truman. His crime? Negotiating a ceasefire and ending the war. In the minds of many Koreans, he betrayed their nation by not pushing on endlessly for an outright victory, and with it reunification.

This could be missed as the grumblings of a now indulgent republic – people who haven’t experienced the horrors of war, complaining about the ‘limited’ sacrifices of those who have; but the grumblings themselves matter.

The anger and betrayal felt by average Koreans towards American tacit support for the authoritarian leaders of their past, and for watershed moments such as the suppression of the Gwangju Uprising, are understandable still today. But if this were all there was, then the Korean Presidential merry-go-round wouldn’t always sound so familiar.

Every country has its rites of political passage, the formalities and hat tipping that is first required before anyone can be plausibly considered for office; even if the expression of this is manufactured and dishonest. Elsewhere often this takes the form of religiosity – in South Korea it is a promise to reclaim operational control over joint military forces, and then to remove American troops altogether from the peninsula.

From the Korean War, through constant low-scale attacks, endless provocations, the Blue House raid, the Rangoon Bombing, the bombing of Korean Airlines Flight 858, the torpedoing of the SS Cheonan, the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, countless missile launches, and a string of nuclear tests, South Korea has always been an insecure state. And that insecurity has always come from across their northern border.

The only cure for this that has ever been found, is an unhappy one for any sovereign people. That is, the placement of foreign troops inside their country.

And yet the sight of these bases, these troops, and the echoes of related political debates and news stories, does something both understandable, and strange, to the Korean mind. Feelings of protection and security run thick with those of infantilism, emasculation and animosity. It is never nice to be reminded that you can’t look after yourself.

Inside the walls of politics this national schizophrenia appears almost comical, with President-after-President coming to power on platforms of reclaiming their lost independence, only to – once elected – delay and obfuscate until their five year term is up; with the cycle then repeating itself over again. On the streets things are a little less innocuous with constant spikes and falls, moments of unexpected and uncontrollable anger, followed immediately by a baseline of friendship, warmth and gratitude. 

In 2002, two South Korean school girls were struck and killed by an American armoured vehicle on training manoeuvres. An unhappy accident that involved limited night-time visibility, a blind corner in the road, and the girls listening to music through headphones, that made both drivers and victims unaware of each other until the last possible moment.

The American soldiers were quickly found not guilty and South Korea exploded into a top-heavy rage, with mass protests, boycotts, celebrity bandwagons, and even the firebombing of the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul.

If this could be dismissed as having some justification, then the 2008 protests against American beef were pure conspiracy theory. Street demonstrations started when then-President Lee Myung-bak removed the ban on such imports, but the sentiment had nothing to do with economic protectionism. The million-plus people marching with banners were accusing America – without any basis – of trying to poison them with contaminated meat.

More recently – and mirroring, in some ways, the current moment – was the 2015 knife attack on then-American Ambassador Mark Lippert. His assailant was opposed to the staging of joint American-South Korean military exercises.

And returning to the Yongsan Garrison, after decades of protest against the concentration of foreign troops in, and the presence of a foreign base on, prime real-estate in Seoul, the American military abandoned its home of 73 years and began a staggered relocation to Pyeongtaek in 2018. The crowds in local haunts like Itaewon, now look a lot more Korean, but the once vibrant district is in freefall with the Korea Appraisal Board announcing a surge in commercial vacancies from 3.6 percent to 24.3 percent (This is what the sudden disappearance of 100,000 soldiers, personnel, employees, and their families, will do).

This speaks to something deep in the psyche of the average Korean. They need America, and specifically American troops, to ward off the threat from North Korea, and yet this is so unpalatable to them that certain rituals of atonement are needed. Meaning best friends are hugged close, and denounced as the worst of enemies, at the same time.

But language has reach, it has meaning, it matters; occasionally double-speak just confuses people and careful, delicate, comforting fantasies, are mistaken for reality. If only one person believes the rhetoric an Ambassador is stabbed, a handful and an embassy is stormed, a few thousand and the streets are alive.

The problem is, that on the whole, South Koreans have become accustomed to the idea that Americans understand their charade just as well as they do, and are happy to play along, offer the occasional apology, move the occasional base, and then continue on as if nothing happened; confident in the knowledge that South Korea’s actual record of standing up to America is shockingly poor.

But if this is capable of breaking down from one side – with protest and violence – then it’s capable of breaking down from the other. And this is where the real risks are to be found. We know what happens when Koreans forget – or are taken in by – their own language games here, but not what will happen when an American administration is also; or at the very least tires of being led to symbolic sacrifice.

Before the outbreak of the Korean War, America were all but withdrawn from the peninsula with only 500 advisors left at their posts. A few years later, Richard Nixon pushed for a recalibration of the same variety; two Presidencies later Jimmy Carter tried harder and got closer. Sooner or later it will happen again – and the appearance of real, and sustained, local hostility is only going to make the decision to withdraw that much easier.

At which point there will be overwhelming feelings of relief in Washington, fear in Seoul, and excitement in Pyongyang.

Pigs, Soccer, and National Delusion

Everyone tells themselves certain lies, whether they are aware of it or not. Nations do the same thing, often around ideas of grandeur, bravery and righteousness. This type of self-deceit – by and large – is not helpful, but it is also not particularly harmful either. When it comes to South Korea, this is not the case!

A highly contagious virus with a 100 percent fatality rate, and no known cure, is terrifying enough, even if it only affects pigs. In a country as small as South Korea, the risk of it spreading and wiping out the entire industry is very real. And this says nothing of the possibility of the virus mutating to be able to infect humans as well.

But when the first cases of African swine fever were announced, it was the region of the country – northern Gyeonggi Province, adjacent to the border with North Korea – that seemed to crystalize the fear. When it was no longer just farmed pigs, but wild boars, things became worse. When those infected boars were found inside the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas, once, then twice, this fear became an immediate cascade.

Soon the world’s most heavily fortified border was being reinforced further by a regiment of snipers and thermal vision drones. The lesson here for South Korea should have had nothing to do with the spread of disease or the pork industry – now suffering an irrational downturn in both sales and prices – and everything to do with how they actually see their Northern neighbour when structures fail, security is questionable, and national lies breakdown.

In the middle of this crisis, an inter-Korean soccer game was held in Pyongyang. It is not rare to encounter North Korean sporting teams, this was, after all, an official World Cup qualifying match. What made this into a spectacle was the use, by South Korea, of its national soccer team as vanguards for political and ideological ends.

Most national governments understandably refuse to send their athletes into North Korea, and so games of this kind are usually held in neutral third countries. What the South Korean athletes experienced is exactly what these governments are trying to avoid: a media shutdown, empty stadiums, visa issues, an absence of foreign media or representatives, politically intimidated referees, and complete – prisoner like – isolation (the South Korean team were restricted in their movement, had their cell phones confiscated, and held as the only guests in the otherwise empty Koryo Hotel).

So why would the Moon Jae-in administration, or anyone for that matter, submit their citizens to such an experience when they have the chance to avoid it? The answer: National reunification!

When Moon Jae-in announced in 2012 that he would achieve a North-South confederation before the end of his term in office, it was more than some grand political gesture. He was speaking to his own most deeply held, and publically expressed, desires… and also that of his country. It wasn’t the first time Moon had articulated this hope, and he must have taken stock of the public will, which whenever polled is overwhelmingly in favour of reunifying the peninsula.

First steps are necessary, and sport bears the brunt as it always tends to do. At the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the same outreach happened with Korea entering a unified women’s ice hockey team. What this meant in reality was South Korean players, who had qualified on their own merit, accepting North Korean players into their team, and with it relinquishing their own deserved and hard-earnt playing time. All for national ideology – all for a national lie!

The collective memories of a divided people is enough to make South Koreans instinctively tick ‘yes’ next to any box asking for reunification. Yet ask the follow-up questions of ‘are you willing to accept a tax increase to achieve this?’, or ‘are you willing to accept a reduction in your standard of living?’ and the responses shift quickly to ‘no!’

This sentiment plays out every day on the streets of South Korean cities through an unashamed, and unconcealed, discrimination and ostracising of defectors. Having this much actual difficulty accepting and integrating what is now only 30,000 North Koreans, things are unlikely to improve when reunification brings 25,000,000 more. South Koreans like to think about reunification a lot more than they like to live it.

The other side of this is a confrontational regime in North Korea that wants reunification just as much, but only on its terms, only under the government in Pyongyang and the rule of Kim Jong-un. 

The South Korean soccer team emerged from the North Korean media blackout talking about a ‘rough’, ‘war-like’ experience, where the players were lucky to return ‘safe’ and ‘uninjured’, and of a society where “North Koreans wouldn't even make eye contact when I talked to them, not to mention respond”.

And yet the lesson, again, seems to have been missed!

With whispers inside South Korea of biological pig-borne warfare from the North, and mental images of Kim Jong-un deliberately infecting his livestock and herding them across the DMZ, the Moon Jae-in administration took the more rational approach. The most likely scenario now unfolding across the border is one of unchecked agricultural disaster, something that North Korea has a long history with.

It is sensible to believe that the few wild boars that have managed to stumble through the mine fields of the DMZ, are the tip of a nationwide epidemic that the regime in Pyongyang is not equipped to address. In fact the National Intelligence Service (NIS) estimates that the entire country is infected and that the province of North Pyongan has been completely “wiped out”. With this in mind, South Korea reached out with the offer of help to their brothers and sisters (their self-professed future compatriots) and in response didn’t even get an acknowledgement of the offer.

Increasingly confident that the outbreak is coming from North Korea nonetheless, the military is currently deployed to fight pigs, but not before Seoul first “notified the North of our decision” in order to “prevent accidental clashes with the North due to our gunshots”.

There is a game of goodwill here, and only one side is playing it. And yet South Koreans are so fearful of further upsetting their begrudging partners in North Korea, that they will forgive nearly any infraction, while also viewing their own prudent and restrained actions as hostile. There is a battered wife syndrome to all of this – one side walking on eggshells, imagining that everything is their own fault; the other combative, aggressive and belligerent.

South Korea, and South Koreans, are not strictly responsible for the behaviour of their Northern neighbours, but they do have a choice. Keep telling themselves the old lies that reunification is something that they still want – in all its mess and detail – and that North Koreans are willing partners in an open, liberal and democratic version of this; or step away from the delusion and start seeing the regime in Pyongyang for what it actually is.

Yet as we speak, South Korea are bidding to jointly host the 2032 summer Olympics with North Korea, and pigs are still idling their way across the border, watched carefully through the rifle scopes of highly trained soldiers.

A War of Position? The Regionalism of LGBTQ Rights in South Korea

Autumn is always the season of protest. Winter is understandably too cold for street marches, and the new warmth of Spring comes as such a happy relief that people take well-deserved mental vacations from their social activism. Summer is naturally too hot, but with people clamouring into sweaty public spaces it does reawaken the mind to long-felt injustices.

From here it is a waiting game – counting the days until the heat falls away just enough to make street protests bearable. So with the season now firmly upon us, there is a question that needs asking – what has happened to Korea’s gay pride movement? Of course, I am not talking about Seoul here – their annual Queer Festival came like clockwork, but in some ways that is just the point. Seoul have been doing this for 20 years – and it is now less of a protest than a celebration.  

If the feeling inside Seoul is one of increasing inevitability – a matter of keeping up momentum and rolling over the enemy’s battlelines with less-and-less resistance – outside the capital things seem to be going the other way, with LBGTQ communities in open retreat.

Korea still ranks painfully low on all international metrics of LGBTQ ‘acceptance’, same sex marriage is not legal and neither are same sex civil unions, there are very few protections against work place discrimination, the military code criminalises homosexual behaviour, there is a near-complete absence of media representation, and no major political party supports an increase in gay rights.

It is under this shadow, that Busan held its first Pride Festival in 2017 (18 years after Seoul had theirs), and in 2018 the port city organised their first International Day Against Homophobia. And yet it feels like the counter protests – well organised conglomerations of evangelical Christians who regularly outnumber and drown out the marchers in these events – have started to have an effect, because this year the pinnacle of Busan’s Pride movement appears to be a closed-door brunch at a parochial bar.

I suppose this could be narrow-minded – that movements like these might be playing a longer term game that requires patience, planning and the occasional hiatus. But it doesn’t feel this way, and the gulf between LGBTQ communities in Seoul and other urban areas seems to be growing.

Joe Phillips, a Professor at Busan National University, explains this in terms of: 1. A lack of fealty and sense of community, with very little cross-dialogue, 2. The same type of centre-periphery split that tends to happen when so much money, talent and resources becomes centralised in large cities, 3. Most interestingly, within these smaller, fringe communities is a more gradualist outlook toward equality that seeks to first change social attitudes before seeking protections in law.

Then why the soft tones and the stepping away from the light? This appears to play directly into the hands of current Korean attitudes, which is largely one of indifference rather than open hostility (evangelical Christians are only 18% of the Korean population, and very few of them join in the counter protests), and yet this seems bad enough.

When someone hates you, they are also acknowledging that you matter in some way – through their disgust and animosity they are saying ‘I wish I could control you, influence you in a different direction, and make you see what I see’. The other end of this spectrum is invisibility – the people around you neither know nor care, that you are even there.

And yet there could be a subtlety here on the ground, something that is being missed from the outside. The goal of the LGBTQ movement shouldn’t be to simply highlight injustice, but rather to correct it – and this requires persuasion. It may be intolerably slow for those people, suffering and diminished by their lack of basic rights, but the only other option is force, coercion and imposition. Democracies can’t work like this, and totalitarianisms are never too friendly to minority groups.

It seems unlikely that the stubborn, rigid and deeply held beliefs of people are ever going to change by way of noisy protest, in-your-face spectacle, or blunt-force instrument. The more people feel under attack, the more likely they are to bunker-down and resist change.

As Joe Phillips points out, there might be a better way to go about this. Instead of stepping into identity politics and drawing firm, public battle-lines, advocates of LGBTQ rights could focus on building social ties and working relationships with the non-LGBTQ community; and to do so through non-political organisations. This is what Antonio Gramsci labelled a ‘War of Position’ – rather than embracing open conflict, influence and power might be better achieved quietly behind the scenes.

If indeed, regional Pride movements – abandoned by their partners in Seoul – are making this shift, then that is a positive. But the vacuum screams loudly, and the empty streets still feel like symbols of failure and defeat.

*** The related interview with Joe Phillips on LGBTQ rights in South Korea can be found here.

North Korean Cognitive Dissonance

It is easy to get lost in hope. This becomes ever truer as circumstances slip further out of our control – and so North Korea deranges people in a way that little else can.

Listening to Harvard University’s William Overholt speak at The Korea Society this past week was a bludgeoning, blinded and unthinking example of this. All the slips were there, across questions of strategic interest, nuclear development and models for normalisation – all with the same depth of interest that can only come from thinking North Korea, and North Koreans, are no different to anyone else. And yet the book Overholt was launching, ‘North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War?’, was written with the self-professed purpose of avoiding just this type of unfamiliarity.  

Moments like these are not uncommon, Brian Myers has sadly had much of his career defined by people reading his work, claiming its importance, and then continuing to speak and act as if they never encountered it at all. ‘The Cleanest Race’ should have changed the game, it should have opened people’s eyes to the most important thing that could ever be known about any foreign country, let alone one as inaccessible as North Korea. That is, what the people living there actually believe, and how they see themselves. It didn’t!

With “the realisation that I was making not the slightest bit of headway”, Myers felt the need to write a follow-up book ‘The Juche Myth’. It was a reasonable expectation that some form of clarity might be needed. In a community of academics and policy professionals – people who should ordinarily be champions of truth and accuracy – what else could explain this phenomena of both open and tacit acceptance, followed immediately by near-complete intellectual amnesia?

Again, it didn’t work! Neither have a myriad of blog posts by Myers countering, and personally responding to, the various misconceptions, false attributions or simple inattentiveness that keeps emerging. There is something about North Korea that makes people approach the country as if their propaganda is impotent, their ideology superficial, and their agency purely reactive.

Confident in his authority, William Overholt took his cues from those less informed than himself, rather than those more so. The clumsy language (though even this is questionable) of United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and the cavalier attitude of the American military command during the Korean War becomes enough to build a three step understanding toward a permanent end to the crisis.

According to Overholt, North Korea wants nuclear weapons to: 1. Add stature and legitimacy to Kim Jong-un, 2. To get the world to pay attention to them, and 3. Because nuclear weapons are their only defence against foreign invasions and limited military strikes. Other than adding to Brian Myers’ frustrations, this kind of stencilled-on strategy does the opposite to what the author is hoping; it is just as neglectful and disconnected as those Korean War Generals were, but from a different direction. Instead of inferring the worst about North Koreans based on absent information, Overholt – and those in his mould – infer only the best intentions in spite of what North Koreans actually say and do.

Any understanding of Songun – North Korea’s ‘Military First’ policy – or the famine conditions that brought about its creation, should be the antidote to this kind of mistake. Overholt blames America for not fulfilling its side of the 1994 Agreed Framework, so forcing North Korea down the path to nuclear development. But he makes no mention of the nationwide starvation at the time, the leadership transition from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il, the fact that the regime was in very real risk of collapse, nor that only six weeks after the Agreed Framework was signed, when American aid was flowing into the country, North Korea – without warning – labelled America ‘the Great Enemy’ and launched Songun in response.

William Overholt made a point of assuring his audience that he had taken stock of all the ‘technical details’. They were just the wrong ones! Understanding North Korea has a lot less to do with questions of launch pads, nuclear sites and missile trajectories, than it does with ideology. And you can only get to such a place through the challenging and laborious task of analysing the different streams of propaganda, as Myers does, or through – with even more difficulty – personal interactions with the country and its people.

Speaking with Edward Reed, a firmer picture of reality begins to emerge. Visiting North Korea as part of various aid programs and initiatives, he witnessed first-hand the country in its lowest – most insecure – moment with the famine, and through the twenty five years since. Working to save a failing agricultural sector, and entering the country by desperate invitation, aid workers like Reed understandably thought that they were walking into just another humanitarian crisis.

Where it would be typical to expect a collapsed state, without any real central authority, instead they found a largely undiminished, and unreformed regime. A regime that, despite their call for open help, were also strangely selective in what help they actually accepted. From the outset, there was a hierarchy of risk/reward placed on aid partners and NGO’s – those from America and South Korea were at the bottom.

When finally allowed in, regardless of their nationality or affiliation, there was no sense of gratitude or relief. Instead they were treated as reptiles in the nest: watched and restricted in their travels and human contact in the same way that tourists to the country are still today.

The state was intact, and so were the institutions. The public Distribution System survived, removing all incentives for farmers to seek sustainable practices. Visits to the countryside (the intended sites for direct aid) by NGO’s or foreign officials were tied to financial or material commitments, all aid was controlled and filtered through Pyongyang, any agricultural success on any particular farm would never spread beyond the fence line without the approval of then-leader Kim Jong-il (which rarely came), and central officials were quick to make nonsensical demands on donors that belied the crisis around them, such as the importation of Australian emu birds.

Dealing with North Korea requires navigating their domestic and ideological worldview. The risk presented by aid agencies – and today by talks of denuclearisation – is one that is limited, personal, and felt only by the regime in Pyongyang.

After a quarter of a century, North Korea still hasn’t returned to its pre-famine levels of food production, and is still locked into the same agricultural cycles of boom-and-bust. This has a lot to do with the regime’s heavily propagandised hope of achieving ‘self-reliance’. Due to its geography, Edward Reed recommends just the opposite – North Korea is a country that can never, based on current technology, accomplish this. It is only ideology, and not practical considerations, that demands they do.

From a different direction again, Victor Cha has often spoken of the moment when he crashed unexpectedly into this same barrier. As part of the American delegation during the Six Party Talks, Cha was doing exactly what William Overholt is hoping for today: offering North Korea a security guarantee. “For years” the North Korean delegations had been pushing for America to sign on to an agreement, written by themselves, and with language that was “basically the equivalence of a negative security assurance”.

This seemed an impossible, and unreasonable, stretch. So much so, that Cha was packing his bags for home as Washington looked over the draft. When the American administration did the unthinkable and approved the language, that should have been – by any reasonable account – the permanent end to the nuclear issue. But just as with the Agreed Framework before it, North Korea simply “put it in their pocket and moved on to the next thing…”

With lessons like these, it is hard to know why the same mistakes keep getting made in such confident yet clumsy ways. North Korea sees the world as leering enemies itching to conquer them only because this narrative serves an internal propaganda purpose. To speak about North Korea’s nuclear program in terms of ‘building a defensive capability’ is ahistorical, disregards the presence of propaganda and ideology, and ignores the experiences of those few people who have actually interacted with the country, its people, and – by proxy – the regime.

If all this type of shallow, groping approach to North Korea ever did, was muddy the waters of academia and policy, then that would be bad enough. But what people like William Overholt are missing when they speak in this way, is that they have inadvertently become mouth pieces for the North Korean regime – spreading just the type of misinformation that they are hoping for back in Pyongyang, but with an authority and reach that they could never achieve by themselves.

*** The related interview with Edward Reed on North Korean agricultural failures can be found here.

In Praise of John Bolton

The delegation was having a face lift. Most people were keeping their titles, but most people were also paying a price – shuffled, relegated and transferred to quieter pastures. Eventually everything finds its limit, and the administration under George W. Bush had found theirs. Years of circular negotiations, and recent stuttering months – despite renewed vigour – meant an end to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. In his place was a grizzled and stoically unpleasant ‘diplomat’, a different breed, with different eyes-on-the-world, and someone whose frustration at that point was impossible to conceal.

John Sawers, Political Director for the U.K. Foreign Office, had been working closely (from the European side) with John Bolton to achieve a nuclear/denuclearisation agreement with Iran. Head of Arms Control at the U.S. State Department, Bolton had been forced to follow the company line, pushed by Armitage, and beyond him National Security Advisor, Colin Powell. Sitting in the background of meetings, Bolton watched as his administration debated the nature and size of “even more carrots” that might coax Iran into abandoning its nuclear enrichment program.

Sawers, now facing Bolton as an equal partner, and the new head of the American delegation, “leaned over” during their first European-American meeting and said “let me know if I can help, in terms of achieving a common outcome to this”. From across the table, came an embittered, contempt raising, “frosty glare”. The crown had changed hands, and the new king was none-too-happy with how things had gone before him. After a few minutes, Bolton called the room to attention, “right, has everyone spoken?” In numbed silence, the European delegations watched as Bolton read from a single sheet of paper, and with it changed the entire course of negotiations.

It felt like a unique moment of affirmation. Bolton had seen – or at least he had believed – his worst intuitions about international relations play out. Iran, and nations like it, would never be “rational partner[s]” in his estimation, any declarations from them to the contrary would be deceptive, and administrations like his own – the rational partners – were naïve about this, to the point of pathology. The world was full of unreformable monsters. Unreformable because ideology is in many cases the most significant barrier that can be drawn between people, and because the rational partners of the world had lost their will – or even desire – to do the one thing they could to halt these monsters: enforce regime change.

When John Bolton re-entered the US administration under President Trump, he was the same person. Filling-out his resume between appointments, Bolton had established himself as a foreign policy wonk for the Republican Party and Fox News. Buoyed by Trump’s original bellicose approach to North Korea – “fire and fury”, “Little Rocket Man” – Bolton was soon dismayed by the haste and open-armed willingness to offer concessions, starting with the propaganda fumble that was the Winter Olympics’ closing ceremony in South Korea.

Instincts purring again, Bolton saw this as North Korea “divert[ing] attention from its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs”, and being allowed to do so by weak minded, and appeasement-focussed officials. The same officials, repeating the same tactics, that he believed had allowed Iran to both maintain its nuclear program and avoid internal collapse. Speaking endlessly about the need for pre-emptive war, and ‘the imminent threat’ from Pyongyang, when ordered back to the White House Bolton could have only assumed that this was a vindication of his world view.

It wouldn’t have taken him long to recognise his mistake. Arriving for work with the hopes of adding flesh to “Maximum Pressure” through tough new sanctions and the closing threat of war, the new U.S. National Security Advisor found a changing sentiment in the air. There might have been hopes that – as Dick Cheney did under George Bush – he could fill an outsized role in government, taking the reins where an under-educated, impulsive, and above-all-else disinterested, President would happily give them up; insisting only that credit returns without question, while failure stays delegated.

Bolton walked onto the job and found his staff hurriedly at work trying to organise the Singapore Summit. The detail was missing, the background work never done, but this wasn’t the problem that it might have been for previous National Security Advisors. Long tired of diplomatic procedure, this was an opportunity to cut through the mess, the soft tones and childlike hopefulness (throughout his decades working in federal bureaucracies, Bolton seemed to only grow less confident in the abilities of those around him). Face-to-face the American President could explain clearly the cliff edge that Kim Jong-un was on, and just how convincingly the North Koreans would have to work to avoid being pushed off.

Instead the meeting went ahead without concessions from Pyongyang and, inside the talks, when things did get face-to-face, vague Iran-esque commitments to denuclearisation were tentatively offered. Donald Trump walked out of this meeting speaking not of vindication and a return to pain and pressure, fire and fury, but of a successful summit; of an end to the North Korean nuclear threat, and even that “we fell in love”. Different motivations aside, Bolton was now looking at a Presidency that represented the same gullibility and lack of conviction that he previously only recognised in lower officials.

One of the forces pushing along those original negotiations with Iran was the belief that, with then-Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami, the Western allies had a unique and fleeting opportunity: Khatami was not just seen as a moderate political mind, but also a reformer. Being missed here through the smiles, handshakes and gestures of kinship, was the ideology. Iran is not run from the Presidency, but from the Supreme Leader; and it is not a democracy, but an Islamic Republic. Social change doesn’t cascade downward from electoral change, nor upward from popular sentiment. Iranians are a people trapped by ideas (central to their national identity) that are not open for error-correction.

Cosmetic change and the promise of new figure heads, are as little cause for optimism as shifts in the reverse direction. After Khatami, the Iranian public elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a student leader of the 1979 hostage crisis, a man who would openly talk about the need to destroy Israel, and someone who occasionally abandoned his own country’s diplomatic rhetoric by linking the Iranian nuclear and missile programs together. Given this, is it any wonder that Barrack Obama’s agreement with Iran was so widely criticised when it allowed for the free continuation of the latter half of this self-professed joint-program.

The mistake, that many people have read into the mind of John Bolton, is believing that he sees things through a text-book realist lens. Under this view, the world is a dangerous place because all states will inevitably act in their own self-interest. Part of this self-interest involves achieving ever-greater power in relation to other states, and even when allies or agreements might be found, the true intentions of those other states can never be known. And so the only rational way to treat the outside world is as hostile, even when it doesn’t appear to be so.

The Bolton school of international relations doesn’t do this! It looks more fundamentally at what states and their leaders actually think. This doesn’t get us to a more pleasant world, or even one less inclined to conflict, but it is an important layer of nuance; however slight it might seem.

As an Islamic Republic, Iran is a country in need of enemies. They are simply promising something that is beyond all human knowledge – the construction of a perfect society, free from unease, difficulty, and future problems. When the regime in Tehran inevitably fails to do this – as it, of course, already has – it is left with a simple choice: collapse under its failure to achieve this central promise, or find someone to blame, preferably beyond its borders (internal enemies have more chance of convincing people of their innocence). America fits the bill due to its strength, Israel due to scripture.

All irrational memes – ideas that resist change and can only survive through stasis – have this feature in common. They need protecting from their own deterioration, so higher-and-higher walls are built around them; walls that soon become a self-imposed prison for the people inside. 

When the Korean peninsula was first divided, it inadvertently separated the core centres of agriculture (South) and manufacturing (North). More socially cohesive as well as piggy-backing off China and the Soviet Union, North Korea under Kim Il-sung closed this gap more successfully. And he needed to: the national ideology that brought him to, and kept him in, power, centred on outcompeting the South; his was the better of the two Koreas, and so from him reunification would soon flow downward.

As things twisted in the other direction, Kim Il-sung introduced Juche thought. Sure, their South Korean brothers and sisters were increasingly better off than them, but that was only if you judged ‘better off’ in material terms. North Korea had what the South didn’t – or so the propaganda read – ‘self-reliance’, a ‘unique Korean identity’ and a ‘motherly leadership that would always provide for them’. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and North Korean agriculture – suddenly unable to import at discounted rates – collapsed with it. In 1994, the ‘Great Famine’ started just as the ‘Great Leader’ – Kim Il-sung – died.

His son, Kim Jong-il, soon to be the ‘Dear Leader’, needed to quickly explain away the nationwide suffering and his inability to remedy it; his inability to live up to his father’s ideological claim to rule. So ‘Songun’ — or ‘military first’ — was born. The new leader was under attack from the outside world – predominantly America – and the risk was so great that he would not be able to properly take care of his people as a result. A fake existential threat to excuse a real one.

It worked, but it came at a cost. The act needed actors, costumes, sets, and above all else, to continue. The only way to pull it off was to actually militarise the society, down to the last citizen. Kim Jong-il became the ‘Head of the Army’, enlisted soldiers were politically retrained, all citizens were required to do ten years of military service, cities became fortified, propaganda talked endlessly about leering enemies, and military equipment was hastily modernised. The most significant and easily understandable symbol of this was the reanimation of a nuclear weapons program.

This is what Kim Jong-un inherited, a country that accepts him as leader because they accept the idea that he is protecting them from outside enemies; and when his ‘final victory’ comes, it will also bring about the reunification of their nation. Just like the Iranians, North Koreans are trapped by their own ideology. Sure they can stop stoking conflict, stop launching missiles, stop testing nuclear weapons, stop threatening war, but with this normalisation also comes an end to the leadership’s legitimacy.

Kim Jong-un cannot step down from the nuclear ledge he is on, but not because he feels at risk from external attack. There is nothing in what John Bolton has ever said that would make someone believe that he understands this background, or has ever looked into the different tracks of North Korean propaganda. And yet his instinct on North Korea was right. They are not serious about denuclearisation, and never could be without precipitating their own collapse. With Bolton gone, the American administration likely misunderstands – dangerously so – North Korea more than it did with him there.

It appears that John Bolton rarely let a day go by without telling people that North Korea could not be dealt with through negotiation, trust-building or trade-off. At the second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, Bolton’s sceptical eyes shone through his President’s. Despite explicitly warning Kim Jong-un beforehand that another closure of the Yongbyon enrichment facility would not come close to satisfying his previous commitments, that was all he ended up offering. The sight of Donald Trump walking away from the chance to claim another superficial ‘victory’, was Bolton’s doing. And once again a vindication of everything Bolton already believed. North Korea was one of the monsters he saw in the world, and when you meet such a creature there are only two choices: “live with a North Korea with nuclear weapons, or look at military force”.

It’s when things get prescriptive that the Bolton mindset most palpably fails, doesn’t check its speed, refuses to break, and careens out-of-control around a much-too-sharp bend in the road. Not one to scoff at the value of sanctions, during his brief recess appointment as Ambassador to the United Nations, Bolton convinced the Security Council (for the first time) to begin economic restrictions on North Korea specifically for its nuclear weapons programs. But ideally, things should be a lot more hands-on. Bolton saw an international landscape that could, and should, be sculpted to measurement; even to the point of ignoring the expressed wills of the parties involved and instead personally devising a “three-state solution” for the Palestinian territories (under which, inexplicably, there was still no room for a Palestinian state).

This is where most of the recent unease around John Bolton seems to have come from. If he was capable of turning Trump’s back – if only briefly – on North Korea, then what else could he do? How much war, conflict and regime change would he commit America to if only he was given rein to do so by a delinquent president? (The only war that Bolton seems to have not approved of was the one he avoided serving in, despite being drafted: “I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy… I considered the war in Vietnam already lost”).

Yet, without the breakdown of normal order, the John Bolton’s of this world have their place. It is uncertain what new-National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, will do, nor the influence that he will have. However, we do know what he is unlikely not to be – headstrong, principled and defiant (the things that seemed to have brought about Bolton’s forced resignation). This is a loss to the administration and to the country. Bolton’s was a voice that deserved to be in the discussion – because, if for nothing else, he occasionally got things right in moments when everyone else was wrong.

When Bolton faced-down his European counterparts during the Iranian nuclear negotiations – “right, has everyone spoken?” – the sheet of paper that he read from outlined a simple new strategy: Iran would need to suspend all of its uranium enrichment, come into line with all of its International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) obligations, and until this happened nothing would even be considered in return.

At the time, new, advanced, and previously undisclosed centrifuges were being discovered in secret sites across Iran almost by the month – as were the numerous ways that Iran had been cheating on their safeguard obligations. Contrary to John Bolton, the Europeans however still saw Iran as a rational actor that was genuinely interested in re-entering the international community.

Soon, however, coalition troops across the border in Iraq were being killed by new, sophisticated, Iranian manufactured, improvised explosive devices (IED’s). Political Director for the U.K. Foreign Office, and the man that Bolton had butted heads most significantly with over Iran, John Sawers, then received a phone call from Tehran with a revised negotiating position. In Sawers’ words: “the Iranians wanted to be able to strike a deal whereby they stop killing our forces in Iraq, in return for them being allowed to carry on with their nuclear program”.

The Japan-Korea Trade War – An Analogy

Growing up he torments you, as older brothers tend to do. He is bigger, stronger, and he feels entitled. The bullying becomes violence, and then brutality. You complain, you plead, and you ask for help from family, neighbours, friends; anyone who might listen. They ignore you – they have other things to worry about. These are, after all, different times; pain and suffering is everywhere.

The years stretch-on, and buoyed by his own strength, your brother’s cruelty escalates. Soon he goes seeking new victims, and soon he overreaches. He bumps into someone more powerful, with more resources, and with the will to stand-up to him.

Defeated, beaten and on his knees, your brother begs for forgiveness. And to your horror, he is granted it. The man that stepped-up to conquer your brother – and so freeing you from his tyranny – is also the man that picks your brother out of the dirt, pulls him back to his feet, brushes off his clothes, and treats his wounds immediately after the fight.

You are liberated, but you are angry.

Years later you are in a bar, enjoying a night out with friends, and your brother walks in, happy, confident, and the life of the party. He looks different, older, changed. He speaks in softer tones, and with different language; he seems happy.

After a few minutes, he sees you from across the room, notably lowers his tone, and smiles through calm eyes and pursed lips. Conscious of your past, and of the pain he once inflicted upon you, he is now – as he has been in previous encounters – trying to come across as respectful, humble, even meek. It’s not enough! It never has been.

Occasionally you can forget, but the trauma always bounces back, and always feels fresh. He has apologised to you more than once over the years, sitting down, listening to your grief, revisiting the past, and even once handing over money for those “lost years”.

Looking at him now, that familiar anger grows inside you, the feeling that he got off too lightly. You notice that he is wearing nicer clothes than you, his friends appear more interesting than yours, and you know already that he has a better job. Seeing him like this makes you feel small again, his strength a memory of a weakened version of yourself.

Now in a rage, you slam down your drink and walk over to confront your brother. You loudly demand another apology, and that he write you another cheque on the spot. He stares back at you sedately, and says “no”. He has reformed himself, he says, never relapsing into the aggressive man that he once was, and has prostrated himself on too many occasions; always to be asked to do so again only a few years later.

“Besides”, he continues, “what is the point in an apology if it never ‘actually’ changes anything, if it doesn’t improve things between us?”

Comfortable in your moral claim, and familiar with him yielding to your righteousness, you are taken aback by this change. You fumble over your words and what to do next. But you have made a scene, and now everyone in the bar is watching you. Feeling that you can’t back down without losing something important about yourself, without again becoming that bullied little boy, you challenge him to a fight. Surprising you again, he accepts!

Scared, but committed, you shove him. He shoves you back a little harder. You punch him, and he punches you back just a little harder. You are slowly getting beat up. A panicked realisation builds-up inside you – you are in over your head! Your brother is still bigger than you, and undeniably stronger. Sure, you can now hurt him, but not to the extent that he can hurt you. You can’t win this fight!

Through the blood and the bruises you try to keep up a confident act, but your poise is fading. It dawns on you rapidly that the only way out of this is to walk away, and to hope that you don’t look too sheepish while doing so.

The Politics of Karl Popper - Part 5: David Deutsch, the Future and Infinity

The problem of how knowledge accumulates in the world – of how it is that we can know anything at all – is the most important lesson that our species could ever learn. The implications of this understanding reach into every field of study, into every improvement, into everything we do or could ever possibly do. And so understandably – for most of our history – it was also the philosophical problem that attracted the sharpest minds, the most intellectual energy, and which nagged most heavily upon us by our consistent failure to solve it.

And yet when Karl Popper did so, very few people paid any attention, and those who did showed a remarkable ability – despite the simplicity of his answer – to misunderstand him. Before Popper – despite the gap in our knowledge – everything felt a little more elegant, neat and high minded. It was all completely wrong, but it was also, quite consciously, a race to the top; or the bottom depending on your metaphor. People were searching for a foundation, the bedrock of who we are, and a place from where we could build ourselves up into giants. The impulse was noble, and yet entirely misguided – the only thing they were right about was the ‘giant’ part.

Instead of seeking to understand the foundation of knowledge, Popper showed instead that knowledge can’t possibly have one. A foundation to knowledge, is a claim that something is so incontrovertible that it cannot be challenged, because the very question ‘why is that the foundation and not something else?’ is a state of doubt, and a foundation is, by definition, an obvious truth. And it is only once you are certain about a foundation that you can then be certain about the truths you build upon it. Something that can be questioned, is something that isn’t certain.

This is a clean, neat and reductionary way of thinking about the problem of knowledge – it is also totalitarian, and doesn’t take into account the place in which we actually find ourselves, and what is actually available to us. Popper solved this problem by asking a different question – the correct question – and so showed that our interactions with the world, and even ourselves, is a theory-laden process; we never perceive anything as it actually is. Our senses and instincts always lead us astray, because unseen theories about reality (knowledge) don’t resemble what we see. We only come to true theories through long chains of conjecture. If knowledge came to us directly from the senses, then our theory about stars for example would still hold that they are small, cold, twinkling objects; rather than massive, hot spheres of nuclear explosions.

This difficult relationship that we have with reality, means that the natural state of things is error. We are wrong about everything, all the time. And when we do believe that something is true, it can never be said to be for certain; only that it is the best available theory that we currently have. Rather than a hierarchical order, where truth builds upon truth like bricks upon a steady and unchanging foundation, the process of knowledge creation is like being dropped blindfolded, in the middle of the night, into a vast and unfamiliar swamp. The mud immediately reaches your waist, and you have no idea what is the best direction to head for dry land. All you can do is take a tentative step forward in any one direction (conjecture), and once there make a judgement as to whether it feels better or worse than where you started from. If you judge it to be worse (refutation) – the water is deeper or the mud thicker – you don’t necessarily move back to where you began, but perhaps in a completely different direction that you feel (again conjecture) might be better than both. And so on.

Most unsettling about this, is the realisation that when you finally, and painstakingly, crisscross your way – after countless corrections – toward a path that feels like progress, you can still never be sure that you are actually heading in the right direction. The water may be getting shallower, the ground under your feet feeling more solid, the swarms of mosquitoes less thick and less aggressive, but that steady incline you are on might just be a small sandbar in an otherwise deeper and more inhospitable part of the swamp. Your next step takes you over its edge, and now with water above your head you are swimming desperately back the way you came (again refutation).

When your solution to a problem sounds like this, is it any wonder that people instinctively turn away? But this is the same instinct that causes people to turn away from democracy in favour of authoritarianism, to prefer the status quo to social progress, and to fear technology and the future – worst of all, to not appreciate the infinite reach of human beings.

David Deutsch – an Oxford physicist and the father of quantum computation – came to Karl Popper in the tragic way that most people do – by chance and accident. It was an off-hand comment by a university professor who, despite not quite understanding Popper, was aware that Popper had solved the problem of how knowledge accumulates in the world. Immediately recognising that he was dealing with a higher level of argument than what he had encountered before, that small poke sent Deutsch off in new directions. There were no fudges, no strains of reasoning; the world Popper drew a light on was messy, but his theory was clean-edged and exact.

Everything that Deutsch would do from this moment had the unmistakable echoes of Karl Popper behind it. And though Popper embraced the mess and grind because it was true, Deutsch also saw something beyond this. There was suddenly unique reason to be optimistic, not simply because progress could be made, but that we – if we play our cards right – will be able to understand and control the universe without limit; that progress could be literally infinite.

It is a broad and expansive line that takes us back to the birth of our species in the Great Rift Valley. Evolving as we did in that eastern corner of Africa, things appeared perfect by most metrics that we use today – the skies were clear, the rivers clean, and the surrounding environment as untouched by our footprint as by that of any other animal. Of course, it was also a situation for which we were genetically well suited. And yet we never had it so bad – stalked by predators, constantly on the edge of starvation, and with no protection from extreme weather, every moment was one of suffering and fear. We know now from the fossil record – just as has been the case with all other species that have ever existed – that this same environment in which we evolved, almost killed us.

It all comes down to the limitations of genetic knowledge. Relying upon undirected mutations, the constant improvements needed to keep ahead of natural changes in the environment, are just not something that evolution is capable of doing; at least not at the speed required. But even if it were able to do so, then those benefits would also apply to other animals (including our predators), and we would still have to suffer the same horrors and constant risk of extinction by virtue of the ensuing evolutionary arms race (micro-organisms and bacteria such as cholera bacillus evolved in this way specifically to kill human beings).

The only way that we ever managed to keep our heads above water, was with a new type of knowledge altogether – ‘explanatory knowledge’. No longer relying on the information in our genes, we could suddenly create knowledge ourselves. The process behind this remained a mystery until Karl Popper came along, but nonetheless it pulled us slightly out of the mud, and gave us the ability to dramatically change the world around us… if we chose to. The trouble was, people rarely ever did.

The immediate descendants of those people in the Great Rift Valley, despite migrating to new territory, and spreading out across the world, continued to live lives of incredible misery and desperation – the threat of death and extinction always biting at their heels. They had brains identical to our own, and so they also had the capacity to improve things exponentially. Yet – again from the archaeological and anthropological records – we know that from the standing point of any individual, nothing ever improved; the world that people were born into was also the world they died in (the artefacts – technology – we find from these periods can only be measured to an accuracy of about 10,000 years). The natural state of things was complete-and-utter stasis. This is hard to imagine based on how fast technology is improving today, and even harder to imagine when we realise that these people desired change just as much as we currently do.

Whether it was better hunting methods, better shelter, better clothing or better ways to protect themselves, our ancestors were constantly aware of how they wanted to improve their lives – they just didn’t know how to. And following this pattern, the vast majority of human history became one of unimaginable suffering, terror and extinction – right up until the Enlightenment

What changed at this moment, and what hadn’t existed until then (or at least hadn’t survived its early moments), was the establishment of what Deutsch calls a “tradition of criticism”. It came about largely through accident, and largely without people understanding its significance, but they had stumbled onto – in part – Karl Popper’s breakthrough long before he was born. Before this, all ‘traditions’ did just the opposite – they sought to avoid criticism, to avoid change, and to maintain stasis. The importance of this moment isn’t properly appreciated, because neither are the horrors of the static societies that came before it.

Unwilling to allow criticism, and therefore unable to make progress, we just don’t have any real record for most of these unchanging civilizations. They just didn’t survive long enough to etch themselves too deeply into history. Unable to innovate and correct errors, the first major, unexpected problem that came their way invariably wiped them out.

It was only by rejecting so-called authorities, and being free to question and criticise the world around us, that we began making rapid progress. And yet this still felt to many as cold comfort. We were improving our lives in remarkable ways, and yet for every problem we solved, new unforeseen problems were created (the industrial revolution was a solution to poverty, only for the by-product of those improved living standards – carbon – to become an existential threat of its own).

It still felt like we were only just a step or two ahead of death. That sooner-or-later we would begin to push-up against the ultimate limits of our knowledge, and so the next problem we faced could be a step too far – David Deutsch saw something different. Just as Popper had accepted the messy reality of things before him, Deutsch too started from a point of acceptance - “we shall never reach anything like an unproblematic state”. And so it is true that we might be doomed, but not regardless of what we choose to do. We can survive!

Every time we make progress we are solving problems, and every time we solve a problem, of any kind, we are creating new problems – but they are also better problems. The fact that problems keep arising, is never something that we will be able to fix. To be able to do so, would entail having access to future knowledge, to understand the unforeseeable. Yet despite not being able to comprehend future knowledge, we do have the capacity to deal with it – without limit. It all comes from that unique ability of ours to create explanatory knowledge, because there exists an intimate relationship between explaining the world and controlling it.

This is something that we do all the time, in what now often seems mundane ways. The world around us today, just as it was for our ancestors in the Great Rift Valley, is still a death trap. The only reason it doesn’t feel as such anymore, is by virtue of the explanatory knowledge we have already created. We no longer think about the problems of staying warm in winter, ensuring a constant food supply, or of avoiding waste-borne diseases, only because we have already invented clothing, agriculture and sewerage systems. The only people that do still think about these things, are those people trying to improve them (error-correction). Without the layers of technology that we have already built around us, most of us would die almost immediately – and yet for the most part we are thriving.

The only thing that makes any environment hospitable, is what the inhabitants of it actually know. And what we know, we can control. We might still fail to solve problems in time – in which case we will go the way of all other life – but through a commitment to learn from, and correct our mistakes – to always move on and embrace better-and-better problems – we have a chance… our only chance. And there is reason to be optimistic here. It is a messy, reality-based optimism just like Popper’s theory of knowledge – but also like Popper it is precise and doesn’t hinge upon utopianism.

It starts by doing away with hopes of prevention or delay. Approaches like these can be useful in dealing with any individual problem, but they can never constitute a future strategy in themselves. Trying to protect against – or trying to limit once they happen – future problems that we don’t yet know about, is a strategy that will quickly find its ceiling. It has the same logic of being told by a doctor that instead of treating your broken leg, he will instead show you how to avoid breaking it again in the future. For all its high-minded intent, it does nothing for your predicament right now – and in terms of existential threats, it means we only have to be wrong once for the whole project of humanity to end. To focus on problem avoidance rather than problem solving, will achieve very little of either.

Not only are these threats out there, and not only do we not know what they are, let alone how to deal with them, but there are also enemies of civilization – people who would seek to end the whole project by their own hand. Yet what all these problems have in common is their solubility, and what all these people have in common is that they are wrong. Thinking otherwise is not just to adopt the mindset of a static society, but also to adopt a mindset that – according to Deutsch – is deeply unscientific. Karl Popper has given us the tools to always stay ahead of these problems and these people, but it requires nothing less than a total commitment to achieving rapid, open-ended progress – the type of progress that static society ideology is just not capable of.

But this is not just a parochial arms race addressing cosmologically insignificant events, it is also our ‘Beginning of Infinity’. Stepping firmly ahead of Popper now, Deutsch saw what for some people might sound like a truism but – yet just like with Popper before him – has been almost completely misunderstood. That is, ‘any physical transformation not explicitly forbidden by the laws of nature, is achievable given the right knowledge’. It is hard for the full gravity of that statement to set in. It means that we can reach out across the universe, manipulate planets and stars as easily as we now do TV channels, and regulate the conditions of galaxies as easily as we now regulate the temperature of bedrooms. It means that the alchemists were onto something, they only failed to create gold because they didn’t have enough knowledge.

If there is a limit to what we can achieve, then that limit is also discoverable, comprehensible, and a law of nature. In the absence of such a law, everything – absolutely everything – is possible. And so we are capable of changing everything (the universe) at will, because there can be no such thing as a solution beyond our reach. Sure our problems often feel parochial – and they often are – but this is just because we are only at the beginning of David Deutsch’s infinity (and always will be).

When people talk about our niche in the universe being precarious, that we are insignificant, and so we need to be cautious and humble in what we do and what we desire, they are doing the one thing that will spell the end of humanity – turning away from rapid, open-ended progress, and toward stasis and stagnation. But perhaps worse, they are wrong! As beings capable of creating new knowledge (explanatory knowledge), and therefore of affecting the universe without limit, it follows from physics that we are of the deepest cosmic significance.

It is hard to imagine a universe without limitation in this way – and so the tendency is to imagine instead that even though explanatory knowledge has this unique reach to it, and although we have the capacity to create explanatory knowledge, we are still limited by our biology. Maybe other beings will be able to control the universe in this unbounded way, maybe even better evolved versions of ourselves in millions of years’ time, but not us! We are too broken, too incomplete, too much a product of our messy evolution. This misses the point of explanatory knowledge, and with it the lesson of universality.

Explanatory knowledge is a launch point, an escape valve after which there cannot be any other limitations, because with explanatory knowledge those limitations (problems) can simply be solved. And if we decide that the problem is our biological selves, then we could also simply solve this through improvements in our culture or nano-surgery in our brains. Without a foundation, our minds are completely fungible, and expandable without limit – we are entirely re-writable software. The principle of the ‘Universality of Computation’ means that there can be only one way of doing computation, and so the structure of our minds already contains the structure of everything. It feels god-like, but it is true, we are universal beings!

An open-ended stream of explanations is always available to us. The limitation is never resources (because all resources only become so by virtue of what people actually know) but only knowledge. It is never going to be pretty, but we can begin to step ourselves out of Karl Popper’s swamp, and to do so at ever greater speed. Progress of this kind in any one area, is also intimately linked with knowledge and progress in other areas; if technology continues to lead the way in this regard, as it does today, then progress in politics and morality will follow closely behind. The only dangerous thing we can do, is to think that some solutions are beyond our reach. “What lies ahead of us is in any case infinity. All we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, wrong or right, death or life.”

The Politics of Karl Popper - Part 4: Social Progress, Morality and Rugby

It is all a lot more fundamental than it sounds – it’s a question of how knowledge accumulates in the world.

There is an unnecessary focus on details here, but they do need restating: Israel Folau is a hulking – and once much loved – Australian rugby player who takes his religious faith seriously. So serious in fact, that he is now willing to risk his career and reputation over the question of whether or not gay people are going to hell. He thinks they are, and that they can still be saved if only they repent and reform. Australian Rugby thinks differently, and so seemingly parochial questions of offense, freedoms, and contractual responsibilities are being arbitrated in strangely public ways.

This is only because – despite Karl Popper solving the issue a century ago – most people still don’t understand how it is that we can know anything; how it is that knowledge develops, and with it how progress – moral or technological – is ever possible. It is not an overstatement to say that we have forgotten the most important lesson that our species could ever learn.

The details of what was said, what was breeched, who was offended, and what freedoms are protected, just don’t matter when it comes to the question of what should be done about Israel Folau. The improvement in gay rights over recent decades is undoubtedly a positive, and not something that most people would want to wind back. But though the attachment to this progress is charged with heavy emotion, the only reason that it isn’t reversed, is one that is cold, impersonal, and above all, explanatory.

It has always tended to lag behind technology, but moral progress is happening all around us, all the time. But that doesn’t mean that the growth of moral knowledge (and knowledge in general) is linear. All theories that claim to start from a foundation are not only false, but cruel. The idea that something is known for certain, carries the imputation that questioning that certainty deserves punishment. Because only someone who is deliberately malicious dares to criticise what they know to be true.

It is unsurprising then, that for most of human history the permanent state of things has been stagnation and suppression. Every time we discover new knowledge, the next question can always be ‘why that way, and not another’. A foundation doesn’t allow this – and without questioning of this kind we cannot discover problems, let alone solve them. And so until the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, in the course of any given human life nothing ever really improved. The world you were born into was the world you died in; almost entirely unchanged.

For these people, the problem wasn’t bad ideas – because bad ideas are the general state of things – but rather ideas about the world that discouraged change. New ways of organising political institutions, health care, marriage, or even new ways of understanding what constitutes a good life for example, weren’t just dismissed as wrong, but silenced as heretical. The problem here is the issue of fundamentals – people believed that knowledge came from authorities, and that this knowledge was also self-evident.

With this bug in our thinking, a large chunk of philosophical thought was dedicated to questions of ‘who should rule’ or ‘how do we get the best people into power’. The question itself was wrong. Instead of asking who should rule, Karl Popper turned it over and wanted instead to know ‘how do we best remove bad leaders’. What he had stumbled on was an understanding that the natural state of things is error, and that the truth is never obvious. So what is needed is not authorities, but constant error-correction and a tradition of criticism – a commitment to rapid change and recursive improvement.

This doesn’t mean that no one can ever say that a particular moral theory is better than another, but rather that moral progress is available to us only because no one has a claim – as they did for most of our history – to understand the future growth of knowledge. We have come a long way, and every piece of that progress was fought tooth-and-nail by people claiming to know what was always beyond them (and always an obvious tautology): tomorrow’s knowledge, today.

This also applied to the advocacy of gay rights. At every step people were saying not just that homosexuality was immoral and therefore should be illegal or limited, but also that this would remain true into the future. You only have to go back fifteen or twenty years and the consensus in every country – no matter how enlightened – was against gay marriage… at a minimum. This was – at the time – as foundational a moral principle as that of murder or theft being wrong.

It was only by embracing Karl Popper, and the acceptance that no truth is so incontrovertible that it cannot be questioned, that gay rights advocates ever got a hearing, and then slowly managed to snowball those early noises into broader acceptance, and eventually social change.

The change happened by explanation. By the open challenge of one set of ideas, by a better set of ideas. People were not shamed or coerced into changing their minds, they were convinced. This is how knowledge works: most of us have this strange impression that knowledge is literally transferable, that it can be downloaded from one person to another. This is wrong in so many ways – it can’t possibly exist like this. When someone changes their mind or gains some form of new knowledge, they have in fact given it to themselves – acquired only, and always, through that individual’s creative engagement with it.

The set of problems that got Karl Popper motivated here, was that of induction and empiricism. Essentially the claims that we comprehend the world through our senses, and that our experienced reality resembles unexperienced true theories. Popper again turned this over – our thoughts about the world only come to us through long chains of conjecture; reality is always theory laden, and so it is always deceptive. 

People listened, they thought about it, and finally they came to understand that the gay rights movement was not just championing moral change, but moral improvement. Arguments against this were less credible, were built on bad explanations, and so proved to be less convincing over time.

Popper exposed the messiness of our enterprise here. There is no hierarchy to knowledge, and what feels like truth or progress might be revealed as false, or as regression, at any moment. Any claim to the contrary is a claim to understand what is impossible – the future growth of knowledge. Considering how far we have come in recent years, or indeed how the morality of only a few hundred years ago now seems abhorrent to us, the only reasonable thing to project is that our moral standards will continue to improve. And our descendants in a hundred years will look back on us with the same – if not greater – level of disgust, and in ways that we cannot yet imagine.

This is as sure as anything that we understand in science or philosophy – prophesy is not available to us. All we can know is that moral improvements are coming our way – if we play our cards right. Just what those improvements are likely to be, we can never know until we have the explanations.

The lesson here – and particularly for people wanting to protect gay rights – cannot be clearer: it is always a mistake to try to silence opposition and criticism, no matter how upsetting those arguments may be. If we allow institutions to impose today’s moral values by coercion, then we must also accept that this would have mandated that those early gay rights advocates – openly challenging accepted norms and offending the standards of their day – be silenced also. It may feel like the compassionate thing to do, but protecting feelings also means that soon enough the immoral, the barbaric, and bigoted, will also have that tool in their arsenal.

Forget gay marriage, forget legalisation of homosexuality at all for that matter. If the values of our predecessors had been immune from criticism – in the same way that certain people now want to be immune from Israel Folau’s criticism – then we would still have those old values today. Women would still be second class citizens, racism would be the norm, and the thought of allowing gay men and women a voice would be a great blasphemy.

The second half of Popper’s equation – after conjecture – is refutation. It is not that we adopt theories as true, but only that we don’t discard them as false if they survive in the face of criticism. Without this second step, we are only ever guessing blindly at truth – rigorous testing knocks down bad ideas, leaves good ideas standing, and only then is progress possible.

So it is always a mistake to allow anyone to wall-off their truth claims. And we should not respect anyone who – once they have achieved the small piece of salutary progress that matters most to them – would then seek to shut down all criticism of that progress. Having benefited from Popper’s open society, and their freedom to speak their mind without limit, they would seek to burn the bridges behind them, and again claim to be the final arbiters of truth. If silencing people by the moral standards of the day were appropriate, then we would still be living in the dark ages. 

Truth has a rare property that separates it from falsehood: it is strengthened by criticism and not weakened. It doesn’t need to be shielded, or protected – the more people are allowed to hammer away at it, the clearer it becomes. Israel Folau, if he could, would turn back the clock not just on gay rights but also on (in his own words) “drunks, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, idolaters”. We have a choice: to challenge him and let his arguments fail on their own grounds, to prove him wrong; or to simply – and dangerously – insist that he shuts up.

Israel Folau might lose his court case, and if so it will be on the principle that employers have the right to impose their moral values – or the consensus values of society – upon their employees. This is a loss for everyone involved. It means we are again in the business of outsourcing our truth claims to authorities, of empowering those people with the ability to silence dissent, and so we are also in the business of locking in the values of today against future change. Instead Karl Popper would have us meet Israel Folau’s challenge head on, test his understanding of gay rights against our own, and break him down only with argument. Popper knew, as so many people seem to have now forgotten, that the source of all tyranny comes from the idea that the truth is manifest…

From here, the possibilities for what we can do, and what we can become, are literally infinite… Continued in part 5

The Politics of Karl Popper - Part 3: Totalitarianism and Tiananmen

It is something so instinctively true that it barely needs repeating – democracy matters because it is about freedom, rights and empowerment. It satisfies, as much as anything, an emotional need. And yet this is completely wrong! So much so, that thinking of this kind is in fact a pathway in the opposite direction – toward domination, disenfranchisement and totalitarianism.

It is true that we should be able to elect and remove our political leaders, and yet by focussing on the hiring process we edge ourselves closer to tyranny – wilfully handing over the keys to our own society. Writing during the rise of Nazism, Karl Popper applied his “war effort” to understanding the psychology of totalitarianism. Where most people saw answers in biology or social conditioning, Popper instead found a technical – even mundane – sounding truth. It packaged up other such theories, simplified the whole process, and exposed the unlikely space that totalitarianism needs to survive. And having come so far, having embraced democracy so substantially today, it is a risk that we – often – no longer recognise.

The ability to elect our political leaders does nothing to ensure that those leaders won’t become tyrannical, or even that democracy will be a better functioning system than an authoritarian one. In fact it has almost become fashionable today for people to question the value of the democratic systems we live under, and to do so in comparison with the rise of seemingly cleaner, faster growing, and less problematic systems like that in China today. From all directions it feels like non-despotic, developmentally-focussed, authoritarian regimes like these are simply capable of things that democracies are not.

Sure, the trade-off is slightly unpleasant, but for many people it feels increasingly acceptable: the citizens have their voices marginalised or ignored, and in return unbelievably impressive things can be achieved. Without concern for civil liberties, crime can be addressed a lot more swiftly and comprehensively, limitations on development can be removed without fuss, and large-scale national policies can be introduced without regional pushback or legal challenges. The ability of the Chinese government to reach decisively into society, to mobilize people and resources, and to control the direction of change and progress so completely, feels not only like a good thing, but also exactly what most modern democracies are lacking.

Marred by political infighting, bogged down by the need for compromise, limited by parliamentary diversity, and constrained by the legal challenges of minor groups, democracy increasingly feels middling, messy and unproductive. So we get national, resigned-to-the-outcome mantras like ‘it doesn’t matter who you vote for, they are all the same’. Democracies just don’t feel designed for rapid progress, or even for passing good policies into law. And in the event that the stars do align in this regard, the next electoral cycle is always never too far away, and any good work can be undone by a new government, incentivised by the adversarial nature of our politics to roll back the changes even if they agree with the previous policies.

This stasis and inaction is most apparent when compared with Chinese style authoritarianism. Crackdowns like that in Tiananmen Square are unpleasant, and something most people would not like to see happen in their own country. But as a price to pay for a far superior political system, and the promise of noticeable improvements in their lives, those same people often become envious. It begins to look like a compromise worth making. And this is where the discussion ends, in a simple choice between a system that makes rapid progress, and a system that respects individual rights; of which the right to vote is one.

This is a completely false understanding of the value of democracy, and with it the limitations of authoritarianism. Democracy isn’t about electing the best leaders, it’s about removing bad ones as quickly, effectively and bloodlessly as possible. There is a historical element in our failure to understand Karl Popper here – and our failure to understand the origins of totalitarianism. The Chinese state represents a long tradition – not limited to any country or people – as universal as anything else we have.

Our first clearly recognisable attempt at an Enlightenment – ancient Athens – was not an attempt to keep things the same, but rather to open-up old ideas, values and institutions to criticism; and so with it bring about change. Socrates paid the ultimate price for this, famously put to death for the charge of ‘corrupting the youth’. Traumatised by this moment, yet also emboldened by his teacher’s courage, Plato internalised a reasonably sensible lesson. He sought to avoid these types of mistakes by devising a better, perfect society, governed by perfect leaders. As Plato saw Socrates’ death as a problem of who held power – in this case they weren’t the right people, and so they couldn’t see the mistake they were making. The idea of ruling by authority, or of deferring to traditions, wasn’t wrong in itself – it was only that they had the wrong authorities and wrong traditions.

And this instinct – now replicated in places like China – is understandable. It is a product of what Popper called the “strain of civilization” – the deep insecurity that comes from a rejection of tribalism (belonging) and the embrace of fallibilism. The idea that all authorities, regardless of their claims to knowledge, are hopelessly flawed (just like the rest of us) and so the only reasonable thing to do is to shake-off the claims of parent-figures, and to embrace a world whose natural state is error. It’s not easy. Personal responsibility and individual freedom are always inseparable from anxiety, fear and isolation. It is the shift away from the childlike impulse to find a protective and all-knowing parent. And for Popper, it is the choice between living in an ‘Open Society’ or a ‘Closed Society’.

And for all the well-meaning intentions of Plato, he couldn’t bring himself to make the adult choice. By dreaming up the perfect ‘Republic’, he was consciously creating a hierarchical order that could never be challenged, never be changed, and so had the same qualities of the system that he wanted to reform. Stuck on the question of “who should rule?”, he was – without realising it – simply trying to replace one tyranny with another. And this is where the arguments in favour of modern totalitarianisms, like that in China, begin to breakdown. The person willing to abrogate their rights in exchange for increased wealth, standards of living, and global power, is still making a mistake on those very grounds.

China has a one-party political system, and for the sake of argument let us afford those people at the top of the party (those people running the country) something that no leader ever deserves – good intentions. Let’s just say they aren’t in it for themselves, but only for the betterment of the Chinese nation – and that they accept the responsibility to rule only because they honestly see no one else who is better qualified. They see themselves as best fitting Plato’s criterion for government – they are the best people for the job. And from their position they probably feel this is true, which again runs us a little closer to the real issue here.

The protestors in Tiananmen Square thirty years ago were fighting against corruption and for democracy, yet what they were really doing was something a lot simpler – they were offering criticism. There were certain things about Chinese society – foremost their lack of a say in how they were being governed – that they disagreed with. And they chose to protest in the manner they did, only because they didn’t have any other forum under which to try and correct the errors they believed they had found. However, the Chinese government saw only a break in social harmony, a risk to economic growth, and the feeling of history repeating itself and their country collapsing back into internal conflict and maybe even civil war. It’s the same impulse that Plato had when he wrote that social justice “is nothing but health, unity and stability of the collective body”.

Individuals on the streets, blockading public areas, and disrupting everyday life, can certainly have an unpleasant feel about it. Anyone that disagrees with the purpose of their protest is also likely to resent the imposition. The decision made by the Chinese government on June 4th in Tiananmen Square was misunderstood by those on both ends of it. The values underlying it – the desire for a direct political voice vs. the desire to maintain harmony at all costs – obscured what was actually happening. It sounded again like a question of ‘who should rule?’, but it was a plain – even mundane – attempt to error-correct mistakes. And whether it is Plato in Athens or Deng Xiaoping in China, the rejection of avenues to error-correction has implications far beyond any individual event.

Both Plato’s ‘Republic’ and modern day China are examples of Closed Societies – and both charge forward toward the same strange and impossible place – the idea that tomorrow’s knowledge can be known today. To reject ideas as wrong – which happens every day in democracies around the world – is a completely different behaviour from that of stopping new ideas from ever bubbling-up, from ever being voiced let alone heard, and from the impact of those ideas ever being felt. The latter might feel cleaner, more efficient, and even more appropriate if the ideas in question appear ridiculous, but what is being lost is more than messiness – it is also the only means by which we can actually improve things.

Authoritarianism is a surrender of the individual – the interests of any one person in favour of the interests of the state. The sacrifice in lives and suffering under the crackdown at Tiananmen was easily justified under the shadow of China’s collective strength and prosperity. This is a hallmark of all authoritarianisms – it comes in different forms, in different justifications, and with different ‘higher’ principles, but the individual is always expendable when compared to the state. This is not just possible to accept, but even axiomatic, once a certain conception of history becomes mainstream truth. That is, the flow of history is governed by predictable laws, that these laws are easily comprehensible, and that they point in a clear direction; an end-game. This is ‘Historicism’, and the mistake that Popper saw in it, that so many people seemed to have strangely missed – or naively bought into – was not just the claim that the truth is manifest, but that the future is also predictable.

Plato built his Republic on this foundation, as did almost every other political philosopher that came after him. Whether it was based on aristocratic order, divine rule, race-based nationalism, or workers seizing the means of production, all these visions involved focussing on a small set of known problems and then imagining that their resolution would be the last ones ever needed. There simply wouldn’t be any more problems, or that any future problems would be parochial matters; tinkering on the fringes. In short, they were all utopian. Before the full horrors of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union were widely known, Popper knew what they would be. Systems which elevate the collective above the individual, that censor criticism, that centralise control, and that impose rigid hierarchies, are systems predisposed to tyranny and horror.  

Which brings us back to those moments in Tiananmen, and the apparent successes of Chinese authoritarianism. Many critics saw the crackdown as a sign of a deeper illness, something that might not kill its host right away, but that in time, inexorably, would do so. The hope they shared was that political defiance – no matter how ineffectual it might feel at the time – will slowly shift people’s perceptions, further unrest will grow, and eventually it all snowballs into political overthrow.

Though coming from a different direction, there is a touch of Historicism about this type of thinking too. All questions of inevitability are fallacies. The sickness in the Chinese model has nothing to do with their ability – or lack thereof – to control future dissent, but rather the lack of error-correction that they are allowing into their political decision-making. By creating a system that supersedes the individual, China – and other authoritarianisms – are claiming an immunity to error; or that it is enough for the select few people in positions of power to error-correct each other, in house.

Popper showed that all knowledge is conjectural. It doesn’t come to us through the senses, and our experiences of the world around us don’t reveal true theories; instead everything is theory laden. The fact that we can ever know anything is only by an uncertain method of proposing theories (educated guesses), and then testing those theories against criticism – conjecture and refutation. At the point when a theory survives exposure to the best available criticism, we don’t adopt it as true, we only don’t reject it as false; always leaving open the possibility that future criticisms – which we can’t conceive of today – might force us to abandon it altogether.

Being wrong is the natural state of things, and no truth can ever be so incontrovertible that it should be walled-off from criticism. To do so, is to claim an understanding of what is not available to anyone – the future growth of knowledge. Truth and progress only come about through the open challenge of one set of ideas by another – bad ideas are destroyed by this process, and good ones are strengthened.

Popper matched his political theory to this theory of knowledge. Instead of reaching too far, and imposing too many values that might be hard to challenge or change, democracy should be minimalist – designed to do nothing more than fix mistakes by removing bad leaders and bad policies quickly, and without violence. And constitutions – or any other means of defending the value of democracy – should simply “make anti-democratic experiences too costly for those who try them: much more costly than a democratic compromise”.

By silencing the protestors at Tiananmen, and anyone else that has tried to follow their example, China is closing itself off to a broader range of ideas, a broader range of criticism for existing ideas, and a broader means of error-correction. The limited range of error-correction happening inside the Chinese Communist Party today might have been sufficient to transform China into a global power, but that is only because there are greater levels of error-correction there now (though still limited) than existed under the shadow of Mao Zedong. The Great Leap Forward was a mistaken policy,; what turned it into a human catastrophe was a fear of criticising it as a policy, and the silencing of those people who dared to do so.

The correction of mistakes is the only means of making progress that we have available to us. By limiting this into the hands of a select few people, China was also limiting its ability to respond to failures, to make changes, and to improve things. If it wasn’t the Great Leap Forward, it was the Cultural Revolution, if not the Cultural Revolution then it would have been something else. China today is no longer making this same level of mistake simply because it has allowed more criticism than it did previously.

Yet by still limiting this range of criticism to those select few people in the upper hierarchy of the Communist Party, China continues to expose itself to unnecessary levels of mistakes. They are unlikely to be as obvious as the calamities of the past, but they are happening, and they will continue to do so. And this doesn’t just relate to the creation of bad policies, but also a sluggishness in recognising them as bad, and then the failure to replace them with something better; again as quickly as possible. If we are being generous with the number of people in the elite circles of the Chinese Communist Party holding any real power, we might accept a figure of about a thousand – and a thousand-odd people doing error correction is just not as good as what could be nearly a billion in a Chinese democracy. A billion people looking for errors in their society, a billion people suggesting alternatives, and a billion people constantly – and loudly – judging policy outcomes.

Democracy is messy, annoying and frustrating, but only because knowledge creation is also. Anyone, or any government, claiming to be an authority, to be beyond criticism, or claiming that any given truth is self-evident (that they know it for certain) is simply making the same mistake that doomed almost every human society that has ever existed. They are always on the edge of something unpleasant, of a new Great Leap Forward, or of something much worse. Countries like China may look prosperous, successful, or even worth emulating, but they are exposed to catastrophe and limited in their ability to make progress in a way that no democracy is.

And that limitation is not just political, or technical, but moral as well… Continued in part 4