Mind over matter? Well, it's not that easy a battle

Some days I wake up horribly early.

I know, I know. It means I’m getting older. It’s the only explanation. But before you do any gloating, just remember – so are you.

On occasion, if I’m awake at around 5:30, I think “I really ought to go for a swim.” This is because I’m convinced that I need exercise. If nothing else, it might help me sleep through the night and not wake up before the alarm goes off.

But a conviction that it would do me good isn’t the same as any enthusiasm for the prospect of exercise. Especially wet exercise. So I may be up and making coffee at quarter to six in the morning, completely convinced that this is a great opportunity for a swim, but it doesn’t mean I actually want to.

Inviting? Not at stupid o'clock in the morning

Why swimming at that time of day? Well, firstly because the pool is open to its full 50 metre length. So you don't have to turn so often. Which is a boon. Besides, I find that after three or four hours work, I’m even less inclined to struggle into the pool than at the crack of dawn; after seven or eight hours, reluctance at the idea turns into abhorrence. 

So it has to be first thing.

Now the reluctance isn’t intellectual. The mind is fully convinced that I’m going swimming. Which is easy enough for the mind. It isn’t the mind that has to deal with the water. It can loftily choose to do this horrible thing; the victim, the one that has to undergo the experience, is the body.

What therefore comes into play is that deep, veiled will that’s buried in our bodies themselves. It knows it can’t challenge the mind directly: it’ll always lose a rational argument. Instead it acts deviously, it works by misdirection.

“Look!” it says, “Washing up. You said you’d get it done.”

Washing up doesn’t take long. Might as well do it quickly. And the minutes crawl on.

“Does the cat have enough food?”

“Did you let the dog out in the garden?”

Eventually, in a last desperate throw of the dice, when already on the threshold, ready to lock up and head for the door, the horrified body raises a final objection: “did you lock the back door after you let the dog back in?” It knows that my mind is much too neurotic to say “screw it. Who cares?” and just go.

This rearguard action doesn’t often avoid the dreaded fate. But it means that it doesn’t matter what time I get up – it can be 5:00 in the morning – I’ll never be in the water until after quarter to seven. Delaying tactics live up to their name: they make you late.

Talk about mind over matter. Well, my body has a mind of its own. The battle’s no pushover. The body fights back. 

And at the very least, buys itself some time.

In praise of shutting up. And a departing King

I always had ambivalent feelings about the late Ugo Chavez, de facto President for life of Venezuela. He sometimes said and did things I felt were right, above all to help the poor, but then he did so much that was wrong, and even did the right things in such a wrong way – hectoring, bullying, authoritarian – that I simply couldn’t warm to him. He seemed thoroughly obnoxious.

So it was with delight that I learned that the King of Spain had told him, in a conference of Spanish-speaking nations, to put a sock in it. “¿Por qué no te callas?” he asked, “Why don’t you shut up?”

¿Por qué no te callas?

So well received were the King’s words that for a while they became the most popular ring tone on Spanish phones.

More recent anecdotes have been less flattering for poor Juan Carlos. It was a shame, for instance, that he chose to go elephant hunting in Africa. That he did so at a time when most of his subjects were struggling with the effects of the worst crisis to the hit the nation in a century, added a measure of insensitivity to the offence, and left his reputation in tatters.

A bare 41% of the population now approve his rule.

In passing, I should point out that technically this is irrelevant: a system in which you can change your head of state when you’ve had enough of him is called a republic. The whole point about a monarchy – or a state presided over by Ugo Chavez – is that you can’t.

Even so, Juan-Carlos has decided to abdicate, and Spanish parliamentarians are rushing through legislation to make it possible. Which must seem ironic to quite a few of their compatriots: many have lost their jobs over the last five years, without the benefit of special legislation.

So the King has decided it’s time to shut up himself, even if in his case what he’s shutting up is his shop. One has to congratulate him. I suppose we’ve all had situations in which we’d have done better to shut up, and wished afterwards that we had. His, I feel, is an example to follow. I can think of quite a few people who I’d be happy to see follow it, but I won’t name any of them here, since I’m sure you have your own list.

He’s going to be replaced by his son, Felipe. Curiously, he too knows a little about being told to shut up. He married a former TV anchor, Letizia Ortiz. The Guardian explained that at a press conference where the couple announced their engagement, “as Ortiz was explaining her plans to leave her job in the media, Felipe interrupted her. She snapped at him, ‘Let me finish!’”

I hope Felipe took it better than Chavez. Because in both cases, as in so many others, being told to shut up was excellent advice.

Hesitating summer and a tribute to the woman in white

Summer’s been teasing us this year. It came early in England – or was that a glorious Spring? At any rate, the flowers came out and the trees covered themselves in leaves.

But then it slipped away again, as though it had a better place to be, and left us glum and grey and rain-sodden. Why, we were even cold. We began to wonder whether it had really been there at all, and I had to go back and see the leaves still covering the trees to convince myself that it had.

One day we even had summer to the left,
spring to the right

Now it seems to be sneaking back again. A patch of sun here, a little heat there. And the plants, smarter than we are, have been reacting, growing like weeds (especially the weeds, that poor Danielle has to spend so much time pulling out): they know that the rain was good, though we complained about it, and that sun is coming behind it to make things better still.

But summer hasn’t yet wholly made up its mind to stay with us. The grey keeps coming back, even the occasional pattering of rain. It’s like a child forced reluctantly to visit an aged relative: he’s there, but not really in the company, and can’t wait to get away again.

So it’s comforting to know that it was ever thus, there’s nothing new in this sense that we’re perhaps being cheated by a summer that hasn’t entirely decided to join us. There’s nothing new, either, in the knowledge that in time it will show up and we just need the patience to give it the time it needs.

No one I know sang the seasons better than the woman in white, the glorious Emily Dickinson, back there in Massachusetts the century before last. And, to celebrate the 1st of June and a wonderful poet, here’s how she described this reluctant indecision on the part of summer.

These are the days when birds come back, 
A very few, a bird or two, 
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on 
The old, old sophistries of June,— 
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee, 
Almost thy plausibility 
Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, 
And softly through the altered air 
Hurries a timed leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days, 
Oh, last communion in the haze, 
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake, 
Thy consecrated bread to break, 
Taste thine immortal wine!

Enjoy the summer! It’s on the way.

(My apologies, naturally, to anyone in the Southern Hemisphere)

The US: autocracy and tolerance, ever since the founding fathers. And the men who inspired them

Jon Meacham, in his fine biography, tells an anecdote of Thomas Jefferson’s about a meeting with his colleague and nemesis, Alexander Hamilton. At the time Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury and Jefferson Secretary of State in George Washington’s first administration, though they were already becoming political adversaries. 

Hamilton called at Jefferson’s lodgings.

... Jefferson had decorated the walls of his quarters with a collection of portraits that included Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton, all men of the Enlightenment. Hamilton asked Jefferson who they were: “I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them,” Jefferson recalled.

Taking this in, Hamilton paused, thinking. After a moment, he broke his silence.

“The greatest man that ever lived,” Hamilton said, “was Julius Caesar.”

Julius Caesar, military autocrat, inspired Alexander Hamilton

The story matters not only for what it says about the two men, but for what it reveals of the two currents that have always battled with each other in the United States, down to our days.

Jefferson was the author of significant works on politics and the philosophy of government; most notably, he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Hamilton was the leading writer of the Federalist Papers, spearheading the campaign to convert the loose confederation that won independence from Britain into the tightly structured United States that persist today.

Both men had accepted political responsibility when called on to serve, but Jefferson had never been a soldier. In fact, his blackest moment came when as Governor of Virginia he retreated in front of advancing British soldiers and was accused by opponents of not doing enough to defend his State. Hamilton, on the other hand, had been an aide de camp to Washington during the War of Independence and arguably his leading adviser (certainly, he would have argued it).

Both were thinkers, both were men of action. That makes it all the more interesting that they chose objects of admiration who were so different.

Of Jefferson’s trinity, perhaps the most influential was Locke. In Two Treatises of Government he wrote:

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions: for being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into this world by his order, and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are made for ours.

Reason is derived from God and is the bedrock of the rights of Man. Remind you of anything?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It’s true that it’s hard to reconcile a view that there can no subordination of one man to another with the ownership of slaves, and Jefferson was a major slave owner. That has long been the great unresolved and probably unsolvable paradox of Jefferson’s existence.

A little later, Locke wonders about considers what power one man may have over another who has committed some offence. He can have:

... no absolute or arbitrary power, to use a criminal, when he has got him in his hands, according to the passionate heats, or boundless extravagancy of his own will; but only to retribute to him, so far as calm reason and conscience dictate, what is proportionate to his transgression, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint.

That’s a principle that deserves reasserting: punishment is to be calm and reasoned, and its aim must be reparation and deterrence, not hotheaded vengeance. Some of that thinking emerges in the US Bill of Rights, particularly in the Eighth Amendment:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

John Locke, apostle of reason and government by consent,
inspired Jefferson

Locke’s spirit presided over the very foundation of the United States. But Hamilton didn’t recognise his portrait, and instead gave his admiration to a wholly different man, Julius Caesar. 

Caesar turned a rotten and corrupt Roman Republic into a vehicle for his personal ambitions and by doing so, ultimately undermined what little was left of its republicanism. If he failed to take imperial power himself, it was only because he was assassinated first, but by then he had created the conditions that would sweep his adopted son Octavian to power as the first Emperor Augustus.

The great drive behind his ascent had been his military prowess. He had stormed through Gaul (with even a brief incursion into Britain) and crushed all his enemies.

So Hamilton chose the soldier and autocrat. Jefferson chose the man of moderation and of government by consent.

And aren’t those the two trends that have run like golden threads through all American history to today?

The successors of Hamilton are the gun lobby, worshippers of the armed warrior. They sing the praises of the men and women of the armed forces, strong, brave and powerful. They cling to their firearms, even at the cost of the lives of the innocent. They like fierce punishments, the 900-year sentence when they can’t be granted an execution. Their influence ensured that Chelsea Manning was subjected to treatment that even the authorities eventually found excessive.

The successors of Jefferson stand for the subordination of interest to law, to the treatment of all men and women as equal because they are all human. They care for the warrior too, but not just when powerful and victorious, but also when they’ve returned broken, incapable of re-assimilating, living rough and desperate for help. They try to moderate the behaviour of government, and plead for its authority to be limited to respect the rights of the citizen. They understand why Edward Snowden won’t return to face a US court, while a public interest defence is barred to him, against charges carrying a sentence heavier even than Manning’s.

The great unanswered question is which of these trends will ultimately predominate, Jefferson’s or Hamilton’s, Locke’s or Caesar’s. On that question, the jury is still out. Sadly, for all of us.

The passing of a phenomenal woman

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style,” wrote Maya Angelou, who died yesterday, leaving the world with less empathy, fewer smiles and that much less elegance.

Laughter and wisdom

Her words are something to remember in times when far too many of us seem to be giving the primacy to bitter, damaging emotions. We’re traversing a period in which many see the outsider, the other, those who are different in race, faith, sexual orientation or simply nationality as to be shunned or turned into a scapegoat.

Instead of passion, compassion, humour and style, we end up with fear, hatred, intolerance and ugliness. It seems acceptable in far too large a minority of our populations to complain about the diversity around us, to complain for instance that there are parts of Britain that feel foreign, perhaps because we feel uncomfortable when no one around is speaking English.

That strikes me as odd. I’ve always found that experience something to revel in. I’ve walked along London streets and heard no English. It made me proud of our tired old capital that so many people were prepared to travel there, whether for a brief visit or to stay for longer. I was sure they would enrich us, in the narrow sense by spending money in our shops or working in our companies, more generally by bringing us a flavour of other places and other cultures. That was something in which I took pleasure. At the simplest level, there was a game to play in trying to recognise some of the languages, with a certain delight when I did, but a rueful admiration of the variety of mankind on the far more frequent occasions when I couldn’t.

Maya Angelou, I like to think, would have found that diversity, that mixing and cross-fertilising of cultures inspiring. Conversely, she would have found the desire to exclude despicable. In I know why the caged bird sings she wrote:

“It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. [...] As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.”

It’s that abomination that is growing around us today, in Europe and the United States. Large numbers of people, scared no doubt by the instability and suffering that our crisis-torn societies are imposing, run to build walls beyond which they can drive their scapegoats. What they fail to understand is the scapegoats are false and excluding them will achieve nothing, while the walls don’t just create a defence, they also build a prison.

Combating these trends is going to take a long battle. For that we’ll need just the kind of spirit that Maya Angelou left us. And also what she identified as the greatest of human strengths:

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

We’ll miss her. But the best tribute we can pay to her is to take up the cudgel against the views she abominated.

After an Earthquake, reconstruction

So now we’ve had the earthquake in Britain. UKIP topped the poll for the European elections. We know the worst, and we know its extent.

After an earthquake, the first task is rescue and recovery. But actually this one wasn’t that scary. It’s nasty to see success for a party which, while strenuously declaring itself to be neither racist nor homophobic, somehow keeps turning up spokespeople who express thoroughly racist and homophobic views. Nevertheless, these were elections for the European Parliament, and though UKIP ran a campaign claiming that 75% of our legislation is made in the EU, the reality is that power still remains in London.

Victory in a forum which exerts little power over us? It’s not as catastrophic as success in Westminster elections would have been.

So no rescue or recovery. Instead we move straight to the next phase: reconstruction. And there we certainly have a lot of work to do.

While UKIP came top, it took just over 2% more of the vote than Labour. The last time the elections were held, in 2009, Labour fared miserably; it has rebounded into a perfectly respectable position. It has even forced the Conservatives into third place. That’s the first time they’ve fallen so low in a national poll. Not the first time for ages, the first time ever, in their entire history.

All that’s good. What’s much more worrying is that Labour took under 1.5% more of the vote than the Conservatives. That’s far too anaemic a lead for an Opposition party a year out from a general election: there tends to be a swing back towards government in the last few months and Labour is perilously close to losing its lead.

It isn’t clear whether that wisdom remains true in the new environment created by UKIP, with four parties in contest. Or five, if we include the Greens, and we should, since they overtook the Liberal Democrats, junior partners in the present government, last week. 

Maybe there will be less of a resurgence of government popularity in these circumstances than in the past, but I don’t think Labour should rely on that faint hope. Especially as a lot of UKIP supporters in these elections are likely to return to backing the Conservatives next year.

No, reconstructing a politics in Britain based on simple liberalism and tolerance is going to depend on Labour taking positive action itself. And the big question is going to be, what sort of action?

Commentators are all saying that UKIP’s success is going to force the other parties to consider its agenda more seriously. And that agenda has just two points: anti-immigration and anti-EU. The Tories will find it easy to move closer to those positions, but what about Labour?

Ed Miliband's task for Labout
win support back from UKIP without adopting its positions

Adopting a similarly little-England and xenophobic stance would be wrong in itself. Labour stands for inclusiveness and for international collaboration. Coming down hard on immigrants and opposing the EU means betraying fundamental principles.

But in any case it would do Labour no good. If I’m going to vote for a party which has those views, why would I vote for one that has only adopted them recently and doesn’t really believe in them? I might as well vote for the real thing. No, Labour needs to do something much harder. It needs to take on the UKIP discourse and show how profoundly misguided it is.

It has to argue the case for the EU, a reformed EU by all means, but the EU all the same; and it has to argue the case for Europe’s open borders – surely one of the great extensions of human liberty the European experiment has given us. And also deeply necessary, at a time when we need immigration to shore up an ageing workforce.

Labour needs to argue that case with conviction to win back enough supporters from those tempted by UKIP to give it a 5 or 6 point lead. That would be sufficient. But it isn’t going to be easy.

Put off by the scale of the challenge? 

Marine le Pen: the French have a real, devastating earthquake

Think of our friends in France. There the elections were won by a Front National which even UKIP is shy of, because of its racism. And the Socialists, far from coming second, came a poor third, massively diminished by a weak and ineffective President Hollande.

At least reconstructing after our own earthquake is a much more manageable task.

European Elections: the earthquake finally happened for UKIP. But it wasn't that big...

Well, it’s been an interesting night here in Britain, as it has throughout Europe, as we counted the votes for the European Parliament.

The results in Britain, as shown by the BBC

In Britain, UKIP came first. And that means that the commentators who’ve been talking up a UKIP earthquake, will feel justified. They’re not entirely wrong: UKIP have never previously won a national election of any kind, so we have to say well done to them. Even if it’s between gritted teeth.

Then, however, we can qualify that a bit.

First of all, and it’s part of the problem with the European Union, no one cares very much about the European Parliament. So they don’t mind voting strangely in European elections, handing the mainstream parties a kicking when it’s not actually going to change very much. There were indications of that in the fact that the elections were held in Britain on the same day as the Europeans, and in those local elections – which can actually affect voters’ real lives – they handed the victory to Labour.

Indeed, though UKIP came second in terms of new council seats gained, that still left them fourth in terms of representation, and in control of no councils. It seems that UKIP could only gain its victory in an election that voters felt wouldn’t affect them. 

Besides, the victory wasn’t that big: they have a lead of only 2.1% over Labour.

In many ways, what matters more was what happened to the other parties.

The Liberal Democrats are down to just one seat and saw their percentage of the vote halved. It seems that they’re being punished for having won themselves a great reputation sniping from the left at Labour when it was in power, and then joining a government of the right led by the Conservatives. We all saw it coming – I’m sure even they did – and now it’s on them.

The Greens overtook the LibDems, taking three seats and moving to near 8% of the vote and fourth position.

The Conservatives came third. That’s the first time in the entire history of the party, since its foundation, that it has come below second in any national election. Quite a record to break.

And then there’s Labour. It was only given a clear advantage over the Conservatives by the London result, a massive victory for Labour that left UKIP in third place. A result which made me feel less bad about staying up till 3:15 to see it announced. But Labour’s lead over the Tories is under 1.5%.

Labour leading by 1.5% a year out from a General Election? That’s far too tight. As I wrote about the local elections, there’s one big lesson for Labour to come out of these elections: the party needs to lift its game and lift it big.

Meanwhile, of course, this wasn’t an election just about Britain. The saddest aspect of it? A huge victory for the Front National in France, despite its deeply xenophobic message: even UKIP, itself frequently suspected of racism, regards the FN as too racist to work with. A victory for the far right in Denmark, and in numerous other countries around the Continent. Perhaps the most worrying for its symbolism, small though it is numerically, is the election of a neo-Nazi from Germany.

There are difficult times ahead for the whole of Europe. And Britain’s problems are just part of that big picture.