Columns on the state of our lives and the natural world

Addicted to Comfort

January 20, 2014

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

The question has changed a little since Rousseau’s day, but the mystery remains. (1) Why, when most of us now possess greater freedom than almost any preceding generation has enjoyed – freedom from tyranny, freedom from slavery, freedom from hunger – do we act as if we don’t?
I’m prompted to ask by the discovery that the most illiberal and oppressive instrument proposed by any recent government – injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance in the Anti-Social Behaviour Bill – has been attacked by Labour not because it is draconian but because it is not draconian enough. (2,3) The measure was decisively rejected by the Lords last week. (4)

But if the government tries to restore this monstrous proposal in the Commons next month, Labour is likely to insist only that it is too timid.
Why do we tolerate a politics that offers no effective choice? That operates largely at the behest of millionaire funders, corporate power and a bullying media? Why, in an age in which people are no longer tortured and executed for criticising those in power, have we failed to create viable alternatives?

In the US Congress this year, for the first time a majority of members are millionaires. (5) As the representatives become richer, the laws they pass ensure that they exercise ever less power over the rich and ever more power over the poor. Yet, as the Center for Responsive Politics notes, “there’s been no change in our appetite to elect affluent politicians to represent our concerns in Washington.” (6)

We appear to possess an almost limitless ability to sit back and watch as political life is seized by plutocrats, as the biosphere is trashed, as public services are killed or given to corporations; as workers are dragooned into zero-hour contracts. Though there are a few wonderful exceptions, on the whole protest is muted and alternatives are shrugged away without examination. How did we acquire this superhuman passivity?

The question is not confined to politics. Almost universally we now seem content to lead a proxy life, a counter life, of vicarious, illusory relationships, of secondhand pleasures, of atomisation without individuation. Those who possess some disposable income are extraordinarily free, by comparison to almost all our great-grandparents, but we tend to act as if we have been placed under house arrest. With the amount most of us spend on home entertainment, we could probably buy a horse and play buzkashi every weekend. But we would rather stare at an illuminated box, watching other people jumping up and down and screaming. Our political constraint is one aspect of a wider inhibition, a wider failure to be free.

I’m not talking about thinktank freedoms here: the freedom of billionaires not to pay their taxes, of corporations to pollute the atmosphere or induce children to smoke, of landlords to exploit their tenants. We should respect the prohibitive decencies we owe to others. But there are plenty of freedoms we can exercise without diminishing other people’s.
Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves? How many would have foreseen a national conversation – in public and in private – that revolves around the three Rs: renovation, recipes and resorts? How many would have guessed that people possessed of unimaginable wealth and leisure and liberty would spend their time shopping for onion goggles and wheatgrass juicers? Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

A few years ago, a friend explained how depressed he had become while trying to find a stimulating partner through online dating sites. He kept stumbling across the same phrase, used verbatim by dozens of the women he looked up. “I like nothing better than a night in on the sofa with a glass of red and a good DVD”. The horror he felt arose not so much from the preference as from its repetition: “the failure to grasp the possibilities of self-differentiation.”

I wrote to him last week to see if anything had changed. Yes: he has now tumbled into the vortex that dismayed him. He dated 18 women in 2013, seeking “the short sharp hit which keeps you coming back despite the fact that the experience taken as a whole does not add up to anything worth having. My life … is beginning to dance to the Internet rhythm of desire satiated immediately and thinly”. In seeking someone who was not trapped on the hedonic treadmill, he became trapped on the hedonic treadmill.

Could it be this – the immediate satisfaction of desire, the readiness with which we can find comfort – that deprives us of greater freedoms? Does extreme comfort deaden the will to be free?
If so, it is a habit learnt early and learnt hard. When children are housebound, we cannot expect them to develop an instinct for freedom that is intimately associated with being outdoors(7). We cannot expect them to reach for more challenging freedoms if they have no experience of fear and cold and hunger and exhaustion. Perhaps freedom from want has paradoxically deprived us of other freedoms. The freedom which makes so many new pleasures available vitiates the desire to enjoy them.

Tocqueville made a similar point about democracy: it threatens to enclose each of us “entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” (8) The freedoms it grants us destroy the desire to combine and to organise. To judge by our reluctance to create sustained alternatives, we wish neither to belong nor to deviate.

It is not hard to see how our elective impotence leads before long to tyranny. Without coherent popular movements, which are required to prevent opposition parties from falling into the clutches of millionaires and corporate lobbyists, almost any government would be tempted to engineer a nominally democratic police state. Freedom of all kinds is something we must use or lose. But we seem to have forgotten what it means.

References:
1. Rousseau’s unanswered question, at the start of The Social Contract, concerns the mystery of our submission to captivity.
2. http://www.labour.org.uk/asb-the-government-is-proposing-to-weaken-powers
3. Yvette Cooper, Column 176. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm130509/debtext/130509-0002.htm
4. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/09/lords-reject-antisocial-asbo-ipna-bill
5. http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/01/millionaires-club-for-first-time-most-lawmakers-are-worth-1-million-plus.html
6. http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/01/millionaires-club-for-first-time-most-lawmakers-are-worth-1-million-plus.html
7. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/education-children-not-feral-enough
8. Alexander de Tocqueville, 1835. De la Démocratie en Amérique.

Civilisation is Boring

 8th December 2014

We are pre-tuned to the natural world; wired to respond to nature

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds,” the pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote. “An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” (1)

I remembered that when I read the news that the world has lost 52% of its vertebrate wildlife over the past 40 years. (2) It’s a figure from which I’m still reeling. To love the natural world is to suffer a series of griefs, each compounding the last. It is to be overtaken by disbelief that we could treat it in this fashion. And, in the darkest moments, it is to succumb to helplessness, to the conviction that we will keep eroding our world of wonders until almost nothing of it remains. There is hope – real hope – as I will explain later, but at times like this it seems remote.

These wounds are inflicted not only on the world’s wildlife but also on ourselves. Civilisation is but a flimsy dust sheet that we have thrown over a psyche rich in emotion and instinct, shaped by the living planet. The hominims from whom we evolved inhabited a fascinating, terrifying world, in which survival depended on constant observation and interpretation. They contended not only with lions and leopards, but with sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyaenas and bear dogs (monstrous creatures with a huge bite radius).

As the work of Professor Blaire van Valkenburgh at UCLA suggests, predators in the pre-human past lived at much greater densities than they do today. (3) The wear and breakage of their teeth show that competition was so intense that they were forced to consume the entire carcasses of the animals they killed, bones and all, rather than just the prime cuts, as top carnivores tend to do today. In other words, the animals with which we evolved were not just bigger than today’s predators; they were also hungrier.

Navigating this world required astonishing skills. Our ancestors, in the boom-and-bust savannahs, had to travel great distances to find food, through a landscape shimmering with surprise and hazard. Their survival depended upon reacting to the barest signals: the flicker of a tail in the grass, the scent of honey, a change in humidity, tracks in the dust. We still possess these capacities. We carry with us a ghost psyche, adapted to a world we no longer inhabit, which contains – though it remains locked down for much of the time – a boundless capacity for fear and wonder, curiousity and enchantment. We are pre-tuned to the natural world; wired to respond to nature.

In computer games and fantasy novels, we still grapple the monsters of the mind. In the film of Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, the orcs rode on giant hyaenas. (4) In the first Hunger Games film, bear dogs were released into the forest to prey on the contestants. (5) I don’t believe these re-creations were accidental: the directors appear to have known enough of our evolutionary history to revive the ancestral terror these animals provoke. The heroic tales that have survived – tales of Ulysses, Sinbad, Sigurd, Beowulf, Cú Chulainn, St George, Arjuna, Lạc Long Quân and Glooskap – are those that resonate with the genetic memories lodged in our minds. I suspect that their essential form has remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years; that the encounters with monsters recorded in writing were a consolidation of stories we have been telling since we acquired the capacity to use the past tense.

You can see how such tales might have originated in a remarkable sequence in the BBC’s Human Planet series. (6) Three men in southern Kenya, described by the programme as Dorobo people (though this is not a designation many ethnographers accept) stalk to within about 50 metres of a lion kill. Fifteen lions, blood dripping from their jaws, are eating the carcass of a wildebeest. The men suddenly stand and walk towards the pride. Rattled by their astonishing confidence, the lions flee. They watch from the bushes, puzzled and indecisive, as the three men walk up to the carcass, hack off one of the hind legs, then saunter away. That night, the adventurers roast the meat in their cave. “We really robbed those lions”, one of them boasts. “How many do you think there were?”, another asks. “Fifteen, but there might have been more.”

This, surely, is how sagas begin. Those men, led by a veteran of such ruses, are heroes of the old stamp. They outwitted a party of monsters, using guile and audacity, much as Ulysses did. A few hours later, they tell the first version of a story that might echo down the generations, every time with new flourishes and embellishments. Now imagine that, thousand of years hence, lions are long extinct, and the descendants of the Dorobo have only the haziest notion of what they were. They have become monsters even bigger and more dangerous than they were in life, and the feat becomes even more outrageous and unlikely. The saga remains true to its core, but the details have changed. We are those people, still telling the old stories, of encounters with the beasts that shaped us. 

The world lives within us, we live within the world. By damaging the living planet we have diminished our existence.

We have been able to do this partly as a result of our ability to compartmentalise. This is another remarkable capacity we have developed, which perhaps reflects the demands of survival in the ever more complex human world we have created. By carving up the world in our minds we have learnt to shut ourselves out of it.

One of the tasks that parents set themselves is to train their children in linearity. Very young children don’t do linearity. Their inner life is discursive, contingent, impulsive. They don’t want to walk in a straight line down the pavement, but to wander off in the direction of whatever attracts their attention. They don’t begin a task with a view to its conclusion. They throw themselves into it, engage for as long as it’s exciting, then suddenly divert to something else.

This is how all animals except adult humans behave. Optimal foraging, the term biologists use to describe the way animals lock onto the best food supply, involves pursuing a task only for as long as it remains rewarding. Our own hunting and gathering would have followed a similar pattern, though it was complicated by our ability to plan and coordinate and to speculate about imagined outcomes. Broadly speaking, ours was a rambling and responsive existence, in which, by comparison to the way we live today, we had little capacity or inclination to impose our will on the world, to lay out a course of action and to follow it without deviation or distraction.

Only with the development of farming did we have to discipline ourselves to think linearly: following a plan from one point to another across weeks or months. Before long we were ploughing in straight lines, making hedges and ditches and tracks in straight lines, building houses and then towns in straight lines. Now almost every aspect of our lives is lived within grids, either concrete or abstract. Linearity, control and management dominate our lives. We fetishise progress: a continuous movement in the same direction. We impose our lines on the messy, contradictory and meandering realities of the human world, because otherwise we would be completely lost in it. We make compartments simple enough, amid the labyrinths we have created, to navigate and understand.

Thus we box ourselves out of the natural world. We become resistant to the experiences that nature has to offer; its spontaneity and serendipity, its unscripted delights, its capacity to shake us out of the frustrations and humiliations which are an inevitable product of the controlled and ordered world we have sought to create. We bully the living world into the grids we impose on ourselves. Even the areas we claim to have set aside for nature are often subjected to rigid management plans, in which the type and the height of the vegetation is precisely ordained and, through grazing or cutting or burning, nature is kept in a state of arrested development to favour an arbitrary assemblage of life over other possible outcomes. Nothing is allowed to change, to enter or leave. We preserve these places as if they were jars of pickles.

The language we use to describe them is also rigid and compartmentalised. In the UK we protect “sites of special scientific interest”, as if the wildlife they contain is of interest only to scientists. The few parts of the seabed which are not ripped up by industrial trawling are described as “reference areas”, as if their only value is as a baseline with which to compare destruction elsewhere. And is there a more alienating term than “reserve”? When we talk about reserve in people, we mean that they seem cold and remote. It reminds me of the old Native American joke: “we used to like the white man, but now we have our reservations.” Even “the environment” is an austere and technical term, which creates no pictures in the mind.

It’s not that we have banished our vestigial psychological equipment from our minds, or lost our instinct for engagement with wildlife. The tremendous popularity of nature programmes testifies to its persistence. I remember sitting in a café listening to a group of bus drivers talking, with great excitement and knowledge, about the spiders they had seen on television the night before, and thinking that, for all our technological sophistication, for all the clever means by which we shield ourselves from our emotions, we remain the people we have always been.

But we have suppressed these traits, and see the world through our fingers, shutting out anything that might spoil the view. We eat meat without even remembering that it has come from an animal, let alone picturing the conditions of its rearing and slaughter. We make no connection in our compartmentalised minds between the beef on our plates and the destruction of rainforests to grow the soya that fed the cattle; between the miles we drive and the oil wells drilled in rare and precious places, and the spills that then pollute them.

In our minds we have sanitised the world. WH Auden’s poem Et in Arcadia Ego describes how “Her jungle growths / Are abated, Her exorbitant monsters abashed, / Her soil mumbled,” while “the autobahn / Thwarts the landscape / In godless Roman arrogance”. (7) But the old gods, the old fears, the old knowledge, have not departed. We simply choose not to see. “The farmer’s children / Tiptoe past the shed / Where the gelding knife is kept.” (8)

Civilisation is boring. It has many virtues, but it leaves large parts of our minds unstimulated. It uses just a fraction of our mental and physical capacities. To know what comes next has been perhaps the dominant aim of materially-complex societies. Yet, having achieved it, or almost achieved it, we have been rewarded with a new collection of unmet needs. Many of us, I believe, need something that our planned and ordered lives don’t offer.

I found that something once in Cardigan Bay, on the west coast of Wales. I had stupidly launched my kayak into a ten-foot swell to fish a couple of miles from the shore. As I returned to land, I saw that the tide had risen, and ugly, jumbled breakers were smashing on the seawall. From where I sat, two hundred metres from the shore, I could see that the waves were stained brown by the shingle they flung up. I could hear them cracking and soughing against the wall. It was terrifying.

Behind me I heard a monstrous hiss: a freak wave was about to break over my head. I ducked and braced the paddle against the water. But nothing happened. Then a hooked grey fin, scarred and pitted, rose and skimmed just under the shaft of my paddle. I knew what it was, but the shock of it enhanced my rising fear. I glanced around, almost believing that I was under attack.

Then, from the stern, I heard a different sound: a crash and a rush of water. A gigantic bull dolphin soared into the air and almost over my head. As he flew past, he fixed his eye on mine. I stared at the sea into which he had disappeared, willing him to emerge again, filled with a wild exaltation, and a yearning of the kind that used to afflict me when I woke from that perennial pre-adolescent dream of floating down the stairs, my feet a few inches above the carpet. I realised at that moment that I had been suffering from a drought of sensation which I had come to accept as a condition of middle age, like the loss of the upper reaches of hearing.

I found that missing element again in the Białowieża Forest in eastern Poland. I was walking down a sandy path between oak and lime trees that rose for perhaps one hundred feet without branching. Around them the forest floor frothed with ramsons, celandines, spring peas and may lilies. I had seen boar with their piglets, red squirrels, hazel grouse, a huge bird that might have been an eagle owl, a black woodpecker. As I walked, every nerve seemed stretched, tuned like a string to the forest I was exploring. I rounded a curve in the path and found myself face to face with an animal that looked more like a Christian depiction of the Devil than any other creature I have seen.

I was close enough to see the mucus in her tear ducts. She had small, hooked black horns, heavy brows and eyes so dark that I could not distinguish the irises from the pupils. She wore a neat brown beard and an oddly human fringe between her horns. Her back rose to a crest then tapered away to a narrow rump, from which a black tail, slim as a whip, now twitched. She flared her nostrils and raised her chin. I fancied I could smell her sweet, beery breath. We watched each other for several minutes. I stayed so still that I could feel the blood pounding in my neck. Eventually the bison tossed her head, danced a couple of steps then turned, trotted back down the path then cantered away through the trees.

Experiences like these are the benchmarks of my life, moments in which dormant emotions were rekindled, in which my world was re-enchanted. But such unexpected encounters have been far too rare. Most of the lands in which I walk and the seas in which I swim or paddle my kayak are devoid of almost all large wildlife. I see deer, the occasional fox or badger, seals, but little else. It does not have to be like this. We can recharge the world with wonder, reverse much of the terrible harm we have done to it.

Over the past centuries, farming has expanded onto ever less suitable land. Even places of extremely low fertility have been cultivated or grazed, and the result has been a great disproportion between damage and productivity: the production of a tiny amount of food destroys the vegetation, the wild animals, the soil and the watersheds of entire mountain ranges. In the face of global trade, farming in such areas is becoming ever less viable: it cannot compete with production in fertile parts of the world. This has caused a loss of cultural diversity, which is another source of sadness.

But at the same time it means that the devastated land could be restored. In Europe, according to one forecast, 30 million hectares – an area the size of Poland – will be vacated by farmers by 2030(8). In the United States, two thirds of those parts of the land which were once forested, then cleared, have become forested again(9), as farming and logging have retreated, especially from the eastern half of the country. Rewilding, the mass restoration of ecosystems, which involves pulling down the redundant fences, blocking the drainage ditches, planting trees where necessary, re-establishing missing wildlife and then leaving the land to find its own way, could reverse much of the damage done to these areas. Already, animals like lynx, wolves, bears and moose, on both continents, are moving back into their former ranges.

There are also possibilities of restoring large parts of the sea. Public disgust at a fishing industry that has trashed almost every square metre of seabed on the continental shelves is now generating worldwide demands for marine parks. These are places in which commercial extraction is forbidden and the wildlife of the seas can recover. Even fishing companies can be persuaded to support them, when they discover that the fish migrating out of these places greatly boost their overall catches, a phenomenon known as the spillover effect. Such underwater parks are quickly recolonised by sessile life forms. Fish and crustacea proliferate, breeding freely and growing to great sizes once more. Dolphins, sharks and whales move in.

In these places we can leave our linearity and confinement behind, surrender to the unplanned and emergent world of nature, be surprised once more by joy, as surprise encounters with great beasts (almost all of which, despite our fears, are harmless to us) become possible again. We can rediscover those buried emotions that otherwise remain unexercised. Why should we not have such places on our doorsteps, to escape into when we feel the need?

Rewilding offers something else, even rarer than lynx and wolves and dolphins and whales. Hope. It offers the possibility that our silent spring could be followed by a raucous summer. In seeking to persuade people to honour and protect the living planet, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair. We could, perhaps, begin to heal some of the great wounds we have inflicted on the world and on ourselves.

References:

  1. Aldo Leopold, 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press.
  2. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf
  3. http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/megafauna/valkenburgh.pdf
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3GFYKIwJ9Y
  5. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/
  6. http://vimeo.com/22616099
  7. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/jun/03/et-in-arcadia-ego/
  8. http://www.rewildingeurope.com/assets/uploads/Downloads/Rewilding-Europe-Brochure-2012.pdf
  9.  http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-16/features/ct-prj-1118-book-of-the-month-20121116_1_wild-animals-wildlife-wild-game-meat/2 

 

Falling Apart

15 October 2014

What do we call this time? It’s not the information age: the collapse of popular education movements left a void now filled by marketing and conspiracy theories. (1) Like the stone age, iron age and space age, the digital age says plenty about our artefacts but little about society. The anthropocene, in which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish this century from the previous twenty. What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness.

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man” (2), he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominims of East Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults. (3) Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50 (4), and is rising with astonishing speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day (5) ; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. (6) Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. (7,8) We cannot cope alone.

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is now no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.

British children no longer aspire to be train drivers or nurses, more than a fifth now say they “just want to be rich”: wealth and fame are the sole ambitions of 40% of those surveyed. (9) A government study in June revealed that Britain is the loneliness capital of Europe. (10) We are less likely than other Europeans to have close friends or to know our neighbours. Who can be surprised, when everywhere we are urged to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin?

We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is loser. We no longer talk about people. Now we call them individuals. So pervasive has this alienating, atomising term become that even the charities fighting loneliness use it to describe the bipedal entities formerly known as human beings. (11) We can scarcely complete a sentence without getting personal. Personally speaking (to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist’s dummy), I prefer personal friends to the impersonal variety and personal belongings to the kind that don’t belong to me. Though that’s just my personal preference, otherwise known as my preference.

One of the tragic outcomes of loneliness is that people turn to their televisions for consolation: two-fifths of older people now report that the one-eyed god is their principal company. (12) This self-medication enhances the disease. Research by economists at the University of Milan suggests that television helps to drive competitive aspiration. (13) It strongly reinforces the income-happiness paradox: the fact that, as national incomes rise, happiness does not rise with them.

Aspiration, which increases with income, ensures that the point of arrival, of sustained satisfaction, retreats before us. The researchers found that those who watch a lot of television derive less satisfaction from a given level of income than those who watch only a little. Television speeds up the hedonic treadmill, forcing us to strive even harder to sustain the same level of satisfaction. You have only to think of the wall-to-wall auctions on daytime TV, Dragon’s Den, the Apprentice and the myriad forms of career-making competition the medium celebrates, the generalised obsession with fame and wealth, the pervasive sense, in watching it, that life is somewhere other than where you are, to see why this might be.

So what’s the point? What do we gain from this war of all against all? Competition drives growth, but growth no longer makes us wealthier. Figures published this week show that while the income of company directors has risen by more than a fifth, wages for the workforce as a whole have fallen in real terms over the past year. (14) The bosses now earn – sorry, I mean take – 120 times more than the average full-time worker. (In 2000, it was 47 times). And even if competition did make us richer, it would make us no happier, as the satisfaction derived from a rise in income would be undermined by the aspirational impacts of competition.

The top 1% now own 48% of global wealth (15), but even they aren’t happy. A survey by Boston College of people with an average net worth of $78m found that they too are assailed by anxiety, dissatisfaction and loneliness. (16) Many of them reported feeling financially insecure: to reach safe ground, they believed, they would need, on average, about 25% more money. (And if they got it? They’d doubtless need another 25%). One respondent said he wouldn’t get there until he had $1 billion in the bank.

For this we have ripped the natural world apart, degraded our conditions of life, surrendered our freedoms and prospects of contentment to a compulsive, atomising, joyless hedonism, in which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. For this we have destroyed the essence of humanity: our connectedness.

Yes, there are palliatives, clever and delightful schemes like Men in Sheds and Walking Football developed by charities for isolated older people. (17) But if we are to break this cycle and come together once more, we must confront the world-eating, flesh-eating system into which we have been forced.

Hobbes’s pre-social condition was a myth. But we are now entering a post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.

References:

  1. http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/hj1.html
  2. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents.html
  3. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/20/loneliness-britains-silent-plague-hurts-young-people-most
  4. http://www.independentage.org/isolation-a-growing-issue-among-older-men/
  5. http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/threat-to-health/
  6. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/16/loneliness-twice-as-unhealthy-as-obesity-older-people
  7. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/20/loneliness-britains-silent-plague-hurts-young-people-most
  8. http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/threat-to-health/
  9. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11014591/One-in-five-children-just-want-to-be-rich-when-they-grow-up.html
  10. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10909524/Britain-the-loneliness-capital-of-Europe.html
  11. http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/05/FINAL-Age-UK-PR-response-02.05.14.pdf
  12. http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/loneliness-research/
  13. http://boa.unimib.it/bitstream/10281/23044/2/Income_Aspirations_Television_and_Happiness.pdf
  14. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4234843.ece
  15. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/14/richest-1percent-half-global-wealth-credit-suisse-report
  16. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/308419/
  17. http://www.independentage.org/isolation-a-growing-issue-among-older-men/

Brussels for Bulgaria: It is not a Circus, it’s a Menagerie

I admit I was wrong. I had written with regard to the 13th report on Bulgaria under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) announced two weeks ago that Brussels was watching a circus in our country. But the day before yesterday the European Commission corrected me with a new report: it is not a circus, it is a menagerie. In the circus you see smart animals performing complex tasks. But in our country it is actually a menagerie that resists any type of control – a Jurassic Park populated with predators that won’t stop eating. Corruption has turned into a fundamental law of the Bulgarian jungle, which is being catered for (as hard as they can) by famous politicians from all facets of the political spectrum, magistrates, top managers, elite businessmen and their well-dressed protégés, middle and low-level officials and even the general population that has accepted its destiny to be constantly sacrificed as a reluctant participant in the corruption schemes.

Foto brussels for bulgaria

Cartoon by Hristo Komarnitski

For seven years Bulgaria has been suffering in the EU because (along with Romania) it has been regularly exposed to the public eye due to high-level corruption. Just like many other predators, the country’s political and business elite likes hunting in the dark. In Europe it has been recognized as one of the most bloodthirsty elites (even more bloodthirsty that the Romanian elite) because only for it there has also been added monitoring for organized crime (besides the one for corruption). Since the times of the triple coalition, through Borisov’s cabinet and finally Oresharski’s, the authorities have been stubbornly insinuating to Brussels that it did not treat Bulgaria fairly since it was not the only country that was a breeding ground for corruption. “Look at yourselves and then criticize us!”, ministers and members of Parliament were insisting.

Their wish finally came true. During its presidency in the second half of 2009 Sweden proposed (based on the Treaty of Lisbon) the so-called Stockholm Strategy for building a common area of justice, freedom and security, which was adopted by the European Council in the spring of 2010 as the Stockholm Programme for the period 2010-2014. An Action Plan was also prepared in the middle of the same year, which required the implementation of common mechanisms in the so-far un-harmonized sphere of justice and internal affairs. In 2011 it was decided to subject all EU member-states to monitoring for corruption, which is believed to be the greatest evil because it causes damage to the Community of about 120 billion  Euros per year – approximately the amount of its budget. To that end every two years there will be a joint anti-corruption report for the entire European Union with appendices for each member-state. The first report came out last Monday and its results are cataclysmic. Forced to confess their sins as well, the Western countries, which has served as our teachers in democracy, came out of the diplomatic restraint and gave the European Commission such freedom that has not been afforded to it previously. The difference can be felt very well when making a comparison with the recent report on Bulgaria. It was dominated by the usual mysteriousness that we now as “Brussels lingo”, which avoids the direct denunciation of the culprits. In the new text it seems that the names have been on the tip of the authors’ tongues because they are easily identifiable from the first reading.

Here we see the entire menagerie that we have known since the years of transition. Please note the names that are seen through the brief descriptions of their deeds – Georgi Parvanov, who received funds from persons (the notorious businessmen Lyudmil Stoykov and Mario Nikolov) who abused EU funds under the SAPARD programme; Ahmed Dogan, “a political party leader who had received EUR 1 million as a consultant on hydropower projects, without engineering qualifications”; Volen Siderov, the “controversial” chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on the Fight against Corruption and Conflict of Interests and on Parliamentary Ethics, who had to be stripped of the responsibility for the parliamentary ethics; Hristo Biserov, former Deputy Chairman of the National Assembly, who was charged with money laundering; 16 Members of Parliament from different political parties, who took the bait of the media with the “free Vertu phones” hoax in 2010; Rumen Petkov, former Minister of Interior, who “resigned in 2008 over contact with organised crime leaders” (the Galevi brothers); Tsvetan Tsvetanov, another former Minister of Interior, who is known for “claims of mass unauthorised wiretapping of politicians, magistrates and business people”; Miroslav Naydenov, former Minister of Agriculture, who was investigated for abuse of EU funds; Delyan Peevski, “a controversial MP elected as head of the State Agency for National Security that raised concerns in Bulgaria and beyond”. He is the only one mentioned twice in the report because he is also included in the sector for the media where it has been stated that “ media ownership is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the same people (Peevski, his mother Irena Krasteva and their “creditor” Tzvetan Vassilev), compromising editorial independence”; Krasyo Cherniya, “a power broker, promising to ‘sell’ senior positions in the judiciary”; Veneta Markovska and Galya Gugusheva, failed candidates for the Constitutional Court due to “integrity challenges in the judiciary”; Vassil Bozhkov, considered the richest Bulgarian according to several rankings, who fits “a popular perception that a few companies dominate the procurement market in areas such as road construction”, and so on and so forth.

Like participants in a safari among free-roaming predators the authors of the new report have carefully noted that in Bulgaria there is “some progress in the fight against corruption on the low levels in Border Police and Traffic Police”. In other words – some insolent traffic policemen have been tamed but at what cost? “In 2011, a police officer was forced to resign after being identified as the source of media reports about donors to the Interior Ministry whose vehicles were allegedly exempt from road checks. Claims that donors to the Interior Ministry (after a journalistic investigation of the Sega Daily – a/n.) included suspects under investigation led the Ministry to introduce rules on donations and to publish an online list of donors, updated every three month”. Then the European Commission gives a warning with something like “Do not tease the animals!”: “However, no steps were taken to strengthen the protection of whistle-blowers”. Anyhow “petty bribery continues to be reported in healthcare, police, customs, local authorities and beyond.”

However, this concerns only small predators. For the others the report states: “So far, few high-level cases have reached the courts. Dissuasive sanctions for corruption have not yet been applied… Challenges remain in the prioritisation of higher-level cases”. This means that with regard to large beasts there is not even a plan with whom of those to start. Their untouchability is omnipresent, including upon manipulation of elections: “More senior organisers of vote-buying have not so far been prosecuted”, the wildlife experts from Brussels have established.

We cannot speak of a plan for the fight against corruption in a country whose government (Plamen Oresharski’s) submitted in September 2013 a programme “for the measures against the causes and preconditions for corruption” without explicitly stating the word “corruption”, the environmentalists in the European Commission are puzzled. Obviously the government is afraid to even call the problem by name because it is a part of the problem. “According to the received data the organized crime in Bulgaria uses protections by means of corruption in the public administration, the judicial system, the police and customs”, the report has stated. It cannot be otherwise since the food chain is controlled by criminals: “organised crime continues to exercise influence in the economy”. That is why “in Bulgaria there is no regulatory framework with regard to lobbying”, “the prosecution of corruption and organised crime is obstructed by flawed pre-trial investigations, procedural delays and dismissal on technicalities.”, and “the attempts to adopt a code of ethical behaviour of the Members of Parliament failed”.

Since one can see these appalling facts with the naked eye from such a great distance, what can one see when having a closer look at the bushes? “Smaller towns face particular risks of organised crime infiltration, linked to a combination of violence, threats and collusion with local politicians and law enforcement, and concentration of economic power”, the political zoologists write. In their opinion “Such risks have direct implications for the ability of local authorities to carry out impartial and transparent procurement”, which means inevitable predatory plundering of social wealth.

In their attempt to drive foreign observers out of their hunting fields Bulgaria authorities were exposed to the public eye twice. They believed that the European Union will terminate its special monitoring on them under CVM by introducing a common control mechanism for all countries and after that, against the background of the universal sins, our country’s own thievery will not look as a unique event in the European Union. Our government has relied on its experience in the Council of Europe, where a procedure for monitoring of all newly-accepted countries was introduced because of Bulgaria at the end of the 1990s, and then a procedure for post-monitoring was introduced again because of it at the beginning of the new millennium, and later the inspections were expanded to the older member states.

However, as our country has remained the perpetually monitored party (the usual suspect), the European Union also has the chance to immortalize the monitoring on itself because Brussels has warned that even if the procedure under CVM is terminated someday, the new anti-corruption procedure will not be limited in time. If until now Bulgaria was being compared only with itself (and to a certain extent with Romania) when reporting progress, in the future it will have to consider the advent of general intolerance towards corruption. New rankings are under way in Europe, in which our country leads by 13 laps – the number of official reports after 2007 that have presented the country as an example for corruption in the European Union.