THE ARAB SPRING, OUR AIR WAR IN LIBYA, AND WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

Do we? Do we know it with respect to the new revolutions from
Tunisia onward, and our air war in Libya, and our inspiring democracies? By
what means do we know right from wrong about them?

Analytic philosophy, including moral and political analytic
philosophy, is not deep, airy or arcane. It has nothing to do with such
performers as Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge past, or French
self-publicists of the present day. It is just a concentration on the logic
of ordinary intelligence.

That logic consists in three things — clarity by such means as
analysis, and consistency and validity, and completeness. Analytic
philosophy of course doesn’t own this logic — what it does is concentrate
more on it than on questions and propositions of fact. Say questions of
probability, say the probability of different outcomes of political action,
maybe of civil disobedience or terrorism.

Analytic philosophy is my line of life, and so, as you guess, I’m
shorter on factual knowledge than political scientists, labourers in
institutes of Arab and Islamic studies, historians, and good journalists.

But I am reassured a little by the lack of logic, as it seems to
me, on the part of most adversaries on the Right in politics. I am reassured
too by what is in fact the mixed nature of some supposedly factual
disciplines. Almost all economics, to take the outstanding example, is in
fact is no pure science. It is more than half morals and politics, in fact a
pompous politics of capitalism that in 2011 is helping to drag down the
world.  It includes the illusion or delusion or indeed grandiose disorder
that is the conviction that our capitalism is the only possibility.

It would be inane to take the utterances of our George Osborne,
our Chancellor of the Exchequer, our elected economist-in-chief, as factual
utterances as to what is necessary and what is impossible. For him to appear
on the telly is for me to remember a story, no doubt true. As an Oxford
undergraduate he switched to the B.A. course in Modern History rather than
plough on with PPE — Philosophy, Politics and Economics — because he
couldn’t understand the economics.

RIGHT AND WRONG, A LIST OF FAILURES

We all need a general principle of right and wrong in order to
keep ourselves from self-deception on any subject, to keep ourselves from
failing to see that we are cheating on behalf of ourselves, or a social
class, or the political class.

One of these is the Happiness principle of the Utilitarians. It
is that we must have the possible society with the largest total of
happiness, well-being or satisfaction, however it is shared out. But
happiness or the like is left vague, and open to manipulation. And the
greatest total of happiness might depend, despite protestations and bits of
theory to the contrary, on the existence of a slave class, or on the state
punishment of the innocent. Also, Utilitarianism has lately included the
good idea that the badly-off are to be helped partly not by changing the
world but by changing their feelings about it, by way of neuroscience and
psychoanalysis.

Another large principle is that of Equality — everbody to be
equal in terms of something. What? Happiness? But in any case surely
everybody being equal at a certain level of something is not preferable to
everybody being at a higher although unequal level? You didn’t have to be a
neo-conservative to see that. It wasn’t neo-conservatives who saw it first.

A principle of Desert or Retributive Justice then? Everybody
getting what they deserve? Everybody getting their just rewards? Any
arguable version of that principle reduces to something. It takes what
someone deserves to be what it is right that he has. That is no answer to
anything. It is the principle that what is right is what is right.

To those traditional answers to the general question of right
and wrong must be added the stuff of political thinkers in the traditions of
conservatism and liberalism.

Conservatism, in fact, is unique among political traditions in
having no arguable principle to justify the self-interest that it shares
with us all. Certainly it cannot be, as used to be said, a principle against
change — remember Thatcher. She changed things. Certainly there is no
arguable principle in talk of freedom, since what is necessary is a
principle for preferring the freedoms desired by conservatives to the
freedoms desired by others. Conservatives used to say, taught by the
greatest book of conservatism, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution
in France, that conservatism’s principle consists in being against
something. Revolutions. They’re not saying it now.

Liberalism is a tradition of better intentions — but not
intentions taken forward with resolution. In England it is the middle class
pretending not to be looking after itself. It is bumble, about as vague as
conservatism. Its founding father in England, John Stuart Mill, declared
that you are to be free from state interference, at liberty, unless you harm
someone else. Then he did not say what harm consists in. He was a typical
liberal in that.

Which brings us down to the politicians of our own day.

HIERARCHIC DEMOCRACY, PUSHERS’ DEMOCRACY

The refrain of our politicians is that in deciding on right and
wrong for our society, we must go by our democracy.

The fundamental and plainly absolutely essential justification
for all democracy must be that this decision-procedure’s outputs are better
than those of any other decision-procedure, say dictatorship — better in
terms of laws, policies, institutions, whole societies, the state of the
world.

The argument in support is that two heads are better than one
and more heads are better than two. Or more wants expressed in a
decision-procedure are better than fewer. The argument obviously depends on
equality and freedom in the democracy. That is, the argument depends on the
heads having the possibility of equal expression of what is in them.

But our particular democracy is hierarchic or pushers’
democracy. In it the highest economic tenth of population has more than a
thousand times the political power and influence of the bottom tenth.

It is another glory of our science of economics, by the way, and
of our political science, that it goes in for a lot of quantification, but
not quantification of political power and influence in relation to economic
power and influence. We don’t have to join our betters in this reluctance. A
thousand to one is about right. Remember the wealth of the bottom tenth is
about zero.

Is our democracy, if absurdly unequal, still a
decision-procedure of freedom? No. Not at all. Important freedom requires
and varies with equality. If you and I are in dispute, and we become unequal
in that you have a gun and I don’t, my freedom reduces to zero. Something
the same is true with money. The argument for our hierarchic democracy that
two heads are better than one and more heads better than two is just an
indicator of the level of public intelligence and moral intelligence in
hierarchic democracy.

I myself say three cheers even for pushers’ democracy when
compared with an authoritarian state of the Right. I say no cheers for
pushers’ democracy when compared to a democracy of equality and freedom, a
possible democracy we are not right now in sight of having.

I don’t know how many cheers to give pushers’ democracy when
compared with some actual or possible authoritarian states of the Left.

Cuba still exists. They live longer there. They all have
healthcare. They are all full members of their society. They can read. Cuba
is in such ways unique in that part of the world and elsewhere. Denmark is
relevant too, if differently relevant. That Cuba and Denmark are small does
not detract from their great achievements.

The Soviet Union existed in an unprecedented extent of fairness
until a leader lost his moral nerve and lost the Cold War, which was not in
itself an argument in which the other side was better. It was nothing of the
sort. A battle is not an experiment either.

I have never been any kind of Marxist, Green or otherwise, having
been put off Marxism by the high Hegelian theory, including the theory of
history in my old colleague Jerry Cohen’s defence of it. So I have been
saved from doctrinal commitment to the Soviet Union.

I am not saved from the difficulty of thinking about its
recommendations by the ignorance, passion, lies, propaganda and of course
statistics of those who condemn it — in blinded America above all. There
the sludge of manufactured convention fills and stops the stream of
intelligence.

At  the least the Soviet Union raises an awful question about the
necessity of means to ends. The necessity of terrible means to ends. It also
raises a question about the moral guilt of those opponents of the Left who
make the means of the Left irrational. The opponents of what is not rational
force or violence are as responsible for it as its agents.

What is needed in place of dim incantation in favour of
hierarchic democracy, or any of the other stuff of most politicians,
certainly the economic wisdom, is a clear and arguable principle of right
and wrong, a determinate principle, not any kind of metaphor. Nothing else
but such a principle will make for consistency and hence intelligence.
Nothing else will make for the defeat of selfish self-deception.

This has to be the case with any conclusion on the Arab Spring
as well as on everything else — say what is happening now in England. Is
there a principle that issues in or anyway contributes to the proposition
that an economic depression is being converted into a vicious immiseration
of the poor and a victimization of all the poorer? Is there a principle that
supports the proposition that we live in an historic period of awfulness as
certain to be recorded in future history books as its awful predecessors are
recorded in decent history books now, say the enclosures of common land and
massacres and then the genocides?

THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMANITY

I repeat that an explicit principle of right and wrong is
absolutely necessary — with unvague central concepts and other necessary
strengths. A principle therefore resistant to self-deception — and of
course resistant to the deception of some by others.

Start towards such a thing with definition of  bad lives.

Bad lives, in a sentence, are lives of deprivation or
frustration in terms of six great human goods, the fundamental desires of
human nature, of course interrelated. The great goods in one arguable list
are (1) a decent length of conscious life, (2) bodily quality of life, (3)
freedom & power, including political freedom and power, (4) respect &
self-respect, (5) the goods of relationship, (6) the goods of culture.

The Principle of Humanity is that the right thing as distinct
from others — the right action, practice, institution, government, society,
possible world — is the one that according to the best judgement and
information at the time is the rational one, in the sense of being effective
and not self-defeating, with respect to the end of getting and keeping
people out of bad lives.

It is the only content of real fairness, of real justice. It is
the principle of the Left in politics whenever the Left is true to itself.
It gives actual content, so often missing, to thought and talk of human
rights.

It escapes the objections to the traditional principles
mentioned earlier. It is a very long way from what it is closest to, which
is traditional Utilitarianism. If the principle calls for equalities that
serve its end, which it most certainly does, its end is not equalities.
Plainly it is not cant, not public relations, not party-political
advertising.

The principle is beyond piety and spiritualism and most religion
about morality too, some of which turns up in talk of desert. It recognizes
that all moral principles are attitudes, including desire and in particular
empathy. They are not factual or logical truths. No alternative to the
morality of humanity is a higher thing, has any innate superiority.

The principle is not all of a morality. For one thing, it
understands the relation of any principle to particular cases, e.g. the
sexual torture of a child, or the rape of a people, as in Palestine. For a
principle to excuse or justify these things would be for the principle to be
refuted. There is a relation of mutual support between a principle and its
particular consequences, as John Rawls saw in A Theory of Justice, despite
his mere liberalism.

The Principle of Humanity does not leave the justifications of
killing or starving to any state, hierarchic democracy, or political class.
It is a principle of independence, not a principle of respect to betters. It
leaves deference to others. Is it a principle of envy? No, it understands
the rudimentary distinction, lost on conservatives, between envy and a
rational awareness of real deprivation.

The principle is of course what moral philosophers call
consequentialist. It judges actions by their consequences, as in fact all
moral principles do, despite selfishness, illusions and subterfuges. But it
is not the principle that the end justifies the means. It is that the ends
and the means justify the means.

Of course it is a maximizing principle. It does not contemplate
for a moment the unspeakable proposition that 1000 people dying is only as
bad as one person dying because no one person suffers more than one dying.
Anything that does not count lives taken or wasted by different courses of
action, different governments, is not worth considering and is not
considered outside of a seminary in Wales or a recent college in Cambridge
left over from an earlier century.

The Principle of Humanity has more general support from us than
any alternative, more support in terms of both fact and logic. It is
uniquely consistent with the realities of human nature and also the
generalness or universal application or universal commitment of all reasons.
It has the Golden Rule in its past. There is also the relevant fact of our
human convergence on the principle when our own self-interest does not
distract us. We come together about great natural disasters elsewhere. It
has happened a lot lately.

The Principle of Humanity is in fact easier to argue for than
for than answers to factual questions that it raises. The factual questions
are far harder than the question of what is right and wrong in general.
These are factual questions, say, about the probability of courses of
action, say civil disobedience or terrorism, having certain consequences.
Anyone confident about these judgements of probability is likely to be
something like a politician in a pushers’ democracy.

There is also a smaller question raised by the principle. It is
the question of the rational choice of a mode of address on any occasion, or
a particular occasion. A mode of address in advocating the principle and its
consequences. Parliamentary language? Academic restraint? Tolerance? Civil
speech? Or the expression of  a proper contempt for the contemptible?

You have heard a thing or two illustrative of my own tentative
answer these days. Here is some more.

OUR COALITION GOVERNMENT

When your subject is the level of intelligence of our public
discourse in England, our discourse now and since Thatcher and Blair, it is
hard to think of our coalition government of conservatives and liberals,
anyway when they are on the telly, as other than the new Teletubbies.

The new Teletubbies are the Westminster successors to those
creatures in that children’s telly program of the past, the program that
kept the kids quiet for their parents, not in trouble or asking questions,
not thinking. The new Teletubbies are the Westminster successors to those
four round, pudgy, large-eyed, brightly-coloured inhabitants of that cartoon
landscape, getting messages from somewhere else and making those funny
noises. They too are amiable, uttering things in a kind of gurgling baby
language. Never actual answers to questions, of course, never actually
relevant replies to such an interrogator as Jon Snow or Jeremy Paxman on a
good evening, but reassuring all the way.

There on our screens, for a start, is the new Tinky Winky. He is
matey, but still in royal purple, as befits the majesty of a graduate of the
public relations industry. Otherwise known as Dave Cameron. He is the
pre-eminent Teletubby, the leader, full of new and very little ideas, fresh
from the Creative Department of the advertising agency that is now the
Conservative Party. He says there is The Big Society that will take care of
us all when the social services are cancelled, and that we’re all one
family. And, about the challenge of the depression, that he is really our
Winston Churchill come back, and that it’s not the size of the dog in a
fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

The new Dipsy is there too. In green, from the liberal side of
the coalition, serving as deputy prime minister to Tinky Winky. Also known
as Nick Clegg, and as Once-The-Great-Debater, and as the maker of coalition
out of rational necessity and perfect decency, and as
Mr-Always-True-To-My-Word unless the word was a solemn undertaking in the
election.

Thirdly there is Laa-Laa, in yellow, second in Tinky Winky’s own
Conservative party. George Osborne when off the screen. He of whom you heard
earlier, in connection with problems with PPE in Oxford. In charge of the
economy now, and the great truths of economics, and the deficit, and the
financial recovery, the latter now widely known as his absolutely necessary
job of robbing the poor to feed the rich more tax relief.

And then there is Po. Vincey Cable, in there elbow-to-elbow with
Dipsy in the liberal side of the coalition. Po in cunningly deceptive
scarlet, also known as Vincey from Shell Oil, of course unfamiliar with that
company’s depradations in Nigeria. Po was to be the great hammer of Rupert
Murdoch, that greatest servant or master of Tinky Winky, but boasted early
to a comely journalist with a tape recorder and was relieved of his duties
as Business Secretary by the wise Tinky Winky.

But leave for a while all that proper and necessary
condescension. Anyway leave it as long as I can.

The coalition government is indeed choosing to visit a
depression on the poor and the poorer. It is doing its very best to save
Greece, it says, by this wholly unavoidable policy for the dragging down of
lives. Stay in the streets, Greeks, as long as it takes. If ever a
demonstration of the viciousness of conservatism and to a very slightly
lesser extent of liberalism was needed, here it is. Here we have a proof.
Wait no longer.

There is the nonsense, the drivel, of the analogy offered in
justification of the English economic policy for England, cutting public
expenditure on the poorer, the analogy so clear to Tinky Winky. That is the
analogy of a family needing to take care about expenditure so as to pay off
a deficit, a family needing to balance its income and its expenditure,
balance the books.

What we have as a society is in fact precisely not a family. It
is not a family for an overwhelming reason. The society’s state or
government makes law. It can determine the society’s income, decide on the
income. That happens by way of what is called taxation. It can happen by
really acting, not pretending to act, with respect to the
scrounger-corporations arranging not to pay their taxes by having a brass
door plate on a fake office in some island somewhere else.

Also, in so far as any metaphor or simile of family is to be a
guide to us, it must be a decent family. What decent family, when times are
hard, when money is short, deprives its worse-off and worst-off members
before its better-off, penalizes its weaker before its stronger members,
looks after the well before the sick?

In the last few weeks in England there has also been a rare
moment of exposure of some of our inspiring democracy, if no real news about
it.

That was the fact of a coalition  government minister — Fox of
the Ministry of Defence — being found to have been involved in typical
money-grubber corruption. More precisely, involved in corruptly inducing
sleezy corporations to give bribes in order to get defence and other
contracts, the bribe-money going to the financing of organized political
cells whose conservative reality is exactly opposition to humanity.

But forget England for a while. Think about Tunisia, Egypt, and
the rest.

THE ARAB SPRING GENERALLY

Certainly the Principle of Humanity supports the overthrow of
authoritarian and worse regimes, despite the necessary uncertainty as to
what will replace them, and the significant possibility or probability that
it will not be a lot better.

Certainly the Principle of Humanity supports all national
liberation movements, struggles by a people to win liberation from
oppression by another people, as in Palestine. The worst of these movements
are superior to the lying rapes they replace.

And the Arab Spring? The aim of the Arab Spring is a low or lower
form of part of one of the six aims of the Principle of Humanity — not all
of freedom and power, but freedom and power of the political kind. So I know
the Arab Spring must of course be supported by the Principle of Humanity.
Supported despite thoughts having to do with other kinds of freedom and
power — and with the other five great goods lacked by bad lives.

Another thing I know is that the Arab Spring has the fine
recommendation that it must strengthen the position of the Palestinians in
their liberation struggle against neo-Zionism. The latter thing,
neo-Zionism, is the taking of at least their autonomy from the Palestinians
in the last one-fifth of the territory of which they are indubitably the
indigenous people. Neo-Zionism is not Zionism, which in my sense is the
founding and actually necessary defence of Israel within its 1948-1967
borders.

Whatever is to be said of Zionism, which I myself persist in
ustifying by means of the Principle of Humanity and some factual premises,
there is another truth.

The Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism within all
of historic Palestine against neo-Zionism. Their terrorism, which is also
their liberation struggles and their self-defence, is no less to be
reverenced than the fact of Jewish lives now rooted in Israel. On another
occasion we can talk about (a) moral rights on the model of legal rights,
with the fundamental moral principle in the place of the law of the land. We
can also talk about (b) the proposition that to have a moral right to X is
to have a moral right to the only possible means to X. Certainly I believe
it, and I suspect you do. You have to. If you give up either right you have
to give up the other.

LIBYA — OUR AIR WAR ON SELECTED LIBYANS

I know little about Libya, and admit it. There should be more of us
doing so.

A little thing I know is about something said by a London professor
on television, a fellow taken by the British Broadcasting Corporation to
know about Libya but no apologist for it. When asked who the supporters of
Gaddafi could possibly be, he replied that they fell into three categories.
Tribes, regions — and the poor. Gaddafi’s Green Book, at which I have
glanced enough in order to see that it is among other things a condemnation
of pushers’ democracy, is not on the side of the rich. What about the now
victorious counter-revolutionaries supported by Tinky Winky? Tinky Winky is
not on the side of the poor.
But there is no doubt whatever that the Libyan regime violated the
Principle of Humanity, to whatever extent. It did some or many of the things
with which it is charged. Our air war in Libya — our 20,000 of what are
called sorties by our lethal aircraft, and the 5,000 successful attacks —
is against a culpable government and its supporters.

That will remain true even if the Libyan regime is replaced by a
regime of hierarchic democracy of which something is true — that it is a
regime of more violation. More violation if omissions are counted as well as
commissions, as they have to be among grown-ups. Hierarchic democracies are
good at omissions when they are not at war.

And Gaddafi himself, his death celebrated on the telly by Tinky
Winky?

If it is our concern to find moral monsters in the world, to find
war criminals, to find butchers, do we have in our Blair and Bush two
stronger candidates than Gaddafi was? I am talking about killing and who
gets killed. I am talking about the intentional killing of innocents. The
numbers count. Great numbers in Iraq count. We have no need of either the
gurgling baby-thinking on the subject or the celebration of killing.

A lot of other things also come to mind about the war in Libya,
about the attacks by our air forces, the horrible deaths. Let me enumerate
some of these other things quickly.

Is our war in Libya a humanitarian intervention? Have our planes
been engaged in killing in Libya only in order to protect civilians from
attacks by their regime? The answer Yes is childish. No human or social or
political action is so simple. None has but one cause or other necessary
condition. It is in fact ludicrously false that our government’s motives
were only as they said. Causal explanation of things is not this kind of
childish simplicity, indeed this idiocy, whatever is mouthed by ad men in
Westminister and New York and Washington.

Our war in Libya, whatever is to be said about protecting
civilians, is also ideological war. It is a war for pushers’ democracy. It
is a war for the capitalism that goes with that democracy, is inseparable
from it. Tinky Winky would not have supported any other revolution. No
revolution against a conservative despot.

As for America’s record of intervention and terrorism in South
America, read the histories and analyses of the greatest of realist
authorities on the relevant international relations, Noam Chomsky. Look at
What Uncle Sam Really Wants for a start.

Our war in Libya, too, is what you heard of a while back. It is a
war that includes the intentional killing of civilians. That is to say it
includes what reasonable foresight settled in advance for everybody beyond
doubt, that civilians would be killed by our war. It is true of all wars.
It is nonsense to assign the intentional killing of innocents only to
terrorism by way of the usual loaded and thus feeble definition.

Do you say that my comment above about moral monsters, and Blair
and Bush as against Gaddafi, and now the comment just made about our
intentional killing of innocents Libya, are so extreme as to discredit
themselves? So extreme as to discredit me?

Well, truth and argument are not a matter of  popularity, as
decent philosophers and scientists and almost all reflective persons are
ready to agree, however inclined they may be to keep their heads down. The
aim of selling is never truth, but I am not selling. Still, let me say a
word more about intentional killing, give you an example, an example that
might come from your newspaper.

A man’s wife has an affair, and then leaves him. He cannot
handle it. He eventually goes to the house she is in with petrol and
matches. He knows she is in there. But he now sees the cleaning woman go in.
That does not stop him from putting the petrol through the letter box and
throwing in the matches. Two people are burned to death.

In court, he says he did not intend to kill the cleaning woman,
only his wife. He had nothing against the cleaning woman. He is guilty of
only one murder. The court, like any decent court, disdains this. He is
convicted of two murders, not one, of course on the ground that he did
something of which he knew or could be expected to know a possible or
probable outcome.

So with killing of innocents in wars. But there is still more
to say of our air war in Libya.

That air war, it is worth remembering, is as much a war of
aggression as it is a defensive war on behalf of some of the people of
Libya.

Our war in Libya is also a cowardly war — it is a war of our
cowardly politicians, fearful of paying the price of ordering a war that
would include casualties on our side and therefore affect the careers of the
politicians. The nature of agents is not irrelevant to the judgement of
their actions, not irrelevant to seeing more fully the probable consequences
of those actions.

Terrorism and terrorist war come to mind. Yes, terrorism needs
defining. My definition of it is (1) killing and other violence, (2)
smaller-scale than war, (3) with a political and social aim rather than
personal gain — maybe the aim of a whole people, (4) against national or
international law, and (5) prima facie wrong. Terrorism includes state
terrorism.

There is also terrorist war. It is same as terrorism except with
respect to (2). That is, it is larger-scale than terrorism.

Our air war against Libyans verges on terrorist war — or at least a
war not demonstrably or even clearly otherwise than terrorist. This is a
matter of legality. What the U.N. sanctioned, in common understanding of its
treacherous motion, is not what has happened. To say otherwise is to lie
about the implication of a piece of the English language. But what is
important about wars is not their legality, or pretence of legality, or
near-illegality. It is their humanity or inhumanity.

There is more to say about Libya.  We are to support the
anti-Gaddafi people because they are fighting to achieve one form or part,
admittedly the most important form, a political form, of the great human
good of freedom and power. You will remember there are other forms of
freedom and power, one of them being the having of a job, another having a
future for your children. And all freedom and power, as you have heard, is
itself but one of the six great human goods. It is also good to live
decently long, not to be in pain, not to be personally disdained, to be an
accepted member of a society, to be able to read.

Could the good of freedom and power in its political part,
certainly not all of the good of freedom and power, ever be outweighed by
other freedom and power and the other five great goods? Could that be the
case despite political freedom and power being a kind of means to the other
things? Could there be a society that is better than another despite having
less political freedom and power, less of the political kind? The question,
which takes us back to Cuba and Denmark and the Soviet Union,  isn’t easy
outside of Teletubbyland.

Do you say, if less hopefully than you might have five years
ago, that the political freedom and power of hierarchic democracy is
indubitably always the best means to the realization of the rest of freedom
and power, sometimes called social freedom, and the other five great human
goods? Do you live in America? In England? Have you been in Texas for a long
time riding the range? Or in a London postal district looking out of a hedge
fund?

The government or regime being brought into being in Libya will
not be better than our hierarchic democracies. If there were any prospect of
that, Cameron and the poseur of France, Sarkozy, would not have supported
the Libyan revolution. Cameron would not have taken us into an air war
likely to contribute to anything better than the society which he leads.

That is a society, incidentally, whose present nature he would in
certain circumstances indubitably defend by force, defend by violence, no
doubt defend by terrorism — and defend by attacks against certain
civilians.

Do you say stick to the facts, give up low speculation about
hypothetical cases? Well, you cannot be optimistic about the society to come
in Libya given that the war has been taken forward by the leader of a party
engaged in a certain project at home in England. That is the project, of
course a lying project, of destroying or dragging down the greatest work of
civilization in the whole history of what was a great country. I refer, of
course, to the profitization of the National Health Service.

WHAT TO DO, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, GESTURE

The future in the world is not so settled as it seemed to be.
Things have in a way changed. If the authoritarian regimes in the Arab
societies can be brought down, so can the conservative regimes of hierarchic
democracy be changed. That is possible. Actually possible.

Civil disobedience works. Remember the fall of a Wall and an
empire after it. Remember the numerous successes of civil disobedience in
the more recent past.

We in English lecture halls ought not to be here. We ought to be
somewhere else . We ought to be outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, with those
occupiers who are following the example of others in Wall Street. Can we
learn at last from America?

Yes — the response of moral and other intelligence to
inhumanity anywhere in the world must be mass civil disobedience. New ideas
of it. New kinds of it. Gestures too.

Remember Col. Rainsborough of the 17th Century civil war in
England, and what he said. Remember the greatest of utterances in English
political history. “For really I think the poorest he hath a life to live,
as the greatest he….”  Shall we have another English colonel today? The
gesture by a colonel of the British army who takes his tank from a barracks
in Pimlico to Parliament Square, right outside the Houses of Parliament, and
parks in the road there to stop the traffic? No shells in the guns, though.
No violence. After the television cameras get to the square, there is a
return to the barracks by the colonel, and acceptance of his penalty for
civil and military disobedience.

23 October 2011

Ted Honderich’s  relevant books: After the Terror (Edinburgh University Press,
2003); On Political Means & Social Ends (Edinburgh University Press, 2003);
Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (Pluto Press,
2003); Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? (Pluto Press, 2005);
Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited (Pluto Press, 2006);
Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War: Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7…
(Continuum, 2006), published in the United States as Right and Wrong:
Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7… (Seven Stories Press). Also, edited by Stephen Law,
Israel, Palestine, and Terror (2008). And papers, chapters of books etc
listed in the index of the Ted Honderich website.