Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Sport and Politics in Iran

    ‘We consider this a victory for the women’s movement’ says Mahboubeh Abbass- Gholizadeh.

  • Scott McLemee at a Historians’ Convention

    Scholars brainwashed into practicing disinterested, rigorous historical inquiry.

  • MCB Rips Up Anti-homophobia Plan

    Bunglawala disavows policy advisor, reiterates ‘homosexual relationships are sinful in Islam.’

  • What the BNP and Respect Have in Common

    Both make people’s wishes secondary to pseudoscientific abstractions such as race and historical forces.

  • Women Out of Control

    Well you can see their point, of course. Men in shorts darting around kicking a ball – I mean to say. If they let women in to watch that kind of thing, not much football would get played, know what I mean? I mean, whoarrrr, right? Obviously. So if they let women in, then all they would get is, the men would come running out and do a spot of kicking and in thirty seconds flat each man would have forty or fifty women on top of him, and those shorts would be nowhere to be seen. Whoarrrrrrr.

    That’s how it is here of course. In the West. There’s no such thing as football here, there are just these abortive occasions where men in shorts start to play football and then before you can say ‘Play ball!’ there’s just a lot of rutting going on. Not all that sporting. But you know how women are – one look at men’s knees and they can’t keep their clothes on. I think there used to be football, once upon a time, but I suppose that was before the Pankhursts or Betty Friedan or something.

    It’s the thing about the other men in shorts that I don’t quite get.

    Women can watch football broadcast on Iranian television and they can attend basketball and volleyball matches even though they too involve men dressed in shorts.

    The thing about television seems quite cruel. It must drive them almost insane, poor things. Do they try to hump the television itself, I wonder? But it’s the part about attending basketball and volleyball matches that I really don’t understand. Why is that allowed? Why is it okay to have basketball and volleyball matches interrupted and ruined by throngs of whimpering women dragging the players’ shorts off? What’s the deal – Iranians like football but not basketball and volleyball? So they want football to go ahead and be played all the way to the end without being sidetracked to a copulation-fest, while with basketball and volleyball they figure it’s okay either way? That must be it, but I think it’s a little unfair to basketball and volleyball. But I prefer football myself, so I guess I can understand it.

    Members of the clergy say it is wrong for men and women to look at each other’s bodies, even if they have no intention of taking pleasure from it.

    Well of course it is. And what do they mean about no intention of taking pleasure from it? What planet is that supposed to be on? The one where women go to soccer matches and tennis matches and squash tournaments and swimming competitions and volleyball and basketball games and marathons and bicycle races with no intention of taking pleasure from slavering over men’s bodies? The one where women don’t even notice those tight tight tight lycra shorts? That planet? Haaaaaaa –

    Sorry, but you have to admit, that’s funny.

    One MP said, if the reformists had tried this, there would have been suicide bombers protesting on the streets of Teheran.

    Protesting? Suicide bombers protesting? In the sense of blowing themselves up? Or just in the usual sense of marching and setting fire to things? But if it’s that – do suicide bombers announce themselves beforehand? Do they have like suicide bomber clubs, or uniforms, or regalia of some sort? Banners, maybe? I’d have thought they didn’t, I’d have thought the idea was to conceal the fact that one was a suicide bomber until the very instant when that fact was made apparent by an explosion. Because, see, if you go around beforehand saying you’re a suicide bomber and protesting things, there is some remote chance that someone might stop you going on being a suicide bomber.

    But, maybe not, with everyone so busy keeping women out of football stadiums. First things first, ya know?

  • Christian Discovery to Manifest Destiny

    Jim Cornehls gives a brief history of US violence.

  • Daniel Finkelstein on Euston Manifesto

    Principles may draw on the great history of the Left, but they are not its present or its future.

  • Women Must Not Look at Men in Shorts

    Ayatollahs and MPs in Iran want ban on women in football stadiums to remain.

  • Martin Kettle on the Euston Manifesto

    A protest against the perceived obsession, dogmatism and influence of post-Iraq left politics.

  • Whither British Philosophers

    Unable to project themselves as effective public scrutineers of our mission and morals.

  • A Dialectic

    One good Radio 4 idea-discusser reviews another. (I like Laurie Taylor. For one thing, he reviewed the Dictionary of FN in the Times Higher. He didn’t think much of it, but he did think some of the jokes were funny – that’s good enough.)

    I’m also put off by the assumption that anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly join Bragg in his latest popularising endeavour is something of a spoilsport or a dangerous elitist…No one can doubt Bragg’s populist spirit. One of the chief pleasures of In Our Time on Radio 4 is the sound of him trying to persuade the assembled academics to speak more plainly about their specialist subject. Whether the topic of the day is quantum mechanics, Goethe, or the rise and fall of Charlemagne, there’s nearly always a magic moment when Melvyn grumbles that a distinguished professorial guest is departing from the order of play or becoming too interested in matters that are not central to the main story. Such episodes perfectly capture the dialectic between Melvyn’s healthy and commendable populist belief that every topic can be successfully brought to heel and his guests’ equally well-grounded insistence that matters are, on the whole, looking at it from both sides, taking everything into account, rather more complicated than their host would wish them to allow.

    Yeh. That’s an interesting and tricky dialectic. I spend much of my life encountering it these days. Jeremy and I were always wrangling over it while writing Why Truth Matters, and I always have to keep it in mind while working on The Philosophers’ Mag. The basic issue JS and I kept disagreeing over is whether it makes people feel stupid and frustrated to read something they don’t entirely understand, or whether it makes them feel insulted and frustrated to have something they do understand explained to them. That’s why it’s a dialectic. I tend to think that a certain amount of difficulty or unfamiliarity does not necessarily make people feel stupid and frustrated but rather challenged and stimulated; I think he tends to think I go too far in that direction, and also that the risk isn’t worth it. I suppose the problem is that what a certain amount of difficulty or unfamiliarity does is make some people feel challenged and stimulated while it makes other people feel stupid and frustrated. But the trouble is that there has to be a cutoff point somewhere – it’s not possible or practical to explain absolutely everything, or else no one would be able to write anything at all, since every word would need explaining, as would the words that did the explaining, so that progress would be impossible. But how does one figure out where the cutoff point is? It’s pure guesswork, pure intuition; seat of the pants stuff. Nobody knows. We just do our best, that’s all. And argue over words like ‘quotidian’.

  • Laurie Taylor on Bragg’s Twelve

    Academics never nearby enough to moderate some of his less fortunate populist urges.

  • John Sutherland on Bragg’s Twelve

    Bragg has established himself over the past decades as a fearlessly dedicated popular educator.

  • Claire Harman on Bragg’s Twelve

    Arkwright’s patent served to restrict knowledge rather than spread it.

  • On de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness

    ‘Nobody could claim these are great revelations. But they have the virtue of being true.’

  • Alan Ryan on Jane Addams

    She presents us with almost too much to think about.

  • Review of Sen’s Identity and Violence

    Tunku Varadarajan finds it pretty but unrealistic.

  • Vatican Considers Condom Rules

    Might allow married people with HIV to use condoms.

  • No Shortcut

    This is good bracing stuff.

    At Wellington College, one of Britain’s top public schools, headmaster Anthony Seldon is piloting an initiative that may eventually see lessons in happiness added to the curriculum in both the state and independent sectors. What an unhappy prospect…The problem is that Wellington is opting to teach happiness through positive psychology which, in my view, can amount to little more than self-help with a veneer of academic respectability.

    And one thing neither the world nor education needs more of is self-help with a veneer of academic respectability. It’s had lashings of that, via for instance the totem of ‘self-esteem’, and look how well that turned out – producing throngs of people with all too much self-esteem and all too little awareness of their own limitations. Positive psychology sounds unnervingly like more of the same.

    A life of unremitting cheerfulness is one of delusion, for it refuses to acknowledge normal ups and downs. By emphasising pleasure, the psychologists turn happiness into something self-regarding: mere accumulation of pleasure and avoidance of pain. More, they leave unanswered all the tough questions: Do you have a right to be happy? Can you be happy if others are unhappy? Does it matter whether or not you’re happy?

    The tough questions and also the most interesting ones. For instance: if there were a happiness pill, would you take it? The answer is far from obviously yes, for the same sort of reason the answer is not obviously yes to questions like ‘if there were a pill that could make you write great poetry or play the cello like Rostropovich, would you take it?’ The idea may appeal for about a quarter of a second, but then when we think about it we realize we want our happiness and our accompishments or talents to mean something, which entails that they have to be the product of something, of something connected to our own efforts or experience or thought or all those. No, actually, we don’t want to just magically turn into another Keats or Mozart; what would be the point? We want to cover the ground that lies in between being our poor bare selves and whatever magical being we have it in us to become – we want to cover all the ground, ourselves, wide awake and bending every nerve. If we don’t do that, whatever we get at the end doesn’t belong to us, and it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just some sort of parlour trick. Away with it. Same with positive psychology.

    To begin, we must find a better definition of happiness, one that surpasses the restricted boundaries of subjective wellbeing. Lasting and profound happiness is the active orientation of your life towards meaning, purpose and value. It’s a reflection upon the character of your life as a whole. This kind of happiness is strong enough to withstand misfortune and does not depend upon good fortune. It isn’t about feeling good, it’s about being good. That’s what Aristotle meant when he called happiness (eudaemonia) a state of flourishing in the art of living…And thus he insisted that happiness was an activity – because it requires skill and focus.

    It’s the opposite of a magic pill; it’s the negation of a magic pill. A magic pill would block and prevent the need for activity, skill and focus, so the happiness it created would be just some sort of weird delusion (a trick of the Evil Demon, perhaps) rather than the real thing. It would be like taking a pill that would cause you to have won a marathon, without having actually run the 26 miles and with no memory of having done so. Not very rewarding.

  • The Myth of Productivity and the Function of Consumerism: An Institutional Perspective

    Productivity is an economic term that, like others, has more than one meaning. First, there is overall productivity, meaning the collective ability of a society to produce goods and services. Second, productivity is used to explain the distribution of incomes within a society, where productivity is taken to mean the relative contribution of each of the so-called factors of production, land, labor and capital, to the production process. These two aspects of productivity are inextricably linked in the U.S. mixed economic system.

    Efforts to measure productivity in the second sense are chimeras. Productivity is the result of mixing machinery, human effort, and community knowledge. Productivity does not exist independently of any or all of these. If a woman uses a wheelbarrow to move bricks, what part of the result can be attributed to the woman’s exertions and what part to the wheelbarrow? Since it is impossible to measure independently the contributions of each to their combined output, economics uses the mechanism of prices to make this transition.

    But this means that the only way to determine a laborer’s wage is to know it in advance. The only way to determine the rent of land is to know it in advance. By working backwards, it is concluded that the payments to the factors of production prove what their relative contributions are. If it were not so, their payments would be different. This is circular and tautological. Alleged productivity is used to rationalize what the individual actors in the economic drama are paid.

    The distribution of incomes is not determined by productivity but by power relations and institutional arrangements of societies. Centuries ago, princes received huge amounts of the community product, while doing no productive work themselves. Their relatively greater income was acquired because they had the power, both legal and physical, to command tribute from their vassals. The penalty for not paying the prince his due could be the loss of one’s head.

    Today, ownership and control of productive assets, with the resulting ability to command a disproportionate share of society’s income and wealth, still is enforced by law and social privilege. The “free private enterprise system” is slavishly credited with the overall production of the society and with the determination of individual rewards. Today the penalty for not paying the princes of corporations their due is the loss of one’s job.

    Several decades ago, corporate CEOs in the U.S. were paid 40 to 60 times what the assembly line workers received. Whether they were worth 40 to 60 times more than the line worker then is an open question.

    Today these same CEOs routinely are paid from 400 to 600 times more than an assembly line worker. Is it possible that CEOs became ten times more productive than they were 20-30 years ago? That would imply an annual growth rate in CEO productivity of almost 17%. The annual overall rate of growth of productivity averaged only a little more than one percent.

    In 2005, the incomes of the CEOs of the 100 largest U.S. corporations grew by 25% while average U.S. worker pay increased by only 3%. Is it possible the CEOs are 400 to 600 times more productive than assembly line workers? The myth of productivity would tell us they are or they wouldn’t be rewarded so handsomely. The myth of productivity would tell us the CEOs were extremely productive in 2005.

    What changed to permit this sweeping increase in the pay of CEOs were the institutional factors which determined what CEOs get paid by their Boards of Directors. Principal among these was the greater importance assigned to increasing the value of the corporation’s stock. CEOs who orchestrated acquisitions and mergers that temporarily inflated the price of company stock, or cut costs by firing 1,000s of workers were themselves handsomely rewarded with special bonuses, stock options, golden parachutes and lavish company perks. Overpaid CEOs gave corporations bragging rights in the world of big business.

    Several years ago when the corporate CEO pay bubble burst, a number of the most “productive” of these individuals were prosecuted for defrauding their own stockholders and violating federal securities laws. A handful actually went to prison and the trial of two of the most prominent is currently underway in the Enron case. The obligatory calls for curbing these excesses were made by persons in authority. Notwithstanding, bloated corporate pay is again on the increase, while wages for most workers lag far behind.

    One of the ways used to divert attention from the huge disparities in income distribution is to encourage growth and an ever larger output of goods and services. If everyone’s income is growing, so the argument goes, everyone is better off and the relative shares of different actors become less important.

    It is contended that the wealthier income recipients deserve their extraordinary incomes not only because they are more productive than others, but because it is through their frugality and investment that growth takes place. It is allegedly this growth that is responsible for everyone being better off, through the so-called trickle-down theory.

    Those who object to the trickle-down theory on the grounds they don’t like to be dripped on have a different explanation. In reality growth is financed by mega lines of credit for corporations from mega banks, by public assistance such as the use of local government taxation to pay for buildings to be used by private businesses, by tax abatements to lure new or relocating industries to communities, and by the issuance of new or additional shares of stock. Initial public offerings (IPOs) abound for new companies, and are quickly bought up by thousands of small investors, as well as institutional investors that pool the assets of millions of individuals.

    There is another reason why inequality in the distribution of income serves to promote
    ever-greater growth. Striving to keep up with one’s neighbors, friends and associates is effectuated through the mechanism of competitive consumption. Individuals and families are urged, through high pressure promotional devices (billions are spent annually on highly persuasive advertising) and social pressure, to maintain material standards of consumption as high as they can possibly attain, even if it means incurring huge debts.

    U.S. consumers now are burdened with more than nine trillion dollars of debt. The average balance for those who carry credit card debt is $12,000! Additionally, the rate of interest on these unpaid balances ranges from 12 to 22 percent.

    To continue to service this debt and to permit the ever increasing consumption levels of all but the poorest in the society, there must be a constant increase in overall productivity, i.e. the maintenance of a high rate of growth. It is a treadmill of our own design.

    Industrial nations such as the United States produce more than an abundance of material goods, sufficient to enable the entire population to live materially comfortable lives, to enjoy productive, fulfilling work, to become engaged in community activities and to contribute to the eradication of world poverty, the real kind. There simply is no instrumental reason why this cannot be realized.

    The only reason this promise is not realized is because of the power of man-made institutions to prohibit or inhibit its occurrence. Factories are not closed and workers laid off because it is no longer technologically feasible to operate the plant. They are closed for business reasons, for purposes of pecuniary enhancement, of the corporation and/or the CEO. It has nothing to do with the real productivity of either the workers or the machines they use in their work or the CEOs. That and the uneven distribution of income is the myth of productivity.

    Presently, there can be severe economic and socio-psychological consequences when a factory is closed and hundreds or thousands of workers are laid off. In smaller, company towns, the closing of the local plant may literally mean the demise of the community. The United States is dotted with ghost towns that suffered this fate.

    When factories are closed in larger communities, there is a ripple effect that has consequences for the entire community. Community income declines, other businesses suffer decreased demand, often resulting in additional lay-offs, fewer dollars flowing into the community from outside purchases, and a general negative economic impact. It is a cumulative process, and while it may not be fatal, it can have profound impacts on individuals and families, the local economy, government services, education, and quality of life.

    With only five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes more than 40 percent of the world’s resources used in any given year. This high mass consumption far exceeds any reasonable economic needs of the populace, but is continued because of the competition fostered by economic and social institutions. With the present institutional arrangements of society it is impossible for society as a whole to get off the high mass consumption treadmill, without fundamental changes in values and economic and social institutions.

    Such changes cannot take place voluntarily, person by person, because we all are products of our environment and the constant pressures to “live better.” The current economic machine depends on high mass consumption to keep it running. Without changes in the system of rewards, any sudden rapid decrease in consumer spending would result in severe economic dislocation and depression.

    If there are to be meaningful economic changes, it will require public education, public intervention, collective social direction and guidance, and relief from the enticements of private economic interests, especially the advertising industry. Advertising must become informative only, not misleading and designed to create wants where none previously existed.

    With the tightening of the environmental noose and the inexorable depletion of the planet’s natural resources the continuation of consumerism such as that found in the United States and other capitalist nations will not be possible. Decisions about greater equality and reduced demand either will be made by us or for us. We need the planet. The planet doesn’t need us.

    Jim Cornehls – Copyright: 2006

    Jim Cornehls is Professor and Director of the Law and Public Policy Graduate Certificate Program at the University of Texas at Arlington.