Oh, Brave New World!

This is my contribution to a debate on one of my social networks.

Yes, this is interesting, Felicity, the sort of thing that really brings the wheels of my intellect into motion. Most questions and debates here, those questions and debates I choose to participate in at all, can be dealt with in a fairly summary fashion. I did see your submission when I was last online and decided to reflect on it for a bit. You deserve a good answer.

So, what have I come up with? Nothing terribly radical, I suppose. I said in previous discussions on eugenics and abortion that if I got pregnant and subsequently discovered through tests-a process that I would insist upon-that the foetus was abnormal, then I would have a termination, immediately and without hesitation. So, I suppose this automatically puts me in favour of forms of genetic modification before I even consider the grander horizons you set out.

Selective breeding has, indeed, been part of the human experience since the very inception of civilization. So why not take the process as far and as high as we can? After all, who would not prefer a world free of disease and disability, a world of perfect and super-intelligent people? Ah, who indeed?

So, let me think some more. In The German Ideology Karl Marx set out the terms of a perfect society, a communist society, where it would be possible to be all that one can be without being anything in particular; one could raise cattle in the morning and be a literary critic in the afternoon, without ever being defined as one thing or the other. But when one of his associates asked who would clean the toilets under communism, Marx quipped ‘You should.’ Yes, the perfect put down. Even so, the question remains unanswered: who should clean the toilets in a perfect world? In other words, who would choose such a thing?

So, there are two possibilities: the first, that genetic modification is too expensive to be afforded by each and all, and second, in a perfectly democratic world all will have such access. There is really no problem with the first: elites will continue to be elites, though perhaps some of the scions will be a little less stupid, a little less ‘degenerate’, than they have been; and, no, I’m not thinking of the divine Paris! :))

Now the second scenario is altogether more problematic, for we live in a world where Cleaners are just as necessary as Consultants. But what loving parent is going to choose the former as a destiny for their child? I imagine that any process of genetic modification would involve choosing only the best elements; intelligence, good-looks and good prospects. But a world full of Consultants would simply collapse into chaos. Some Consultants may even have to force other Consultants to be Cleaners. New and more dreadful struggles may emerge: the Cleaner Wars! Do you see the point I am making? The low and the high, the Patrician and the Plebeian, could not exist, the one without the other.

I said there were two possibilities. Well, actually, there is a third. The process of democratic modification might be ended and one of modification by determination take its place. Some of you who read this may already know what I am driving at. Yes, it’s that Brave New World set out by Aldous Huxley, published in the 1930s, describing a society, where a reproductive technology is an accepted part of life; where children are raised in hatcheries, and where an elite decide, by a process of modification and engineering, who is to be Alpha and who is to be Epsilon; who, in other words, is to be a Consultant and who is to be a Cleaner.

And in the name of Our Ford so it shall be.

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world!
That has such people in't!

Tertullian and the Nature of Heresy

For Tertullian, an early Christian apologist, the Church alone bore the apostolic rule of faith, revered the canon of Scriptures, and bore through its ecclesiastical hierarchy the sanction of apostolic succession. Heretics were those who challenged any of these precepts. They were people who refused to accept the rule of faith, as others did. Instead they challenged people to raise theological questions to which there was no answer, "...being ready to say, and sincerely of certain points of their belief, 'That is not so' and 'I take this in a different sense' and 'I do not admit that'".

Tertullian has it that all such unnecessary questioning automatically leads to heresy-"This rule was raised by Christ, and raises among ourselves no other questions than those which the heresies introduce and which make men heretics!" Heretics, moreover, are those who do not restrict themselves to the Scriptures, but bring in other writings or challenge orthodox interpretations. Heretics are, quitesimply, rebels, in theological and in practical terms.

The answer was to believe and never question. It seems clear what practcal form this kind of thinking would take, to the fires of the Middle Ages and beyond.

Civilization and Death, exploring the Halls of Montezuma

I’m sure that the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City must count among the best museums in the world; it’s certainly one of the best I’ve ever been to, with an absolutely wonderful collection of Mesoamerican artefacts, many from the time of the Aztec Empire. It’s where I first saw the teocalli, a votive sculpture cared at the beginning of the sixteenth century to mark the end of the 52-year calendar cycle, and bearing the image of Montezuma II. Well, now it’s in London, the centrepiece of a new exhibition at the British Museum, focusing on Montezuma himself as well as some of the wider aspects of the culture of the Mexica-the term the Aztecs used for themselves-and the final clash of empires that followed from the arrival of Cortés.

The Aztecs, as most people known, certainly people who have seen Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, built a city that floated on water and a civilization that floated on blood. War and religion were closely united, in that campaigns were essentially pursued against their neighbours with the aim of taking captives who were then fed to the blood-thirsty gods, though this aspect is rather down-played in the exhibition itself. Though not generally understood this was the key to their downfall, not the fact that Cortés’s tiny force had firearms and horses. No, he had allies, Indian allies, enemies of the Aztecs.

So, given that the Aztec civilization was at heart a cult of death Boris Johnson, my favourite mayor in all the world, took to the pages of Monday’s Daily Telegraph to argue that their taste for killing presents a powerful case for colonialism and the intervention in the Americas of the oh-so benevolent Conquistadors (When one civilization deserves a bloody nose from another). Human sacrifice as practiced by the Aztecs was indeed horrible, a process by which the living heart was cut from the body by razor sharp obsidian blades; it certainly horrified the Spanish.

And yet, Boris, and yet. I wonder what an Aztec party coming to Spain would have made of the procedures of the Inquisition; what they would have made of the auto de fé, when living victims were cast to the flames in the name of another God, not a god of war, not a god who needed blood to rise in the morning, but a god of peace and love? Would they have been equally horrified? Yes, probably, because I imagine they would have been unable to work out why this was happening. There again, they may have sympathised with the ‘religious’ sacrifice of the Spanish in the way that the Spanish did not, could not, sympathise with theirs.

Boris, I know, is a Classical scholar and an admirer of the Roman Empire. So, let me take my imaginary Aztec travellers back in time to the days of the Caesars. What would they see? Why, yet another death cult, with ‘sacrifices’ across the Empire not for the benefit of the gods but for the passions of the mob. Now if our Aztecs were as technologically advanced in relative terms as the Spanish, if they came to Rome in the way that Cortés came to Tenochtitlan, if they had been as thoroughly destructive as the Spanish, we may never have heard of Virgil, of Livy, of Horace, of Cicero or of Seneca, as one imperial power built itself on the sands of another.

But I realise that this is all great fun, and that the dear mayor is writing partially tongue-in-cheek. What he and I can both agree on is that this is a super exhibition, worth going to see, and even worth the entirely voluntary sacrifice of a fiver. :-))

No More Hard Labour

According to a report by Toby Helms in The Observer Joker Brown, 'the best man for the job', could be the last leader of the last Labour government. Yes, you read that correctly-the last ever Labour government. It's not often that The Observer manages to put a little extra spring in my step and gleam in my eyes, but it managed it this Sunday. Seemingly the only hope (oh, God; surely not!) is for the electorate to be offered a chance to change the voting system, at least it is according to Compass, a left-wing pressure group, in a report headed The Last Labour Government. Oh, say that again; say that again!

I assume that these people want the new system to be in place by next spring, though it's not quite clear from the report. What is clear is the horror that David Cameron will inflict on Noo Labour after a victory on the old voting system. Their representation at Westminster, the report continues, would be slashed from 349 at present to a rump of 130 in opposition.

This collapse is partially explained, in the Compass perspective, by the greater likelihood of Scottish independence if the Tories win, the argument here being that they are much less popular in the north and the Scots won't be able to settle down under a government of the right. In that event Labour would lose the 'block vote' of forty-one MPs whose only function at Westminster, so far as I can see, is to act as lobby fodder. But it would also mean the end of the 'Scottish Raj.' How will we ever manage without the Broonies in future? :-)

Seriously, I would be sorry to see the Union end and Scotland and England go their separate ways. But the present situation simply can't continue, with Scottish MPs determining policy for England when English MPs have no say on policy for Scotland. What we can never again have is a situation where a minority Labour government is propped up by the votes of Scottish and Welsh MPs. That's the wave of the past.

The second threat detailed by the report is Cameron's plan to cut the number of MPs by ten per cent. This will hit Labour hardest because the biggest reduction will be in areas which have seen the greatest decline in population, most notably the old fiefdoms in Wales and the industrial heartlands. So, we can add a likely loss of another forty-five seats to the Scottish block.

The game is changing, Compass concludes. Voting reform is the only way for Labour to avoid not just a crushing defeat but the strong chance that they may never govern again:

A referendum moves the party from zero chance of the Tories not losing next May to striking distance of a hung parliament and Labour the biggest single party. The decision could decide not just Labour's future for one or two parliaments, not even for a generation, but for ever.

It's super, is it not? It gives an almost transparent view of the intensity of the panic among Noo Labour. They are capable literally of anything in their desperation to hang on to government, possibly even manipulation of the voting system to their own self-serving ends. There is no phony nod to 'fairness' here, nothing of the Liberal Democrat argument. It's about power and nothing besides.

Of one thing I am certain: Noo Labour has done such harm to this country over the last twelve years that the thought of them ever again forming a government is just too awful to contemplate. I welcome the message of this report: it shows just how important it is to retain our present system of voting, just as it is to weed out the Old Sarums, all those socialist rotten boroughs that prop up this rotten government. In this regard the next election might very well be as important as that of 1830. Reform, real reform, is on the Tory side.

I wrote this earlier today but I see from tonight's news broadcast that the Joker has made 'electoral reform' part of his package to be presented to the voters next year. Well, now you know why.

High Windows

I’m really just discovering Philip Larkin as a poet, though I memorised This be the Verse a few years ago just for the pleasure of shocking the other girls at my boarding school. But he is a super poet, he truly is, with a uniquely English perspective on things. At the moment my favourite amongst his poems is the wonderful High Windows with all of its sad ambiguity. And here it is.