Adrian Selby's Blog

These two books were so intimidatingly good it’s taken me a while to work up the courage to outline why I recommend them. The Black Atlantic – Modernity and Double Consciousness is my first dip into Black cultural theory, having been recommended Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall’s work in the field. Be warned, the text...

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James C. Scott’s fascinating book argues that we have enslaved ourselves to grain production and the ‘civilisation’ that followed. The inevitable outcome of grain cultivation and sedentism’s propensity to increase birth rates has led to both a patriarchal system that reduces women to breeders and promotes warfare to enslave yet more people to sustain the...

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These two wonderful books, by Michael Cisco and Lavie Tidhar respectively, set me thinking about the role of a protagonist. A core tenet of mine is that my books should have characters the reader really cares about, whether they’re rooting for them or not. Equally, I don’t enjoy, as much as I otherwise might, books...

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Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer is hard sci-fi. There’s no space opera grandeur here, it’s far more profound. It offers a tender and bleak vision of how humanity changes and fails. Nina Allen’s review summarises the book and its challenges brilliantly. I would only emphasise that Vandermeer’s great achievement with this book is how he...

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Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 Link 4

(Gold model of a chariot, 500-330BC)

In the book I’m writing at the moment, the main character finds themselves torn from their ordinary life in my hometown of Barry. I wanted them to find an ally and mentor to help them navigate their conflict and keep them alive. I wanted this character, who I ended up calling Almaqui, to be many lifetimes old. I wanted to find a point in history, both time and place, I knew very little about (ok, that’s almost all of them) but more importantly, was a point in history not that well known generally. I fancied learning something new. I decided The Middle East would be good due to its position at the heart of the ‘Old World’. I then came across the Sasanians, in what was then known as Persia. I did some reading, though there are few books available to the casual historian that deal specifically with this period. I recommend ‘Sasanian Persia’ by Touraj Daryaee.

I was staggered by the richness of its history and culture, and I imagine I’d feel the same had I read as much of any of the ancient civilisations, but among other things they sent Roman armies packing on many occasions, created a great empire, permitted people of many faiths to take part in their society (principally Zoroastrian) and were sophisticated culturally and artistically, as well as embedded in the trade of the Silk Road. The empire ended when Persia was conquered by muslims in the seventh century and it has been a muslim country ever since. My enjoyment of this book was such that it fostered a great desire in me to visit Iran. I have no idea, with only the news to go on, how Iran might be to travel within, but my desire to one day attempt a visit was bolstered further by my visit to the exhibition ‘Epic Iran‘ currently on at the Victoria and Albert museum.

What an entrance!

At the entrance to the exhibition this plaque is an exquisitely succinct, somewhat sanitised characterisation of what we should think of when we think of Iran.

I fear that what images we might conjure when we are asked about Iran are rather more dour than both Iran and its people deserves. It may be that the Islamic Republic ushered in by the Ayatolla Khomeini in 1978-9 brought with it a harder line against the artists and intelligentsia of the decades and centuries before it, yet it remains the case that you can walk into a bazaar and buy a carpet depicting Muhammad. The regime since Khomeini has, albeit with religious restrictions I’d find intolerable, been successful in many ways for its people, with regard to access to medicine and education, for example. Yet the most striking part of the exhibition for me was in the modern art on show here, if only for reassuring me that, after many rooms filled with beautiful pottery, silverware, ceramics and textiles from 3000BC onwards, not to mention a tremendous tradition of poetry and literature, art still remains central to how Iranians reflect on their country and its past.

Almaqui, my Sasanian Persian character, will no doubt have visited his homeland over the centuries since, though increasingly less often, for plot reasons. Its centrality to both the Old World; the trade between Europe, Africa and China, then later the influences of the British and Russians due to its proximity to ‘The Great Game’, would make Iran’s influence internationally a source of pride for him. Of course, no sense of national pride is simple, it always straddles the contradictions of a country’s virtues and sins and Iran’s/Persia’s are as rich as any. I’m grateful to have been able to see up close this exhibition’s artifacts, their beauty and intricacy. I’ll sign this off with a few images I managed to snap. Many more suffered my inexperience at taking photos with a decent focal length in low light!

5-600AD, silver gilt, depicting a goddess on a lion, surrounded by cupid figures and dancers. 12th century Iranian decorations influenced China’s porcelain development. (This one’s a bit later!) Ali Banisadr’s ‘Stardust’ (2011). Banisadr experiences synaesthesia, seeing sounds. ‘All The White Horses’ by Avish Khebrehzadeh. An 8 minute multi-channel animation of horses galloping.

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I’d not long started my career in videogames when a game designer told me that good game design is giving people what they want, but also giving people something they didn’t realise they wanted, but now they’ve got it, they’re delighted. Similarly, if you cannot offer something new and compelling as an opposition party in politics, an inspiring alternative explanation and solution for their problems, you cannot make the emotional connection that takes people with you. You cannot win.

Nesrine Malik’s recent article on patriotism characterises the problem Labour perceives it has in trying to win back power. It’s wrong, and the solutions proffered will, as Malik says, fail before they begin. Focus grouping a strategy in this way is by definition fake and people won’t follow a fake. As a vision it’s too reactive, too focused on taking at face value what people don’t like about Labour and crafting a direct counter, without seriously considering how unlikely it is that people will just magically love Labour again because they wear better suits to a cenotaph. Shouldn’t Labour be re-framing patriotism, grounding it in its true complexity? It’s always been complex. Shouldn’t they be doing this because they need to speak to all, as they always have, not just a few? Labour must formulate a strategy that is optimistic and empowering for current and future generations across the whole country. It must show that political and practical solutions to the erosion of community, decimation of good jobs and regional economies requires an evolution of democracy that leverages technology. It is a national project that only our unity can make succeed. Small scale examples of practical successes in community and consensus building exist. Publicising these will help people get a grasp of the vision, it’ll give them something they didn’t realise they wanted.

Being British

I want to take a step back and look at the nature of patriotic feeling.

All killer, no filler.

The sources of patriotic feeling are multifarious. This pride and sense of belonging sits within citizens with widely varying identities; age, gender, (dis)ability, language, colour of skin, religion. Some might not like it, some hate it, but there is no rational argument for delineating a particular ‘recipe’ of identity and a particular set of sources for patriotic feeling as ‘right’. There is no authority for determining what counts as legitimate patriotism.

So let’s take me as an example and pick on a few things that make me proud. I’m proud of the legacy we have for holding those in power to account, with the freedom to speak to power, challenge it and even satirise it. I love the parliamentary select committee structure for its ability to scrutinise our government from within. For decades on national television there were (and in the odd case still are) current affairs programs famous for holding those in power to account. Ministers no longer seem to care for such scrutiny in an age where they can curate their messages direct to Facebook undiluted by critique. (Take a look at the summaries for TW3, Panorama, The World at One, World In Action and Brian Walden’s forensic interviewing for Weekend World and elsewhere (bear in mind he was no ‘lefty’) for examples of programming that attempted to bring clarity to matters of public concern). There is no doubt we can scrutinise those in power. Who among us would want it otherwise except those who seek to exercise power on our behalf without oversight, i.e. the corrupt?

The image of Stormzy above represents to me also the freedom of expression we have in the arts, another source of pride. We are renowned for a sophisticated, daring and diverse culture. In regards to both freedoms I’m particularly proud of the BBC. Its existence may well be bemoaned by those to the left and right of centre, but Stormzy in Glastonbury was on the BBC the night before The Archers continued to entertain its own long-running and far different cultural niche the next morning. This is the BBC speaking to all of Britain in a nutshell. There’s nothing particularly partisan about its news output, either, much as I believed there was.1 2

What else am I proud of being British for? I’m proud we have strong gun control and the NHS. I’m proud to be Welsh because, er, Welsh. I like that citizens of this country have done so much through political activism for women’s rights, gay rights and worker’s rights, but I’m not proud of how much fight that took or how long it took. I am proud of Britain’s standing in the world, its reputation and contribution, in particular its stand against fascism, but I’m not proud of what it took to get us here regarding the awful human costs of our empire. I’m proud of the fact we can openly scrutinise the latter and yet not so proud that the capabilities of our educational, social and political institutions the wealth of that empire built are not yielding the same ‘white heat’ of progress that the industrial revolution forged. It feels like we’re stagnating.

It doesn’t matter what you think of these sources of my patriotic feeling or, indeed, my frustrations with Britain. No, really, it doesn’t matter. The reasons I love Britain are mine and you or anyone else doesn’t get to decide their legitimacy. Mo Farah is a proud British muslim, an immigrant who became one of the greatest distance runners of all time. Can you seriously believe his patriotism is somehow illegitimate, fake or simply felt less strongly? Stormzy may well love the fact he can create a publishing imprint able to give voice to those being under-represented in mainstream book publishing, yet he will rightly criticise the way Black people are discriminated against here. Our war veteran may both love his country for protecting us from fascism and feel dismay at that same country’s lack of government support and funding for ex-servicemen. He will recognise Stormzy’s belief in God, but is unlikely to understand what it means to be ‘Black British’. It doesn’t matter. Being ‘British’ is a wonderfully complex concept.

Social media and news media wars are being propagated to set people against each other based on their varied identities. This is useful to those who would exercise power over us and look to profit from it. Why else would we stand in a food bank arguing about why I don’t belong in this country when we both should be more concerned about a system that’s forcing us to use the food bank in the first place? The racist and fascist playbooks have a long and varied history of offering comforting and entirely dubious explanations to people looking to understand why they work hard and do their best but end up with so little compared to the rich. Behind these groups, always, are those seeking to exercise authoritarian power over us without scrutiny. Social media has amplified their reach and the same grooming and radicalisation tactics all fundamentalists and terrorists use applies here.

Consensus

So I cannot have been the only one pleasantly surprised by seeing so many of us clapping the key workers for their efforts during this pandemic, the NHS in particular as it bore the brunt of the sick and dying, many of whom suffered due directly to the ineptitude of the government. Despite widely varying identities and, no doubt, a variety of sources of patriotic sentiment we were unified in common recognition of our fellow citizens that spend their lives taking care of us and often saving our loved ones. I don’t recall anyone clapping nurses and doctors of a particular identity. I doubt anyone out clapping would have tolerated that. Yet meaningful recognition of the work of nurses, from the funding of all aspects of nursing training through bursaries to a good salary is an issue we don’t seem to either care enough about or begin to know how to solve, given we have a strong Conservative majority. Have we become a nation capable only of some zero effort, zero cost clapping for five minutes on our doorsteps for the good work done by our neighbours?

Perhaps not. The stellar work Marcus Rashford did to highlight child poverty and hunger during the lockdown, forcing two government U turns on policy that would have caused its own citizens to go hungry was another trigger for an amazing and far more meaningful nationwide effort to provide meals to families struggling with poverty and unemployment across the country. Once more, in adversity, there was a unity among British citizens with their fellows that ignored those other aspects of our identities that are being exploited to divide us.

Practical Steps (aka ‘it’s not merely spending, it’s investment with a return’)

I want to talk about some initiatives out there that Labour should seriously look at that I believe are instrumental to creating a better Britain.

If a prospective government is going to attempt to heal our divisions and argue for a more complex ‘Britishness’, it’s obvious a connection needs to be made between the compassion for others that is latent in almost all of us and a political vision that makes clear the benefit to everyone for leveraging that sense of community. How? Principally by mapping out how we invest in the whole country to stay competitive in the face of change coming in the global economy caused by climate change and advancing technology, and how we can put an infrastructure in place that devolves decision making to a greater degree to the regions using methods that promote consensus and so change the character of our interactions with each other. We can reduce and replace the mediation of our connections driven by the myopic, profit-oriented agendas of modern media and tech barons who seek to define our future on their terms.

Britain doesn’t succeed while it’s at war with itself, while the interests of its citizens have been made antagonistic to each other through excessive inequality of income, opportunity and discrimination. This vision of a better Britain acknowledges the past but is geared towards framing the present as the ground on which we stand, love it or hate it. I think we’re good at pragmatism. The glories and the bloodshed of the past can and must be made clear by our historians, but we acknowledge that it is an act of self-destruction to denigrate the role of education and ‘being educated’ in transforming Britain for the near future global economy, when those things were so central to our success throughout that history. If we paid such a heavy price for the success Britain has historically had, why are we so reluctant to leverage it, except that it appears not to suit an elite that feels threatened by our unity and our potential.

The political vision thus begins with education and opportunity, in particular with a serious investment in STEM subjects and the attendant educational infrastructure. It makes clear that the public investment we make now generates the innovation and expertise later to respond to an economy fewer and fewer of us can make sense of the more quickly technological advances facilitate or supplant the production of goods and services, even the nature of labour and work itself. The twenty first century will not be shaped by the routines and work/life patterns of a twentieth century economy, regardless of whether older generations can make sense of where we’re headed. We therefore need as large a pool of capable people as possible available to drive competitive excellence in our companies. Those companies could lead the world with better support through publicly owned investment banks that can afford to take a longer view than private banks and distribute the dividends directly back to the exchequer. Strong public sector involvement (‘stakeholding’) in key industries is well understood in Germany and Japan. If that support can generate the IP, patents and solutions that will help us maintain an edge in the global economy to come, we will all have much to be proud of.

The vision is of us finding and training our most capable engineers, scientists, thinkers and innovators who might come from any community, not just those that can afford the education. It would naturally follow that we’d need to invest accordingly to give them a far better chance to contribute, and in so doing create wealth that pays back that public investment many times over. I’ve worked for many corporations, from BP to Disney, and all of them value investment in people, spending small fortunes on equipping their employees to be able to thrive and contribute more value to their business. Why on earth don’t countries behave the same way with and for their citizens? Why are so many of our fellows languishing in poverty, using food banks, living day to day under constant anxiety and stress? What could they or their children begin to offer both in the short term if they actually had any spending money to support their local economy and in the long term if they could utilise the sovereignty that better pay, conditions and a more supportive community would allow them and their kids. A simple example; student debt is putting off working class kids from going to university or polytechnic. A whole swathe of our youth are disempowered from fulfilling their potential, generation after generation, that might otherwise create significant wealth with the quality of their labour or entrepreneurship emboldened by the provision of the guidance and funding to bring their dreams to fruition. How is it right that the poorest and most deprived, much of the working class, succeed despite their circumstances and not because of them?

The vision for what it means to be a citizen, how we promote unity beyond just improving opportunity for all needs to describe how we connect directly with our communities via a citizens assembly framework that would exist in all our regions. Software already exists to facilitate this and this process was used to effectively and peacefully negotiate a path to abortion legislation in Ireland, a highly divisive issue there. This assembly and others like it created an environment that in their structure promoted consensus and informed decision making, and in particular did such with people talking directly with each other. How utterly opposed this model of communication is to the anonymity that fuels the cruelty and misunderstanding underlying so much engagement in mass social media generally (and by design).

In addition, what if a network of regional publicly owned investment banks worked in concord with the assembly framework to determine consensus on how best to focus tax spend? A similar, more embryonic initiative is underway with great success in pilot schemes across the UK.

When we see a positive outcome to our collaboration, we break down the divisions that are being constructed against our better natures. We recognise people for what they say and do, not what they are. The person before us is not reduced to ‘benefits claimant’ or ‘brown’ or ‘neurodiverse’, we grow to see they’re as capable of caring about our community as we are. We’ll more readily realise, too, that we all ‘bleed red’ as Shylock might have it.

The arts will evolve to hold our course to account, morally. They will evolve to interpret whatever future comes from these initiatives and further enrich our contribution to culture generally. All such visions are idealistic, but so is the cherry-picked nostalgia of ‘the good old days’ and the suffering it hides. It is as much the experience of the vision made flesh in these new institutions and frameworks that will break down the barriers between us as it is in what we say when we talk about Britain. We win by providing a practical path that might surprise and delight those of us who might be thinking the answers lie in the tweaking and modifying of the increasingly unsuitable frameworks and institutions we are familiar with, i.e. the past. The industrial revolution, all its terrible costs notwithstanding, drove a revolution in civilisation similarly unforseeable to all who came before yet it was capable, in principle, of emancipating us all. A necessarily more inclusive and rewarding revolution is no less achievable.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ht...

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With regard to arguing with others about who we should be and how we should act, I wrote recently about how hard I’ve found it to change my mind. So, after the edits and proofs of my forthcoming novel Brother Red, I managed to get stuck into a book I’d bought a while ago precisely...

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With regard to arguing with others about who we should be and how we should act, I wrote recently about how hard I’ve found it to change my mind. So, after the edits and proofs of my forthcoming novel Brother Red, I managed to get stuck into a book I’d bought a while ago precisely because it promised an exploration of how we actually change our minds.

Stop Being Reasonable by Eleanor Gordon-Smith is a short yet remarkable read, principally because, for a philosopher, she writes wittily, candidly and digestibly, introducing deep and profound questions with deceptive simplicity. She is described on the jacket as a ‘recovering champion debater’ and this characterisation lies at the core of both our dilemmas: How is it that we can provide evidence to refute someone’s stated belief(s) and yet not change their mind? She does it by looking at six case studies and unpicking how the people in them have actually executed radical change in their worldviews and even their identities.

Most pertinent to my concern is her exploration of David Hume’s notion that you apportion belief in something in proportion to the evidence for it and that where there is insufficient evidence to ‘tip the scales’ of two competing beliefs to one side, one should suspend belief. She rightly points out that in areas such as criminal law this is essential given the potential harm that could be done to an innocent if the wrong thing is believed. Then she draws the obvious/not obvious conclusion that the moment we are weighing up the harm done in believing or suspending belief we are not, after all, solely considering the evidence but the potential for harm for choosing to believe one thing or the other:

“…certain arrangements of error-costs can mean that ‘having better evidence’ for something ‘can still fail to make it rational to believe’…’believing truth’ and ‘shunning error’ are two materially different missions”

While the case study this insight relates to is far, far more serious and tragic than my own musings on the problems of changing belief, it offers insight into the challenges I, and I’m sure all of us, have in changing each other’s minds. Our beliefs are part of frameworks and those frameworks may operate on less than rational assumptions. In the case of someone believing that the UK is heading towards a caliphate in the next fifty years, my offering evidence around the extent to which this can’t be true, and/or using that to undermine the evidence they’ve marshalled for it, will not necessarily persuade them not to worry about a caliphate being instituted here, because it might be that the cost of being wrong is so high that they feel it is rational to hold to the belief it could happen and act accordingly unless there is a hard refutation, i.e. a great surfeit of evidence that perhaps might be difficult or impossible to acquire. My refutation might not just need to be in relation to demography of both the UK’s immigrants and the ethnic traits therein, but also a wide range of other views about the predilections, education, capabilities, values and behaviours of anyone unfamiliar with or dismissive of our democratic and civil institutions and laws. Where such views mesh, as can easily be found in the ethno-nationalist, fascist or racist websites and personas on social media, to argue about beliefs regarding a very specific slice of that mesh is going to be an exercise in frustration if the frayed ends you’ve unpicked don’t unravel the wider set of interrelated assumptions. And that’s hard because tearing down world views requires undergoing wide and deep cognitive dissonance about the world one has made sense of. It’s about doing a lot of hard cognitive ‘knitting’ of the old mesh of beliefs to a new one, and one that, now you’ve started re-knitting, may lead to a frankly exhausting journey of reforming many other beliefs. It ties into how you perceive yourself to be. Given many of these assumptions colouring our framework of beliefs might have an emotional or subconsciously biased basis that is opaque to pure reason, how many of us are equipped for that journey of both mind and heart? Yet how many of us are arguing constantly on social media?

The case study that made Gordon-Smith famous illustrates the challenge. She tried to engage with and rationally argue cat-callers and wolf-whistlers out of those behaviours by understanding why they did it and explaining to them why those reasons for doing it were wrong. She unpicks this notion that if one can debate openly with another person regarding their ‘toxic’ views, one should do that, as it will expose the view for what it is and justice will prevail. But when she sat down with a catcaller to do precisely this, to discuss why they think girls would enjoy them doing it when the statistics show the vast majority don’t, she was told that she doesn’t speak for all women and besides lots of them smile when it happens. She told them that women will smile and laugh but the majority of them do it in order to defuse a potentially hostile situation if they are seen to behave any other way, it’s a survival mechanism. In the face of a woman confirming she, and statistically many others hated it, they told her she was perhaps too sensitive. They had a view of women that they felt they could hold onto despite one particular woman before them and statistically many women stating the opposite. It does not seem, therefore, that when a person enters this idealistic ‘crucible of reason’ to debate, they are doing so free of prejudices and assumptions they carry in with them. One only has to see the evidence for how many more black people are arrested than whites for similar crimes to understand that such situations are not being weighed ‘on the evidence alone’ and without prejudice. She calls it a ‘hierarchy of credibility differentials’ that come into play when we come into contact with someone. Even though I prefer to express myself through written argument because I am conscious my poor recall renders me less persuasive (and credible) in a face to face debate, I might still carry prejudices about a person from how well or badly they use language in their written responses. I believe a great many elements of this credibility hierarchy are removed all the same; a person’s voice, colour, age, gender etc. are flattened when discourse is done through text alone. Nonetheless, there are almost no situations in which pure reason will prevail if you choose to give oxygen to extremist views where they advocate deliberate suffering and injury on the grounds of, for example, identity, for the same reason it won’t work between polarised views on taxation. Beliefs regarding identity and taxation are only small parts of a bigger mesh. However, authors of views that advocate suffering and injury purely based on identity are far more dangerous to the prospects of a highly interconnected world trying to make peace with itself.

Gordon-Smith, meanwhile, persists in her attempts to get at least one catcaller to reconsider and the kicker comes when a producer for a tv show gets her to sit down, armed with all the stats, to talk to one of the catcallers she’d chatted to previously, but in a calm and neutral setting. She hits this guy with the stats and he seems genuinely shocked. He had no idea that 85% of women reported feeling angry about a catcall and 67% of them feared it would escalate.

“…yeh, I feel bad if I’ve made anyone feel anything other than complimented. I just kind of embrace the opportunity that is arising. But maybe it’s not arising and that’s where I’ve gone wrong.”

Then, almost immediately he outlines a scenario to her where a girl might enjoy the catcall, then tells her he’s sure that such scenarios happen. Slightly shocked, she asks him why he’s so sure after all she’s said. “Because I know dudes would be like that.”

At this point, you are hopefully wondering why he would say that having just heard evidence that women are clearly not like dudes in this regard. He kept believing that she couldn’t speak for all women. He couldn’t conceive of having to adjust his behaviour or viewpoint in the face of evidence. Perhaps he just enjoyed doing it too much and convinced himself that the smiles were genuine, perhaps even that women secretly enjoyed it, or that a dude wouldn’t put up with it, so why would a woman. Anything to maintain his worldview. We are pattern-seekers, we do not give up our patterns without a fight. Gordon-Smith’s analysis around her chosen case studies and the simple but profound questions they raise are more important than ever.

 

As tenuous as the link might be, Stu Turton’s The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle is all about changing identities, but it is done in service of a novel that’s a cross between an Agatha Christie-esque country house murder and Groundhog Day. Our protagonist wakes up and has no idea who he is and no memory of anything that’s come before. He is calling a woman’s name but doesn’t know why, then hears a scream, and is told by a mysterious and frightening figure he believes to be her killer to go to the country house. The disorientation is exacerbated both by his not recognising his own body, but not recognising either the cowardice with which he shrank from these opening events. Soon enough, he learns that he is in another man’s body, sharing that personality and its limitations, but he has only a few such transitions, into different guests at this house, replaying the same day over, to work out the identity of the person who will kill Evelyn Hardcastle.

Taking an already complicated murder mystery plot and layering it with the protagonist’s struggles both with the limitations of the same day replaying and of his hosts, Turton does a remarkable job of maintaining a coherent narrative voice who nevertheless undergoes wildly varying psychological and emotional pressures from his hosts. While I don’t read many murder mysteries of this sort, I’ll confess I found it hard to maintain all the threads of the plot as it developed, but that was much more to do with the gaps between reading sessions. If you enjoy murder mysteries and fancy something with a fierce twist on the trope within which all the standard twists live, then get thee to a good book store.

 

(NB – I was unable to source and confirm the copyright for the header image for this post. I found it here, let me know if it needs to be taken down.)

 

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Whiteshift, by Eric Kaufman, is an easy book to recommend you read, in part because it is a thoughtful, detailed presentation of some challenging ideas and in part because its subject matter couldn’t (coronavirus aside) be more important. There are aspects to the thesis I don’t accept or understand, but I now accept, more clearly...

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