At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

Like a number of other people, I posted a comment on the site. I can’t reproduce my comment exactly, because it has now been deleted for “violation of community standards” but it read something like “What? ‘transgression’ hardly seems to be an appropriate word.” Other commenters have been deleted, again for “violation of community standards” merely for quoting Mr French’s exculpatory paragraph in extenso and say that it is “ludicrous”. The Guardian’s guidelines on “community standards” are here. They are not unreasonable and contain the assurance:

In short: – If you act with maturity and consideration for other users, you should have no problems.

It is hard, therefore, to see why politely objecting to Mr French’s words should provoke deletion. Apparently, the Guardian thinks otherwise.

De Botton’s latest plans (h/t Alex):

to build a £1m “temple for atheists” among the international banks and medieval church spires of the City of London have sparked a clash between two of Britain’s most prominent non-believers. The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a “new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins’s “aggressive” and “destructive” approach to non-belief. Rather than attack religion, De Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

Not a runner, I think. Though there’s at least one happy precedent: Auguste Comte’s Chapel of Humanity, which Maria blogged about in 2003.

Schor explained that labour-time reduction had been an issue twenty years ago (I guess she was thinking of people like André Gorz) but has slipped out of the policy debate during the boom years. Now, in the post-2008 world, governments are pushing the line that we all need to work harder, for more hours and for more of our lives. But that, argued Schor is exactly wrong. Working-time reduction offers the threefold benefit of few people being unemployed, of less ecological damage and of people having more time to spend on social activities (cue mention of The Big Society). Even if we could grow our way to full employment, we shouldn’t. Rather we should reorient away from overconsumption towards leading better quality lives. More time-stressed households are have more carbon-intensive lifestyles. She held up the Netherlands as a model of how to start moving in this direction. Apparently, the Dutch are the slackers of Europe generally and, some years ago, made new civil service contracts 80%. You have the freedom there to choose to be a five, four, three, two or one-day-a week employee. And she specifically referred to the one-day-a-week Professor (so maybe Ingrid can comment!). [UPDATE: (after gastro george’s comment below) – Schor didn’t envisage a scenario where people would be on shorter hours and less pay, but rather one in which pay is held static but productivity gains get channelled into shorter hours. So the reduction would be gradual. Since we currently have a situation (at least in the US and the UK) of static pay but productivity gains funding increased income for the 1 per cent, this gradual shift would be redistributive in an egalitarian direction.]

Skidelsky was next up. He began by talking about Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren in which Keynes foresaw a radical reduction in working hours and asked why Keynes’s vision hadn’t come to pass. He offered a range of possible explanations (the joys of work, fear of leisure, increased inequality, pressures from employers on a cowed workforce, and pathological consumerism). The business of government should be human well-being in some all-things-considered sense (shades of Sen here) and government should act to enable people to negotiate shorter working hours and, perhaps, by introducing a universal basic income. Government should also act to reduce social pressures to consume via intervention in the advertising industry. He also floated ideas about a progressive consumption tax, but I didn’t get any clear sense of how this would work.

Finally: Tim Jackson. I took fewer notes during Jackson’s contribution, so I probably missed some detail. What was interesting, though was the way he challenged a key assumption behind Schor’s and Skidelsky’s talks. Whereas they had been very gung ho about the need to channel increasing productivity gains into shorter hours, he challenged much of the talk around productivity itself, especially in the service sector and the public sector. In this regard he cited a “recent study” which showed how nurses, subject to productivity pressures from managers in the NHS, had started to feel less empathy for their patients because of the stress they were under.

My brief, but unscientific reactions to the whole project. First, I’m sympathetic, I really am, to the idea that people should work and consume less and that we should attend more to real life quality. But this doesn’t seem very realistic in my own life for two reasons: first, even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere). I suspect this generalizes to many people in professional jobs: we couldn’t achieve the kinds of things we want to in our careers on those kinds of hours. This isn’t necessarily a problem, so long as there isn’t compulsion. Some (many) people have shitty jobs with low intrinsic rewards: removing the burden of work for them would be an unqualified good thing. Second, it is all very well Juliet Schor telling us to transition to a low hours/lower consumption economy. I’m cool with consuming less. The problem is that I, and just about everyone else, has taken out huge mortgages and bank loans to pay (in part) for the consumption we’ve already had. Hard to reduce the hours unless (or until) the debt goes away. Third, there was distressingly little discussion of the politics of this. Whatever the real social and economic benefits, the French 35-hour week wasn’t a political success (perhaps because it was watered-down) and Sarkozy was able to campaign effectively on behalf of the “France qui se lève tôt”. Some kind of post-mortem on this experience would have been helpful, albeit that it took place in a different, pre-crisis, environment.

Whilst it is good to see this issue getting more coverage in the mainstream media in the UK and the US, it is depressing how little uptake there has been among politicians and, indeed, the online community. The long-term detention, mistreatment and probable torture of people who have never been convicted of anything, ought to be a matter uniting people across the political spectrum who care about human rights. Unfortunately, outside of a small coterie of activists, the best you get is indifference or even active hostility. Indeed, those who campaign on behalf of the inmates have themselves been villified (by conservatives or the “decent left”) for such “crimes” as comparing the Guantanamo regime to past totalitarian governments (as if such comparison is more offensive than the acual treatment of the detainees). Depressing.

those who think the aim of philosophy should be to get as clear as possible about the way things really are, that is, about the actual causal structure of the natural and human world, how societies and economies work, what motivates politicians and ordinary people to do what they do ….

My question here is: why’s that an aim of philosophy ? The people investigating the actual causal structure of the natural world are natural scientists, not philosophers; the people investigating the actual causal structure of the human world are social scientists, not philosophers.

Update: Brian assures me that he has no desire that the moralists be “purged” (my work was “abolished”). I’m happy to hear that, but it remains that he thinks that we moralists are pursuing an agenda that is other than he believes the aim of philosophy ought to be.

Cameron vetoed the proposed EU treaty on the basis, or pretext, that other countries wouldn’t agree to “safeguards” for the City of London. The reason he was asking for these was essentially just because his backbenchers had demanded he show the “bulldog spirit” and, since EU treaties need unanimity, he thought he could extract some symbolic gain to satisfy them. He didn’t clear this with Merkel or Sarkozy in advance and would have been inhibited in doing so because the British Tories withdrew from the mainstream Euro conservative grouping in order to hob-nob with a bunch of extreme nutters and anti-semites. Sarkozy, who wanted a more integrated core Europe without Britain in any case, took the opportunity to call Cameron’s bluff. All very good for Sarko in the run-up the the Presidential elections. Exit Cameron stage right, claiming to have stood up to the EU - and getting praised by the UK’s tabloid press and an opinion-poll boost – but actually exposing the City to further regulation under qualified majority voting. He’s also chucked away decades of British policy which favoured EU expansion with the new accession countries serving as a counterweight to the Franco-German axis. Where are the other countries now? Lined up with the French and Germans.

The Euro treaty itself, assuming it goes ahead as planned and is enforced, mandates balanced budgets and empowers the Eurocrats to vet national budgets and punish offenders. Social democracy is thereby effectively rendered illegal in the Eurozone in both its “social” and “democracy” aspects. Daniel put it thus :

a takeover of Europe by the neoliberal “permanent government” who failed to get their way by democratic means. All of the nationalism and anti-German sentiment is a distraction from the real scandal here. The ‘technocrats’ (which is apparently what they want to be called, although frankly I am seeing a lot of ideology and not much technical ability) want to reorganise the whole of Europe on neoliberal lines (ironically, to basically replicate the Irish economic transformation

One might think, then, that the left should be happy to be well away from it and that Cameron has inadvertently done us a favour. However, the short-term consequences in British politics could well be awful. My worst-case fantasy scenario has Cameron calling a snap General Election on nationalist themes, getting a majority dominated by swivel-eyed propertarian xenophobes and dismantling the welfare state, the Health Service, the BBC etc. Riots and civil disorder would be met with force, and those driven to resistance or crime would be incarcerated in giant new prisons. The Scots would then, understandably, opt for independence, and England and Wales would be left at the mercy of the crazies for several decades. Texas-on-Thames, in short.

And Nick Clegg? Well I wonder if even Daragh McDowell will make a case for him now.

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The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.

Hard not to be struck by a parallel with Lukacs’s opening passage from History and Class Consciousness:

Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.

I’ve never had sympathy for what Lukacs says here, and don’t know the context for the Keynes quote. But I’m struck by the way that both Mankiw and Lukacs implicitly endorse the idea that they can just keep on keeping on, whatever happens in the actual world.

Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

Adorno: We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

Horkheimer: In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

h/t Brian Leiter.