Russell Brand turns up at a G20 demonstration – as the global village idiot

There’s a wonderful introduction to psychodynamic theory in Richard Littlejohn’s column today, which was ostensibly looking at the G20 protests:

“Apart from picking a fight with the police and smashing a few windows, what did any of them hope to achieve? This wasn’t about saving the planet, or bringing down capitalism, it was an exercise in self-indulgence.”

So, following Freud: the unconscious mind governs our life and protects us from pain and anxiety using any or all of nine defences. Above is defence number one – projection, the seeing of your own faults in others. There can be almost no job more self indulgent than that of newspaper pundit, resting as it does on the idea that your thoughts on any given subject are any more valid than any other uninformed, unthinking reactionary. By attacking those who were seemingly out exercising their democratic right to alert their elected representatives to the strength of their feeling, Richard highlights his own sense of discomfort with his own career choice.

“Brand epitomises a generation of self-obsessed exhibitionists who dress up their self-gratification by pretending to have a social conscience.”

Defence number two, displacement – Richard moves his anger from it’s object onto another object, to avoid facing up to the real root of the anxiety. The above quote shows this twice – notice the disconnect between the exhibitionism of Brand, which is undoubted, and that of a single person in a crowd on tens of thousands of people.  In both cases the shallowness of his anger is seen by the inadequacy of its explanation – how likely is it that people protesting under the banner of ‘Jobs, Justice, Climate’ are doing it because they want to be noticed as individuals? To do so would be self-defeating, because for the protest to be noticed it would need to be sufficiently large to subsume the individual – the exhibitionism would depend on its bearer’s obscurity. Although you could claim that an individual exhibits themselves within their peer group purely by attending, this is like accusing someone who goes to the cinema every week of being an exhibitionist – although they may be attending purely so they can wow their friends with cinematic knowledge, chances are they actually just like films. With Brand, he in no way attempts to dress up his self-gratification, it is separate from his claims to social conscience, so the latter is a poor reason for Richard’s distaste of him.

“Airport expansion, polar bears, the plight of the Palestinians. It’s all cost-free compassion and an excuse for a punch-up in public. They can protest all they like in the certain knowledge that they won’t have to make any personal sacrifices.”

Defence three, intellectualisation – Richard turns the feeling into a thought, trying to deal with the anger intellectually rather than dealing with its roots. Notice again the implausibility of his explanation, the attempt to theorise to justify his anger. It is not cost free to take a day off work to protest, it is a sacrifice to give time and money to a cause, or to alter your lifestyle to avoid things like the need for extra airports or dying polar bears. It is also more plausible, in the face of the evidence against airport expansion, for global warming and for the plight of the Palestinians, and in the face of an unresponsive and (by Littlejohn’s own lights) unrepresentative parliamentary system that people take to the streets because they feel that this is the best way of giving their position weight, or of drawing attention to their cause. The relative implausibility of Richard’s alternative explanation screams post hoc theorising to fit the facts and anger simultaneously, disregarding any attempt to address the concerns of those he objects to, or even to properly examine what those concerns are.

“They profess concern about Third World poverty while dressing in designer hoodies and trainers knocked out by wage slaves paid a pittance in Far Eastern sweatshops.”

Defence four, rationalisation – attempting to talk away something you’ve done wrong. Throughout his column, Richard has been discussing the protesters as a single mind, and here we see his attempt to shirk responsibility for his own actions by suggesting that all the protesters are doing the same. Quite aside from this being something he is not in a position to claim (generalisation being a good example of defence five, regression – retreating to an earlier stage of psychosexual development to avoid the trauma, here both in the sense of retreating to simpler, more childlike arguments and in the sense of becoming more obstinate and compulsive, a return to the anal stage of development), this sidesteps their positions and their arguments. Even were they gilded hypocrites themselves, this does not devalue their arguments, but only themselves – Richard may still have a position to defend. His complete failure to engage with their substantive points suggests an acute awareness of this culpability, and a desire to avoid facing it.

“Still, it’s not about the downtrodden, it’s all about them, so they can feel good about themselves when, after a hard day’s rioting, they return to their computers in their comfy bedrooms in their centrally heated homes. “

Continuing, as he does, to conflate Brand and a body of concerned individuals, we reach defence six – denial, which Richard exemplifies throughout the column as he continues to direct his anger sideways. Who is feeling bad about themselves in their comfy bedroom in their centrally heated home? Richard seems to suggest here that he attaches some sort of guilt to this lifestyle, while simultaneously criticising those that find release through the confrontation with their elected masters. In denying the cure he denies the illness, pretending that there is no problem to fix. Here though, the guard is let down – can it be that Littlejohn, with an existence more comfortable than most of his readers could dream of having, with the self-concern he projects onto the protesters, feels guilty? Does he feel a kinship with the impotence of the protesters as he bangs off another column that will change nothing? The denial of problems to fix and guilt to avoid would suggest so.

Which brings us to the final obvious defence Littlejohn uses¹, sublimation – the constructive defence, as he transforms his pain into a column. In writing it he has protected himself from the pain of facing up to his unconscious conflict, that feeling of impotence and impostering, the sense of shame at his own self regard. While we should be pleased that he has protected himself for today, this failure to look himself in the eye will only extend the problem, leaving it to confront him anew tomorrow. The anger of Littlejohn’s columns is saddening because it makes the world a worse place – arguably we should be equally sad about the internal world it reflects.

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¹ The two missing ones being repression – the denial of the uncomfortable thoughts, and reaction formation – the doing the opposite of what is upsetting you.

Arrogant, ignorant and out of his depth, is Banana Boy Miliband our worst Foreign Secretary ever?

I’ve touched previously on the paranoid style in Daily Mail articles, but I thought this was quite impressive even by usual standards.

“Beyond hectoring this country’s allies in this way, Miliband also remains a global warming zealot. This is even though the world’s climate is actually cooling, the ice is expanding, the seas aren’t rising at a rate which should concern anyone and there is overwhelming evidence that the whole man-made global warming panic is an anti-west scam of unprecedented proportions.”

I’ve spoken before about climate change in the Mail and I’ll not do it again so soon. What I find more interesting is the idea that it’s a conspiracy  – who by, and for what purpose? Is the West ripping off itself, or is this some sort of evil developing world scheme to hobble our once proud industry further? How have they managed it? I mean, it is a hell of a scheme – it’s not just Miliband they’ve fooled/bought, this con is big. A lot of people who really should know better have gone and got the wrong answer to a simple either-or question. That’s a good scam.

“Much of this comes from a way of looking at the world through a highly ideological and distorting prism. Miliband is very much a child of the post-modern era in which the dominant  belief system of the progressive classes comprises ‘soft power’ – under which negotiation, legal processes and compromise take the place of war whose objective is actually to defeat an enemy with an unconscionable and non-negotiable agenda; ‘trans-nationalism’, under which the nation state is defined as the source of all the ills of the world; and ‘cultural relativism’, under which the west refuses to hold itself superior in its values to the third world, whose ‘narrative’ of its own oppression and powerlessness thus trumps all attempts by the west to defend itself against the attacks the third world mounts upon it.”

I admit that this juxtaposition reads a little strangely, there were some intervening paragraphs, but I’m assuming that the argument is consistent, and this is the first bit that would seem to reflect back on the dastardly scheme to scam the West. Turns out that all those Tuvaluans with their plans to live in New Zealand once their nation submerges are really only trying to undermine Western values with their narratives of oppression. First the petty cultural relativists¹ let them take our light bulbs, and next it’ll be our wives, castles and prejudices.

What this misses is the perfectly reasonable middle ground between mea culpa and right all along – that the nation state, while having its plus points, can also be guilty of some fairly dodgy things. For example, the system of propping up odious dictatorships as a protection of ones own people is a rum one, as are protectionist tariffs and the Olympics. We can safely question these without giving in to self-flagellation – think of it not as relativism but healthy jingoistic introspection. Thinking things through, we might find that we are, in fact, responsible for some of the ills of the world, and that some ways of improving things may be available through negotiation with those we’ve disadvantaged (or ‘wronged’, should you wish to be accurate).

The idea that we can just pretend that the damage we sometimes cause doesn’t happen is one we should have grown out of before hitting school. We can’t pull girls hair and claim that they’re making it up when they go crying to mummy – it didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. Ad hominem attacks ( “a twerp of the first order”) won’t change that. And claiming that the crafty poor majority are coming to steal you incandescent light bulbs under false pretences before accusing  other people of disconnecting from reality won’t either.

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¹ As an aside, she’s right about cultural relativism – to suggest that ‘x is wrong’ is the same as ‘x is wrong for me, but other people may disagree and are entitled to their opinion’ seems to me to misunderstand the meaning of ‘wrong’. Presumably we’re none of us relativist about, for example, rape – when we say that is wrong, we’re saying exactly what we mean. I’m not sure how ‘chauvinism is wrong’ or ‘causing animals unnecessary suffering is wrong’ are different – that is to say, what makes them different has never been adequately explained to me.

If Del Boy was around today, he’d be trading in carbon offsets

I suppose it goes without saying that I was surprised by Littlejohn’s column today, I’m not really his target audience, but I genuinely didn’t believe that there was still anyone out there who didn’t accept the evidence for climate change. After all, there is a scientific consensus behind it (see Oreskes (2004) for a brief introduction, this letter by various national academies in 2005  or this statement from the World Meteorological Association in 2006) and general governmental agreement (this is the text of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and these are the signatories). Poor naive fool that I am, I took this on good faith and started adapting my life accordingly.

What I foolishly failed to notice is that it’s cold at the moment, and has been warm in the past. If we were really warming, you’d expect it to be the other way around. Ergo, as Richard bravely points out, we can’t be warming. The fact that scientists missed this is probably a sign of some sort of agenda.

“None of this has in any way deterred the ‘global warming’ fascists. They dismiss this glaring, incontrovertible evidence as a ‘blip’ and continue to insist the world is burning up.”

The short answer to this is that Richard has got things the wrong way around – we have consistent findings of global rises in temperature (glaring, incontrovertible evidence, as it were) which he is writing off as anomalous, based on some localised instances of weather that doesn’t fit with the general trend. The trend and the instances are not incompatible though – a trend reflects the set of instances, it doesn’t determine individual ones. It is more than possible to have an unusually cold winter in the midst of generally warming ones – for example, our current cold spell is attributable to the effects of La Niña, the cold end of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (see the Met Office’s explanation here). It in no way undermines the consistent findings that global temperatures have risen.

On one level I can understand Richard’s mistake – it seems common sense that if we’re warming we should be warmer. However, the obvious thing to do when faced with something that runs against logic would be to find out if there was any satisfactory explanation, rather than assuming that the scientific community were a bunch of lying chancers you’ve easily proved wrong. What is striking is not just the solipsism of this (which must be difficult to avoid when you’re being paid for any and all of your thoughts) but the misconception of ’science’ as an authoritarian monolith.

I’m being slightly unfair here, because Richard isn’t really interested in the scientific consensus – he seems to assume that there isn’t one. His real targets seems to be politicians and busy-bodies who are seizing on poor evidence to justify impositions on honest, hardworking people.

“That’s because this isn’t about the planet, it’s all about them.

‘Global warming’ gives them a reason to believe, provides meaning and purpose to their dismal little lives.”

This, again, seems to be upside-down. I would argue that, given that those who will suffer most dramatically (and who are already suffering) from the consequences of global warming are the world’s poorest (see here for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 working group report), acting to reduce carbon usage is actually about making sacrifices for others. Jacking up the heating because you’re damned if some government minister is going to tell you what to your own house is ‘all about you’, especially if you’re basing your actions on your own experience of the weather rather the evidence and opinions of those best placed to judge.

This kind of self-satisfied and wilful ignorance is irresponsible. There is a dishonesty in attacking a movement because it has the support of politicians when that support is based on apolitical evidence – however untrustworthy you think politicians are, some little investigation shows that in this case they are justified, a fact which should mitigate the mistrust. Instead, the lack of faith in them is extended sideways by association. Meanwhile, the fear of Richard and his readers is focused on the monster under the bed, when they should be worried about the water lapping at their door.