Christmas cheer

Every Wednesday I participate in a meditation group. We always start with a guided meditation from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. We read pairs of sentences at intervals of five minutes or so, and reflect on them using our breathing to access the deeper meaning of the words.

Last Wednesday was Boxing Day and it so happened that some of the sentences very much resonated with me. In particular, these:

Experiencing the pain of fear in me, I breath in.
Smiling to the pain of fear in me, I breath out.

Experiencing the feeling of insecurity in me, I breath in.
Smiling to the feeling of insecurity in me, I breath out.

Experiencing the feeling of sadness in me, I breath in.
Smiling to the feeling of insecurity in me, I breath out.

Experiencing the feeling of joy in me, I breath in.
Smiling to the feeling of joy in me, I breath out.

The idea of these reflections (it seems to me) is to look deeply and truly at our selves and our experience, and to come to terms with every aspect of our current state. This process is a truthful process, for we see ourselves as we are. It is also a liberating process because, by smiling, we are freeing ourselves from the domination that our pain and other feelings can have over us. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes in his explanation of this exercise: “We must learn to recognize, acknowledge, and welcome each [feeling], and after that to look into its emotion… Mindfulness allows us to be calm throughout the appearance and disappearance of feelings.”

This could not be more out of sync with the usual Western experience of the Christmas period. Throughout this period we are bombarded with images of Christmas cheer: of people eating and drinking and making merry together; of families gathering together in warm homes and opening presents; of herald angels singing, merry gentlemen (let nothing them dismay!) and joy to the world.

And yet we all know that these images correspond very poorly to the average experience. For many people Christmas is a time of loneliness, of family arguments, of drunken foolishness and regrets. In short, Christmas is like every other time of year – inducing a mixture of every human feeling. And yet so strong are the media images that, despite knowing better, we too often fall for the propaganda and feel obliged to put on a happy face.

The result is that we flee in terror from feelings of fear, insecurity, sadness and anger, while we grasp desperately at any hint of joy, almost fearing its departure before it has properly arrived. Our family times can seem a pastiche of jolly scenarios, between which we lurch in desperate fear that the whole shebang might soon be exposed as a sham.

Oh to be free of the obligation to be happy – how much happier we would be! But Christmas is just the worst of it. Media propaganda is routinely couched in terms of happiness: We need to be cool, to be young, to be in a big happy beautiful gang, to go to parties and stay up late, to have a beautiful (wo)man on our arm.

You might be thinking, “oh but tell me something I don’t know.” And too true, the vacuity of media images is apparent to anybody who takes the time to stop and think about them. But even if we do this (and many don’t), we are not necessarily free of their power. I had a salutory lesson in this some years ago when I left the city of Perth and went to live in an aboriginal community in the desert in Australia. My lesson was in the question of beauty - when I first arrived out bush, it did not even occur to me that there was physical beauty to be found in the people around me. So deeply was the notion of what is beautiful implanted into me that I could not see what was before me. After six months of living free of a media obsessed with skinny, hairless teenagers in bikinis, the scales had started to fall from my eyes – and life became a whole lot more spicy.

Our (often inadvertent) consumption of images of the mass media prevents us from seeing the world around us clearly. We don’t just run in fear from our own emotions, we also cling to notions which are destroying us – and, in the process, we miss out on true joy and true beauty. Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that we meditate in this way:

Experiencing the feeling of attachment in me, I breathe in.
Smiling to the feeling of attachment in me, I breath out.

In a world saturated with misleading images, it is vital that we meditate regularly in this way. For, if we do not, we will inevitably find ourselves attached to a myriad of notions that stunt our growth and that severely limit the depth and meaning of our experience. We need to look deeply into ourselves to see where these notions are rooted and, as we smile at them, to watch them weaken.

Multitude

The email below is included here as a recommendation for people to read Hardt and Negri's "Multitude"... One caveat: Note that a lot of the words used in the email - e.g. empire, imperialism, multitude, democracy - mirror the very specific usage of Hardt and Negri. This may be misleading if you haven't read the book...

Dear Professors Hardt and Negri,

I have just completed your book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire which I found deeply insightful and very inspiring. You are no doubt far too busy to be reading every passing critique of your work but, for what it's worth, I thought I'd provide some constructive feedback. It will help me clarify my thoughts on the current state of global war if nothing else.

In your book you characterise the enemy of empire as a network, a swarm. You posit that in order to fight this network the military of the empire must also become a network. Your argument to back this up is contingent on two unstated hypotheses which are, I believe, very important in understanding the current situation - for they are true, but only partially.

[1] The enemy really exists.
[2] The empire wants to win the war.

I would contend that the global state of war has at least two fronts. One of these is mythical and it is in empire's interest for that war to continue ad infinitum; the other is substantial and here the empire is intent on victory. The two fronts are often deliberately conflated by the mouth pieces of empire, and I feel that your analysis would have benefited from a more clear distinction between the two.

The first, mythical front is (currently) that of terror and its associated notions of civilisations. When I describe this front as mythical I do not mean that it is entirely without substance but its substance is secondary; the role it plays in global geopolitics can be discerned by the way empire speaks of it. This front is continually emphasised in imperial propaganda; battles are said to be won and lost (the empire periodically manufactures a victory for mass consumption) but the empire warns against hoping for an early victory. This is a war that empire wants - I don't need to explain why, it has everything to do with Orwellian notions of subjection and manipulation; Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares explains it well I think.

The second, substantial front is that of poverty and the associated cahiers de doleances which you list. This front has content and this battle strikes at the heart of what empire is about - in contrast to the mythical terrorist enemy which, while it purports to strike at empire, is really an entirely complementary structure. The substantial front is continually under attack by empire as it is a serious hindrance in empire's efforts to extract maximum production from its subjects (as you describe beautifully).

Now you might argue that the above distinction is really a return to the previous notions of imperialism, which no longer apply. The key point seems to be that the empire wishes to absorb everything within it and thus the existence of a terrorist enemy is not in the interests of empire. My argument is that empire has, in fact, already absorbed the terrorist enemy into its fabric and this enemy plays a vital role. In fact it plays several:

First it distracts from the substantial enemy. It allows the other front to become forgotten, or overwhelmed. I don't just mean by the media and such like - the poor don't need the media to tell them that they are poor! Rather I mean that the poor are misguided into thinking that their real enemy is someone else. And what's more that that enemy is being engaged by empire and, one day, maybe, things might change. In other words it provides an appearance of movement in the political and social fabric. People know that the status quo is wrong but, if they can be convinced that things are being done to change it, then they will put up with it.

In fact, of course, empire is intent on moving things in a direction of ever increasing injustice. As you describe, geopolitics today is one of crisis - conflict between multitude and imperial power. There are only two ways for this situation to resolve itself - either the project of the multitude takes shape and diffuses this crisis; or, empire manages to prolong this crisis indefinitely. The only way that this can be done is by distraction and disingenuation. If that's a word. This is the first role of the mythical enemy.

It is very important to clarify that empire contains no potential for a resolution of geopolitical crisis. The fundamental activity of empire is to extract production from the multitude and this action will always be antagonistic. In general empire deals with this antagonism by forcibly crushing dissent, however it is also useful to have some method for diffusing this antagonism - enter, stage right, the terrorist.

The mythical enemy also provides distraction in another way. By conflating the two wars, empire is enabled to more easily undertake the militarisation of society (a process which I won't define now, but which has many elements). So not only is the illusion of movement created, but an actuality of movement also - except that, as I said, the movement is in an opposite direction to the project of the multitude.

Yours sincerely, etc

A picture paints a thousand words...

We passed this guy the other day, as we were headed to Chennai central train station for a week-end away.

If you're looking at this picture on the internet, chances are you don't earn your daily bread by sorting through other people's rubbish. Spare a thought for those who do.

Queue jumping

Last week-end Katie, me and an Indian friend went off for a holiday in a small town called Koonoor in the Nilgiri hills. Away from the heat and dust of Chennai, we went walking through tea plantations and rejoiced in cool, fresh air.

At the end of our three days away the time came for us to catch the bus back down to the plains, from whence we would catch an overnight train to Chennai. We wandered through Koonoor to get to the bus stop and joined the hundred-odd people patiently waiting for the next rickety old hulk to arrive.

We sat down on a bench next to a couple of wizened old men who’d settled in for the long wait. On seeing Katie and my white faces, one old man gestured to us and pointed across the road. There was a vehicle there that was also heading down the hill he said. For 50 rupees (about 60p, and about five times the price of a standard bus fare) we could get there in double quick time.

Feeling slightly guilty we left the gathered mass and went searching. Sure enough the old man was right and ten minutes later we were pulling out of Koonoor in a garish silver mini-bus decorated inside with plush seating, and a carpeted ceiling impregnated with an array of twinkling multi-coloured LEDs. We whooshed past the bus stop and left the poor plebians in our wake.

And suddenly it hit me: Rich people are nothing more than queue jumpers. Perhaps this truth is so self-evident you wonder why I bother to record it. I guess I’d always known it, but it was only at that moment that I truly understood. I’d just finished reading Orwell’s Coming up for air, which perhaps reinforced the effect; but really the conclusion was inescapable. The little self-deceptions that I practice every day as a rich Westerner living in India simply weren’t up to the occasion…

So here’s the main fact: the people at that bus stop had less money than me. What’s more they’d no doubt worked harder, and suffered more, for the pittance they had. The realisation made me feel sick. Even sicker to think that that old man had seen our white faces and known exactly what the score was. We weren’t going to sit and wait with the Indians, when we had a ticket for the front of the queue in our pocket.

It’s a ticket that’s in our pocket every day of the week. In a thousand little ways money eases our way through India, indeed through life. It smoothes the hard edges, improves the food, softens the beds, and shortens the queues.

Corporate publishing houses: Building boundaries and breaking insights

For all the bad press that they receive, a lot of people still believe that Western corporations are making some sort of contribution to improving the lot of people in the third world. Let me present a counter-example.

I'm currently working in a mathematical institute in India and the example that I want to focus on just now concerns academic journals. The institute where I work is one of the few in India (we're talking less than ten) which has access to the most up to date research in mathematics. A very big chunk of the Institute's budget is spent in buying access to these journals - both online access and subscribing to the paper copies. I don't know what the exact size of the chunk is but I'd guess that it's around 50%.

This money is mainly paid to the big mathematics publishers, namely Reed-Elsevier, Springer-Verlag-Birkhauser, Kluwer etc etc. All of these publishers are very proud of the work they do in providing high quality scientific publishing; they trumpet the benefit that their work brings to humanity. Elsevier's tagline is Building Insights. Breaking Boundaries. It's a tagline that, with a little reworking would aptly desribe the real situation for these publishers are in reality hell-bent on Building Boundaries and Breaking Insights. Here's why:

1. Their service is next to non-existent. I am the author of a small number of academic papers. Here's how the system works (at least in the field of mathematics). Let's suppose I submit to a Reed-Elsevier journal...

- I create some maths, write it up, submit it. I do this FOR FREE.
- An academic editor receives my submission and decides where to get it referee'd. The editor will be an academic working in the field and she works (usually) FOR FREE.
- The editor sends the article to a referee who reads it, makes comments and a recommendation for publishing (or not). I've been a referee on one occasion so I can confirm that the referee works FOR FREE.
- Let's assume the referee says the article is OK. The editor then writes back to the author and asks him to make whatever edits are required. Often this will also involve making sure that the typesetting is consistent with the format of the journal. Yes, that's right, in maths the author does the typesetting.
- The final version is sent in by the author and gets passed by the editor to the Reed-Elsevier employees who run the journal. They will check the type-setting of the article, and arrange it with the other articles to appear in the given volume. This will be printed in a paper version and appear on web. These employees will also have to chase up paper work like the transfer of copyright. Yes, it might seem absurd, but if I want to publish in their journals then I must resign myself to the fact that Reed-Elsevier becomes the owner of my work.

It's pretty clear that Reed-Elsevier are getting an awful lot for free and not contributing a great deal themselves. I don't want to denigrate the work of their employees who are, in my experience, very professional. But we need to give the work they perform a proper weighting - it is important, but it is by no means the whole game. And a lot of their work is involved with protecting the interests of Reed-Elsevier. They chase copyright transfers, they run secure web servers with credit card payments for subscribers etc etc.

2. Their prices are horrendous. And they're getting worse. In 2006 the American Maths Society (AMS) surveyed mathematics journal prices for the years 1994 - 2004. A useful summary of the results is also available. The summary compares commercial journal pricings with the price of the Annals of Maths, perhaps the most prestigious maths journal in the world, which is published by Princeton University Press. The comparison is illuminating. For instance, the Annals of Maths, at that time, cost around 10 US cents per page. Commerical journals ranged in price up to $5.30 per page, with fifty of the journals surveyed costing more than $1 per page. The annual price increase for many of the journals was in excess of 10%.

In absolute terms an annual subscription to a mathematics journal is likely to cost well in excess of $1000, often more than double that. The AMS survey includes a list of more than 270 journals although this is by no means exhaustive. It is pretty clear that if an institution wishes to have up-to-date access to cutting-edge mathematics research then they are going to have to spend a lot of money. That money is simply not available in developing countries like India. It's not even available to many institutions in rich countries.

Think about the implications of this! Whole sections of the globe (most of humanity, in fact) do not have access to the body of human knowledge. We proclaim our benevolent intentions to aid development and provide assistance to the third world and yet, at this most basic level, we are denying people the tools to help themselves. And to what purpose? Simply so that the share holders of two or three big corporations can grow wealthy on their ill gotten gains.

3. We can do it ourselves. There is no reason why journals need to cost the reader anything - online access to research articles should be free. And for most mathematicians online access is all that they need. Many journals ouside the clutch of the big corporations provide free online access already and there is, frankly, no reason why we should support journals that don't provide this service

So here are are some suggestions for action:

- Authors should not submit to journals owned by Reed-Elsevier, Springer, Kluwer etc. Indeed, they should only submit to journals which allow free on-line access. There are lots of these and, a lot of the time, they are the most prestigious! People who are asked to referee an article should refuse if the journal is not free.
- If you must submit a paper to a journal owned by one of this horrible lot then make sure you put your paper on the arXiv - so at least people may find it if they're on a search. And make sure the copyright of the journal allows you to keep it on the arXiv once it's published.
-If you're an editor, resign! Or, better, get the whole board to resign! It's been done already - the board of Topology recently resigned en masse. A little later a new low-cost journal appeared - the Journal of Topology - with a very similar editorial board. More power them!

In fact the arXiv has been showing us the way for a long time now. All that is lacking is a system of peer-review - and we don't need a big corporation to make that happen. A journal simply needs to run a web server where authors can upload their papers automatically like on the arXiv. Editors then take responsibility for the review process (as they do now) and when everything is approved the article can be made public and given a unique identifier. The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, for instance, already works in a similar way and there's no reason why all the rest shouldn't follow suit. Academics need to get their act together.

A final thought. Each day when I come to work in this institute I pass a whole army of auxiliary workers toiling away to keep the place going - cleaners, security men, catering staff, receptionists etc etc. Unfortunately, for all their good work, their wages are lousy - it'll be a long time before they can aspire to membership of the fabled Indian middle class. Indeed their annual salary would not compare well even to the hourly rate of Crispin Davis and his coterie of executives at the top of Reed-Elsevier, who take home millions of pounds every year.

Perhaps the comparison is too naive, too emotive to be valid. And yet on some very real level these two sets of people are connected - for starters, both their wages are paid by academic institutions. And, speaking from experience as an academic, I know which group has been of more benefit to me.

[P.S. I'm not the only person who thinks this way...]

The Petraeus Report

To understand the Petraeus report to congress it is important to also understand the subsequent report to be given by President Bush. Bush will brief the US congress with regard to the eighteen benchmarks that the congress has set as a measure of the performance of the Iraqi government.

This military occupation is, you see, a very political project. It is aimed at specific political outcomes over and above merely military considerations. Too often the question of whether the troops should stay in Iraq is couched in terms of "making Iraq safer." This, it is thought, is the primary question; more precisely, it is thought that troops remain in Iraq in order to make Iraq safer for Iraqis. In fact this interpretation is not consistent with the facts.

Let me give one example. In July, President Bush presented an "initial benchmark assessment" to Congress, as he was obliged to do under the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007 (Public Law 110-28).The third of these benchmarks starts as follows: "Enacting and implementing legislation to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources to the people of Iraq..." So far, so noble. But the sting is in the tail. The final sentence of this section reads as follows: "Prime Minister Maliki intends to submit the Revenue Management Law to the Council of Ministers soon, for subsequent consideration by the Council of Representatives along with the framework Hydrocarbon law. "

This Hydrocarbon law has largely passed beneath the radar of the Western press, but its significance for the future of Iraq is immense. According to the NGO,War on Want, the law "would allow long-term contracts to be signed with foreign oil companies, with terms that may not be changed by future Iraqi governments for decades to come. The oil companies will be immune from accountability in Iraqi courts."

Now according to the US congress, the passing of this law is considered a measure of the performance of the government of Iraq. But what do the people of Iraq think? A recent survey, found that "Iraqis oppose plans to open the country’s oilfields to foreign investment by a factor of two to one." And that view is shared across all ethnic and sectarian groups - "there are no ethnic, sectarian or geographical groups that prefer foreign companies." Or, as the Guardian put it, Iraq says No to Oil Theft.

So then, by the standards of democracy, a better benchmark of the Iraqi government's performance in this area would be their opposition to US efforts to get this law passed! Indeed one can go further. Subhi al-Badri, head of the Iraqi Federation of Union Councils, has said that "the law is a bomb that may kill everyone." In other words, US efforts to push this law through the Iraqi legislature have the potential to fuel, rather than reduce, the violence gripping the country.

And this demonstrates exactly the absurdity that lies at the heart of the reports being tabled by General Petraeus and President Bush. They purport to outline progress towards a stable democracy. In fact, they merely demonstrate the occupiers' continued commitment to their own political goals, which they pursue regardless of the wishes of the Iraqi people. The reports purport to outline progress towards making Iraq safer and more secure. Yet the political aims of the occupying forces are consistently at odds with the safety and security of ordinary Iraqi people. And so, inevitably, the occupation will continue to fuel violence and tragedy in Iraq until the troops finally leave.

India and the Tao Te Ching

We've been living in India now for about three weeks; a mixed experience so far. Most days have started with breakfast and then a session of meditation on Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching - reading one chapter each session we've reached number ten. It turns out that this has been an excellent discipline to help us cope with a pretty serious cultural adjustment...

Therefore having and not having arise together (Tao Te Ching 2). Indeed they do and, in India, having and not having arise right next to each other. We live in an entirely adequate flat with the luxury of a lap top and an internet connection. Since we've been here we've spent some 20 000 rupees (about £250) on "essentials" like a couple of bikes, some Indian clothes, a pair of trainers, a guitar, a couple of days out... Now that we've got what we "need" we've started to tighten our belts a little but even so we are having some difficulty keeping to our daily income of 500 rupees (about £6).

And yet 80% of Indians live on 20 Rupees (25p) a day. How they do this I have no idea. I presume it must involve being hungry every day; it must involve having to work, scrounge, hustle every day; it must involve indignity and discomfort every day. And worse, of course, for many it involves illness, disability, a hugely diminished quality of life and, ultimately, an early death (the healthy life expectancy here is more than fifteen years less than in the UK).

I knew all this long before I got here of course - in my head. But in the West we rarely encounter poverty in such a spectacular way. There is severe poverty in the West but it is ghetto-ised; we have marginalised people not just socially, economically and politically, but geographically. Middle-class Westerners are rarely forced to encounter the poor. Indeed we've separated having and not having so successfully that a lot of good middle class folk feel distinctly irritated if some poor bugger has the temerity to break the illusion and ask them for 50p...

For of course our having and their not having are intimately connected - and that's eminently obvious here. Each time I want to go to the shops here I have to cross a stinking canal (a relic of British rule) on the banks of which live a number of utterly destitute families. The same little children smile at me each time I pass; I see the same old lady sitting under her hut (several pieces of corrugated iron) but she doesn't smile as much as the children.

How am I to respond to this?

If nothing is done, then all will be well (Tao Te Ching 3). Oh really?! I wonder what that old lady would say if I were to run this by her...

A little bit of reflection has opened my eyes a little though. Two things occur to me. Firstly I need to understand how to do nothing. By which I don't mean not doing anything. Doing nothing is an active process - it won't just happen by itself! Perhaps the nearest verb that I can use to describe it is "emptying". At the end of a process of emptying one has less than when one started, but that doesn't mean you've not been doing anything...

So perhaps the sage means that to act truly I must act from a place of nothingness. In particular I'm not acting from a place cluttered by myself and my needs - I'm not achieving, I'm doing only what is to be done.

Contrary to first impressions, this is intensely practical! I have to make sure that any response to my situation here is considered and appropriate. I cannot be in the business of assuaging my Western guilt - that is not the point. I must respond in a way which affirms life for its own sake.

However I'm still not sure what form that response will take...

The wise therefore rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies (Tao Te Ching 3). And this is the second thing that has occurred to me. One of the beautiful things about the Tao Te Ching is that a lot of it appears to be bullshit! What is this bloke on about?

And yet herein lies the nub of its wisdom. Lao Tsu knows the danger of truth - a danger so great that he often avoids truth altogether. Rather his language is one of suggestion, implication, even plain nonsense and contradiction. The responsibility is on the reader to sort through his hints and suggestions, to make sense of his absurdities... and to jettison the bollox!

This might appear odd at first but of course it is really the responsibility that every reader has every time they open a book or a newspaper, most especially a book which has the status of a religious text. The fact that too many readers don't do this is evidenced by the fundamentalist nutters who trot about the place spouting hate. But I get the feeling that it's kind of hard to be a fundamentalist Taoist and thank God, Allah and most especially, thank Lao Tsu for saving us from that.

And of course in the light of such demonstrable wisdom from Mr Tsu, the reader of the Tao Te Ching would be well-advised to think carefully before she really does decide he's talking bollox. So the wise rule by stuffing bellies, eh? Think on that...