NE PLEURIEZ PAS MILORD - ENGLAND'S WORLD CUP

Every four years the FIFA World Cup delivers sporting theatre which is as rich in human psychology as it is in football. Of course it's only a game. But there were two comments from the papers following England's quarter final exit from a so-far enthralling competition in Qatar which stood out :

"The World Cup counts so much because it is a window on to who's who and what's what unlike anything else that football offers. We see what players are made of, divested of whatever advantages they have when playing for the biggest and best clubs, shouldering hopes of nations and conscious such opportunities come round only a few times in a career."

 and

"Football is the one place where reality and their highfalutin sense of themselves meet."

Interestingly, the journos were showing their disappointment with the teams of Brazil and Argentina respectively, the former knocked out by an un-fancied Croatian side containing a number of middle- aged men and the latter squeaking a bad-tempered victory on penalties against an equally unfancied Dutch side which refused to be rolled over, despite being 2-0 down for most of the match.

As a muddled Sassenach (albeit with Irish Catholic and French Huguenot ancestry) it grieves me to ask, but could not those observations be fairly applied to the football set up of England? Certainly the fans who watched open mouthed as Harry Kane hoofed the match saving penalty over the cross bar would seem to deserve an explanation.

Whatever his deficiencies in either selection or tactics, there is no doubting that England manager Gareth Southgate has a genius for PR. He managed the quite extraordinary feat of making the England football team vaguely likeable. This is a group with both talent and a social conscience. We have had knee-taking, armband wearing, group hugging and a general vibe of wholesomeness. When was the last time an England sports team changed the course of government social policy? One of its soccer stars, Marcus Rashford, managed to do just that when agitating for free school meals in both term time and holiday for the children of "vulnerable" families. Such is the shallowness of our politics, the administration of Boris Johnson caved in promptly. Yet no-one (least of all Rashford) seemed to consider that the proposal effectively relieved parents of the basic duty of feeding their children.

But no matter. Emboldened by all the hypocritical hoo-ha about Qatar's human rights record, Team England arrived in the desert in full warrior-for-social-justice mode. There was some confected nonsense about the wearing of Gay Pride armbands which was swiftly snuffed out once FIFA showed a metaphorical yellow card. The arc of England's football  followed a similar trajectory soon afterwards. 

For the side's performance at these events seems to be as predictable as the seasons. First, there are the qualifying matches against the likes of Tibet, Andorra and Vatican City where Team England still contrive to get a scare from part-time crews mostly comprised of students, car mechanics, elderly fishermen and hairdressers. There then follows a group stage at the main event in which it flattens a country of which few of its supporters have ever heard, and then ekes out a series of draw-bores to get into the knock-outs. The rest writes itself. 

From the Amazonian basin to the Himalayan plateau, there cannot be a person on the planet who is unaware of Team England's frailty in front of a barn door, minimally defended by a man in fluorescent jim-jams waving his arms about. More serious is their consistent inability to seal the deal against sides as talented, rich, well-trained and pampered as themselves. Were France the better team on the night? England's "rising star" Jude Bellingham thought not, which only goes to show the depths of a nation's delusions. England spent much of the match falling over, shouting at the referee and passing back to the goal-keeper - all sure signs of nerves beginning to fray. Their opponents played as if they meant to win it, whereas England played as if they thought they would win it next time.

It's no good blaming the manager, or the match officials or VAR or whatever. The media are as masterful in the stoking of fantasy as are the players. Over on ITV, some blow-hard preposterously declared that had England won, they would never have had an easier route to the final, as only Morocco would have stood in the way. What, the Morocco which played as a team, defended like tigers and put out the much vaunted sides of Spain, Portugal and Belgium? That Morocco?

In the end, is not courage defined by the exercise of key skills under pressure? Managers like Southgate are up against it because ultimately they are dealing with a bunch of immature multi-millionaires who don't really need to wear the national shirt, no matter how "gutted" they feel after blowing yet another chance for the long-suffering fans. Far more seriously, they are the product of an education system which routinely promotes self-esteem rather than self-respect, a construct to which impressionable young males seem particularly susceptible. In that sense, Team England really do represent a culture which in so many ways finds it easy to fold in the hope things will be less difficult next time.

So if you don't want to put yourself endlessly through the mangle as an England fan, but really want to see football played with guts as well as skill, then watch the women's game. Or better still, Morocco.

 

GOD BLESS CHARLATANS

In Dominic Sandbrook's brilliantly discursive and sometimes hilarious book "Seasons in the Sun - the Battle for Britain 1974 to 1979" there is a particularly depressing photograph. It shows a teacher supervising a lesson, which is taking place on waste-ground next to a row of dilapidated terraced houses somewhere in the UK in the mid 'seventies. Children sit aimlessly around a fire. Some mooch in the background and the teacher, all long hair and hands in pocket, looks strangely aloof and disengaged. There is a palpable lack of energy in the scene. In 1979 Pink Floyd produced "Another Brick in the Wall", its song about perceived classroom authoritarianism.  "We doan need no educayshun", they groaned. "We doan need no fought contro". They needn't have bothered: that class of '75 got "no educayshun" and came of age between the severe recession of the early 'eighties and the height of the miners' strike in 1984. It is largely that cohort which has been running the country for the past twenty years, and which has filled the upper echelons of its cultural and academic institutions. 

When your leaders are poorly educated and reach maturity in circumstances which enhance their sense of alienation, can anyone wonder about the total mess that is presently Governance UK? 

There have been a number of episodes in post War British history in which an atmosphere of existential crisis has been marked: Suez; the so-called Three- Day Week; the "Winter of Discontent"; the 1984 miners' strike; the financial crash of 2008 and the EU Referendum in 2016. Apart from the last two, all these instances also took place against the threatening back drop of a nuclear-armed Cold War. In three of them, there was an additional paranoia induced by Ulster connected terrorism, which frequently erupted onto the mainland UK. 

In the crises before the Millennium the essential organs of the modern British state held firm, despite a background of profound political turmoil and the possibility of civil strife. A dutiful and dis-interested monarch smiled and waved. Religious leaders were on hand to sooth the wounds of antagonism. The courts continued to dispense justice as found in UK based law. The police were largely trusted to uphold law and order. The professionalism and capability of the Armed Forces was mostly unquestioned. The Civil Service ensured the continuity of national and regional administration. The BBC's approach to public affairs was impartial and evidence based. There was no question of the break-up of the UK (despite the best efforts of the IRA). There was a firm belief in democracy and a healthy scepticism of blue-prints and ideology.

As the sharper elbowed of the class of '75 entered the cadre of national leaders at the turn of the century, the wheels began to fall off. The age of the charlatan had arrived, aided and abetted by the corrosive dominance of the social sciences in public life. It did not matter that the various schemes for the perfection of the citizen founded in the social sciences had manifestly failed, not least in the communist bloc. Unembarrassed, so-called "progressives" now asserted personal "truth" trumped objective truth. Indeed, the whole concept of objective truth was challenged by the increasingly shrill post-Modernist agenda, the sole purpose of which seemed to be the provision of axes to grind and the degradation of rational enquiry and well-tested custom. Social equality would be achieved by the promotion of nonsense - at least then we would all be united in ignorance.

Political chicanery flourished. Blair took the UK to war on the thinnest of pretexts and also because he personally "believed" it was the right thing to do. Brown supervised the largest accretion of the state in peacetime based on his hunch that only he and his coterie could deliver "fairness", whatever that meant. His successors were cast from the same mould in that they too were mostly untroubled by doubt. The vanity, shallowness and fragility of Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss tested to destruction the idea that Oxbridge (or at least Oxford) is the mother lode of educated talent. From these conceits much dross flowed.

When the upper reaches of civil society are as gripped by unreason as is more typically found at its base, there is a problem. Democracy cannot properly function where knowledge and practical experience (as opposed to "lived experience") are relegated or ignored. If accountability is either weak or non-existent, it becomes a lot easier to disregard decisions that have been democratically decided. Nor can democracy work where the fundamental assumptions behind it are endlessly challenged and weakly defended by those who ought to know better.

Charlatans once lived in constant risk of exposure by advances in science and philosophical enquiry. Alas, not even the scientific method has been immune to the contamination of objective truth by post Modernism, while the advances in technology have arguably facilitated the rate at which imbecility flourishes. Ask anyone to name a recently famous UK scientist, and chances are they'll mention Professor Stephen Hawking, the recognition of whom was much enhanced by his wheelchair bound existence and computerised utterances. Hawking made his name in the arcane and highly speculative area of theoretical physics. Although he conceded that so-called M Theory ("The Theory of Everything") was no more than a collection of unproven and unprovable hypotheses, it did not stop him and his collaborators from claiming that this branch of science had supplanted both philosophy and theology. As God had nothing to do with the rightness or otherwise of their speculations, ergo God did not exist either. The British love an underdog and enjoyed the spectacle of the boffin in the wheelchair taking on the Almighty in a contest that no sensible theologian would have asked for.

To say that Hawking deserved his prestige would be overclaiming. But his public popularity and association with speculative science rather than the more precise realm of observed instances also gave a big boost to the quackery of so-called Model Dependent Realism. The very fashionable idea that we can have no concept of a reality outside the models or pictures we construct in order to explain the world has given a big boost to charlatans everywhere. Rational scepticism can be discounted just so long as what you are trying to prove (or disprove) can be fitted into a model. No other considerations apply. Sound familiar? Among the major economies, the UK's strategy to deal with the Covid pandemic was especially dominated by Model Dependent Realism. It did not matter that the assumptions were flawed, and the assigned probabilities seemingly taken out of a hat. The establishment was quick to claim it was "Following the Science" although the experience was a costly and predictable disaster. All the while, the well-founded suspicion that the pandemic had itself been engineered by scientists in a laboratory was ruthlessly supressed.

The "science" of Man- Made Climate Change is similarly compromised by the chicanery enabled by Model Dependent Realism. This has now passed from the realm of scientific enquiry to that of dogma. Notwithstanding the proper application of the scientific method has shown human activity to have a vestigial impact on global warming, sceptics are denounced as dangerous heretics. The Old Testament of anthropogenic climate change is routinely preached by the BBC, with the nonagenarian Sir David Attenborough cast in the role of a modern Elijah. It does not matter, for example, that drought in the Horn of Africa has been endemic since long before global industrialisation. More recently, it has been exacerbated by ethnic conflict, government oppression and widespread corruption. Amid the recent heart- rending scenes of starving infants, the BBC would have been nearer the truth had they said the drought was no fault of these beautiful children. Instead, we were told the catastrophe was entirely the result of Man- Made Climate Change. Never mind the suffering, just admire how on-message is our intrepid and air-conditioned reporter.

Have there been any philosophical defences erected against the rising tide of "personal truths" validated by "lived experiences"? The British pride themselves on their stout- hearted aversion to intellectualism, particularly in the public sphere. From that has arisen the conceit that Britain is somehow immune from any idiocies blowing in from abroad. Post Modernism - isn't that a bit French? Critical Race Theory? That's some nonsense from the US campuses. They'll never catch on here.

Yet arguably the post Modernists bombed the ground that had already been ploughed up by that school of philosophy called "pluralism". This held that romanticism, for example, was as valid a way of looking at the world as rationalism. Or that the wisdom of the ancients was as relevant to our system of morality as the Judaeo Christian tradition. You get the picture. If you asked anyone over 40 if they could name a famous British philosopher, chances are they'd name Sir Isaiah Berlin OM. Lionised by the establishment and adopted as the celebrity house philosopher of UK social democracy, Sir Isaiah owed his renown to apercus like this:

"I regard equality as one of the ultimate goals of men, and its rejection as such is deeply unsympathetic to me...I am not at all against believing that life can be ordered for the better, following a rule of conduct or a critique of culture or a method, even a scientific law - often one can, and if one can, one should". 

and this

"Equality and freedom may sometimes be reconciled and sometimes not...there are forms of inequality which diminish freedom, forms of oppression which destroy equality etc". 

and this

" I do not think that I intend to throw doubts on religious morality as such, only on one that excludes all non-religious values"

Read those highly conditional sentences again and you realise Berlin is not saying very much at all. His fellow pluralist Michael Oakeshott was more obviously suspicious of "systems". This and his reverence for practical knowledge, well tested custom and the human capacity for adaptation have led many to conclude he was an exemplar for the right. Perhaps for this reason, Berlin detested Oakeshott and called him a charlatan. So much for pluralism.

Where the pluralists were in the business of examining the multiple roots of our moral understanding, the post Modernists have tried to dig them up and burn them. They have had quite a bit of success. Politicians are unable to say what defines a woman and eminent doctors of the church can be found to affirm that Christ was, in fact, "trans". Members of the royal family would have us believe they are oppressed. We have been told to assume that we have a right not to be offended, particularly if we are "vulnerable" on account of our "protected characteristics". If objective truth makes anyone uncomfortable or is otherwise "problematic" or "inappropriate", it must be suppressed. Nonsense now has a code of approved attitudes to which citizens must adhere on pain of excommunication ("cancelling" in the vernacular) and even deprivation of their livelihoods. We turn to superannuated footballers masquerading as philosophers for our moral lessons and to professional agitators as our guides to modern manners. We throw billions at business charlatans and allow them to remain at liberty when they should be in jail. As one would expect in the "progressive" world of PO-MO, the zealotry of unreason is most pronounced in our institutions of higher learning. There has been nothing this culturally crazy since the witch burning of the 17th century.

As we enter the Advent season, it is good to be reminded that we were given a perfectly good rubric to help us lead better lives with purer hearts over 2,000 years ago. The Jesus of the Gospels didn't invite us to solve moral problems or to agonise where good ends might conflict - he enjoined us to lead a life of justice AND mercy. He did not assert, and he certainly wasn't in the excommunication game. He did however show that there is a wrong way, and that evil is ever-present. But he would also have been more forgiving of the charlatans than they have ever been of him.

Happy Christmas.