Z-Day at South Bank University

To South Bank University, to a meeting of the London Futurists group, held in conjunction with the Zeitgeist Movement and branded as Z-Day. I went with some trepidation, because pretty much all I knew about the Zeitgeist Movement came from this article, which made them sound like conspiracy nutters. I expected a cross between the 9/11 TruthMovement and the School of Economic Science.

In fact they turned out to be nice, earnest young people who were genuinely friendly and appeared to be open to learning from others. One or two had piercings and tattoos, but most looked well scrubbed and neat. The entrance hall had a little stall with the Zeitgeist movie on DVD and some pamphlets, and there were posters up for the Venus Project, a detailed blueprint for a high-tech sustainable world with which the Zeitgeist Movement is sort of associated. There was a very faint air of creepy cultishness in the way that some of the material looked, but perhaps that's inevitable when an unfamiliar organisation with a non-identifiable house style wants to address matters of seriousness. I know what it is supposed to look like when Greenpeace or FoE talk about climate change, and I'm just not familiar with the way that the Zeigeist Movement does this. There was no sign of any conspiracy theory material, no references to Lyndon LaRouche, no Protocols or anything like that. 

The lecture theatre was full. There was some cheesy intro music and a short video clip, and then we were welcomed by James Phillips, a  young Zeitgeister. He explained (a bit loosely, and without proper timings) how the day would work, and I was genuinely cheered to hear who the other speakers were – decent types from Positive Money, the Equality Trust, and so on. If they were involved it couldn't be all bad, could it?

And it wasn't. The Zeitgeister gave an earnest PowerPoint presentation about what was wrong with the world (inequality, depletion of resources, loss of biodiversity, climate change) that was hard to disagree with. Whereas my feeling at the last London Futurists meeting was that I had fallen among people with a radically different worldview, I could see that with the Zeitgeisters I was at least in the same moral universe. We cared about the same things. If the movement is about antisemitic conspiracy theories, it didn't show.

Sadly the Zeitgeisters ideas about how to fix what is wrong seems much less impressive. It's a good thing that they don't reject technology. There are greens around who seem to think that if we only went back to some period before the fossil fuel age all would be well. The Zeitgeisters are at the other end of the spectrum. They think that advances in technology make it possible for us to live a life of abundance without wrecking the planet. They go all dewy-eyed over Maglev trains, twelve-storey aquaponic urban farms, geothermal energy and the internet of things. There is an almost touching naivety to the way that they seem to think that technology by itself will resolve and dissolve all of the conflicts within economy and science, if only it were adopted. All that is needed is for this to be explained thoroughly, and the blueprint spelled out in enough detail, and the good society will be upon us. They have an equally touching belief in the 'scientific method' as a way of dealing with conflicts, and they appear to have absolutely no awareness at all of any of the work in academic science studies about the limitations of this idealized view of science.

It was hard not to laugh when the nice young man put up pictures of the 'house of the future', which he explained would have a dome roof because science had proved that was the best shape, and harder still when he presented the 'city of the future' – the pictures looked uncannily like Ebenezer Howard's plans for garden cities. Now I've got a lot of time for Howard, who has generally been under-appreciated as an urban theorist, but this stuff is not new. The idea that better computers and networking technology will allow us to run a fabulous, resource based economy without scarcity or money isn't new either – perhaps someone should tell them about Stafford Beer and his attempts to do just that in Allende's Chile. (Having said that, it is amazing that the USSR probably ran its five-year plans and the administration system to deliver them with less processing power than my smartphone – would it have done better if it had had better computers?)

Not knowing about this history makes you look ridiculous. I think that futurologists should all have to study the 'history of the future' before they are allowed to use their crystal balls.

In fact, the whole Zeitgeist thing is strongly reminiscent of the C19th utopian socialists that Engels derided so successfully. If the Zeitgeisters have heard of Saint-Simon and the Comptean Positivists, or even the Owenists, they gave no sign of doing so, but they need to hear about them. They need to know that there have been movements before that have thought that technology has just reached the point at which it can deliver abundance without injury to the planet and in such a way that class conflict will become unnecessary. They need to know that these movements failed, dismally, and they need to have a good think about why. The idea that the world could be better run by a scientific elite of experts has an old provenance too, as is the notion that this is somehow 'apolitical'. In fact this thread runs through the philosophies of both Left and Right, particularly in Britain, where it was a component of both Fabianism and Moseley's Fascism. Come to think of it, the Zeitgeisters could profit from some time reading H.G. Wells' “The Shape of Things to Come”. Perhaps one of the reasons why some on the Left are so upset about the Zeitgeist Movement is that it reminds us that we've been steeped in this sort of thing ourselves, at least sometimes.

What the Zeitgeisters really need to understand is what Marx meant when he said that the relations of production could turn into fetters on the mode of production. It's a tricky phrase that sounds like jargon, but it's actually very important in explaining the current crisis of our economy and civilisation.

I'm not saying that the problem with their movement is that it lacks a correct Marxist perspective, or that they fail to understand the need for a revolutionary party to lead the workers in the overthrow of capitalism. But actually old Karl was thinking about exactly the same problems as them, and he had some profound insights. It's important to learn from the past if we want to avoid repeating its mistakes.

Z-Day was surprisingly enjoyable. The Zeitgeisters seem to be open to listening to others. There were great presentations by Ben Dyson from Positive Money, by London Futurists' own David Wood (available here), and Sean Blaine from the Equality Trust. There was a good session on Non-Violent Communication by Daren De Witt, and a surprisingly interesting discussion with the Moneyless Man, Mark Boyle, who came across as a really sincere latter-day Tolstoyan. Tolstoyans, Saint-Simonians, it really was a back to the future sort of day. If this lot were all dupes of the Zeitgeisters in lending them protective colouration as decent progressives instead of antisemitic conspiracy nuts then it was a trick well done. 

The one lame spot on the day's agenda (for me, anyway) was a short film and talk by John Webster, who claimed to have uncovered the secret legal fiction that underpinned all of state power and the capitalist relations of production (see this link for a flavour of the discussion).  This was the sort of thing that I had been expecting, Webster, who apparently won a prize at the Crystal Palace Film Festival  (yeah, me neither) seemed to think that once this secret was revealed no-one need ever be in debt, or be forced to submit to authority, ever again. Sadly the audience really seemed to like this dross, and there was a mind-numbing discussion on a point of detail with someone who appeared to be advocating the even more pointless 'Freemen'philosophy.

Maybe I've been successfully duped, but the Zeitgeisters did not seem like dangerous conspiracy nuts. They are not my people, and I don't think their approach will lead to anything, but I can't see any sign that they are harmful. 

Review of "Why it's all still kicking off" by Paul Mason

I really like Paul Mason. He writes very well, about stuff that is important. This book is in many ways a survey of the present moment - or rather an update of a slightly earlier survey of a present moment - and so it's inevitable that there will be things in it that look a bit dated or have turned out differently. That is no reflection on Mason, only on the limitations of writing a book versus a more 'hot' medium. Of course a book makes for longer and more thoughtful treatment of complicated subjects than a twitterfeed or even a blog, and you can read it in a different way, more slowly and flicking backwards and forwards.

This book is about the intersection of social, cultural, technological and economic trends – and shows how these have affected and driven a series of not-all-that-connected events, from the Arab Spring to the underclass riots in England. He writes with insight and passion about the places where strange ecounters are taking place, between slum dwellers (the arse end of the globalized economy) and what is in effect the lumpen-intelligentsia (the arse end of the globalized education market), which he characterises as the graduate without a future. He covers the unhappy meeting-points between the traditional organized labour movement and the more radical, deliberately non-organized horizontalist protest movements.

He has a real feel for the limitations of both, and understands the all-too-real risk that the latter will fall in love with itself. I'd say that was more of a certainty than a risk, and that in a few years time no-one but left history anoraks will remember the Occupy movement; it will be there in the roll-call of missed opportunities to build a new kind of movement, along with the Dialectics of Liberation and Beyond the Fragments.

Unlike many others writing about new social movements he's got a good understanding of the opportunities presented by new technology, though here too he is aware of the limitations and the risks. I think he should have managed a hat tip to Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion”, but you can't have everything. In general the book feels well-researched and has lots of references.

Now a couple of negatives. Considering he's Newsnight's economics editor there isn't that much economics in it, which is a shame. That relates to my other criticism – that he's a bit weak on the relationship between the new technologies that he writes about and the labour market. One of the reasons why all those graduates don't have a future is that the jobs for which their institutions were created to prepare them are going away. Arts and humanities graduates were created to fill the middle layers in bureaucratic organisations of the public and private sector, because mass market manufacturing and service delivery required much complex interaction.

Information technology has done away with a lot of that interaction, replacing the live labour of the bureaucrat with the dead labour of the software programmer. Better software based on more, clever code and using more powerful processors and network protocols has done away with lots of what we once thought of as 'creative' jobs – remember how RobertReich thought we were all going to become 'symbolic analysts'? The graduates without futures are the people who were prepared for symbolic analyst jobs that don't need doing any more – software does it better.

Second negative: I don't understand Mason's bromance with Manuel Castells. I watched Mason introduce and interview Castells at an LSE event (later broadcast on the BBC) and I thought that Mason himself was much more interesting and personally engaging than Castells. I'm not sure whether Castells is as special as Mason seems to think he is, or as Castells himself clearly thinks he is. In particular, I don't think that the 'alternativeeconomic practices' that he makes so much of are all that important. In another time we used to call that the 'grey' or the 'black' economy, or just spivery. Is this really the basis for a new society growing within the shell of the old, or is it just old-fashioned cash-in-hand work and bartering, perhaps facilitated by some new mechanisms of trust and recommendation supported by the internet? And is it therefore really a basis for a challenge to corporate capitalism, or a sort of weedy consolatory 'Poujadism of the Left', to cheer ourselves up that we can't afford the stuff that we used to? I'm all in favour of people not buying crap that they don't need, and it would be lovely if we could just bypass the structures of capitalism to create a pre-figurative socialist society based on mutual aid, but I am not convinced that the 'alternative economic practices' that both Castells and Mason seem so keen on are leading us there.

Oh, and one more thing. Mason works for the BBC, and good luck to him for that. Sometimes that sends the Daily Telegraph into a howl of rage because it “proves” the corporation is really run by Trotskyists. My concern is the opposite one; who is providing this kind of coverage of alternative movements useful to? It was Susan George who said that radical intellectuals should study the rich, because any research into the poor and their mechanisms of solidarity would ultimately be used against them. I don't at all intend to imply that Mason is a turncoat or a traitor or anything like that. His book is inspirational; but not everyone who will read it is looking for inspiration.

But hats off to Paul Mason for writing what is a really very good book about where we are at and where it might go. It's made me think more than a whole lot of meetings and magazine articles, and it deserves to be read and debated widely.

Update on PaySafeCard

Finally bought myself a PaySafeCard voucher, at this place on Paddington Street, in Marylebone. The process was indeed perfectly anonymous; I handed over a £10 note (minimum amount) and the bloke behind the counter handed me a receipt with a pin code. Haven't tried spending it online yet. I'll post another update when I have.

The mystery of PaySafeCard, the anonymous online payment vendor that isn't

I was quite excited to discover PaySafeCard - an online payment provider that allows you to spend cash online, as anonymously as cash itself. It's possible to go into a shop, buy a voucher for cash, and spend it online without providing any sort of ID or using anything that is tied to ID.

Or at least it would be, if I could find somewhere that actually sold the vouchers. The PaySafeCard website lists lots of outlets where you are supposed to be able to buy the vouchers, but every single one that I have visited has never heard of PaySafeCard. It seems to be one of the things that you are supposed to be able to do at the PayPoint machine, but in practice it isn't possible. Anyone know anything about this?

Film review of Joyful Noise

Watched on DVD. As they say, that's two hours of my life I'm never getting back. Grim, loosely plotted, uninteresting characters, devoid of dramatic tension or interest. I quite liked the music (despite the dreadful lyrics of the romantic/gospel song  - funny how they work both as a song to a sexual partner and to Jesus - why has no-one else mentioned this?) but it wasn't enough to save this pile of crap. Not a big Dolly Parton fan, but she doesn't deserve anything this bad. Looking at her face all messed up with multiple surgical interventions only worsens the whole experience, as if wasn't awful enough already.

IMDB says 'People who liked this also liked', and one can't help thinking: "poking red hot needles in their eyes, or walking barefoot over broken glass".

On the history of English awkwardness

If you are English, you've probably had the experience of being a conversation with a European – say a French or German person – and beginning to feel uncomfortable that it was going on just a bit too long. The 'are we still talking about this?' feeling. If you are the European, you may have had the opposite experience in a conversation with an English person; you are just get warmed up when they change the subject. Probably by making a little joke.

I've been the English person, and for twenty years I've been aware that English people need to change the subject of conversation more quickly than Europeans. I've also noticed that even among themselves English people seem to need to change the subject of a conversation quite often. Talking about the same thing for any length of time is considered 'getting heavy'. Perhaps I'm not quite as English as I ought to be, because I also have a bit of a tendency to grind away at a theme after others would like to switch – or just because I've noticed this. Most of the Europeans with whom I've discussed this understand what I'm talking about straight away, though they hadn't been consciously aware of it.

Why should this be? Here is a hypothesis. English people don't like talking about anything for long because it might lead to a disagreement, which might in turn lead to an argument. An argument would involve some sort of emotional engagement, which would be uncomfortable and unseemly. The avoidance of confrontation of any kind seems to be pretty fundamental to English conversation patterns. Of course there are rows, and disagreements, and there is verbal aggression – quite a lot of it. But much of the time English conversational sparring takes the form of banter – jokey teasing – rather than argument of any kind.

I suspect that this might be related to the Restoration Settlement after the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. I know this seems a bit of a long shot, but hear me out.

In the Civil Wars the English got very serious about religion. They had massive arguments about doctrine and ritual. For a while they tortured, massacred and executed each other for believing, or affirming, or preaching the wrong thing. They smashed up churches and destroyed images in a way that was deliberately and self-consciously sacrilegious.  By the end of the seventeenth century they were traumatised and exhausted, and the settlement that they reached was that a wide variety of doctrinal positions and liturgical practices could co-exist within the same established church.

I think that this was quite unique in Europe. In other countries the church ended up following the 'cuius regio' principle, and those who didn't like it could adapt or leave. But the churches themselves were much more doctrinally homogeneous.  I don't want to hold England up as some utopia of religious tolerance; the Netherlands were much more tolerant, and the English still excluded both Catholics and Dissenters from acceptability. Nevertheless, the English church included both people who thought of themselves as Protestants and people who didn't – and it still does. I don't think this happened in any reformed churches in Europe.

I think the price that the English paid for this was an agreement not to discuss matters of religion, or rather to transmute them into matters of personal taste, about which there can be no right and wrong. This conversational convention has gradually spread to other areas of public discourse (try disagreeing with something that someone says about the weather, or try getting someone to disagree with you by saying something that's obviously not true). This might also explain why the English intellectual tradition is so resolutely anti-theoretical, in matters of philosophy and politics and even science. As Marx observed, "If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas."

Remember this next time the French guy you are talking with seems to be worrying a subject to death like a dog with a bone. It's not him that's got a problem, it's you.

Film review: Looper

Time travel paradox films. Once you've seen one, you've seen them all, or so it feels anyway. The fact that Bruce Willis is in it means that I couldn't help think of Twelve Monkeys, which does the same thing but much, much better.

Didn't like the plot, the characters, the way it dealt with the time travel issues. Plot full of holes, and the basic premise - that time travel technology has been developed but is outlawed and is only used by criminal gangs to dispose of their victims - is just ridiculous beyond words. I didn't even like the way the future looks, either in 2044 or in 2074, both of which are depicted. Waste of time.

Film Review: Ulysses

I've seen this once before, but didn't remember much apart from an episode in which a faux-Zionist flag is raised by Hasidim outside what looks like Dublin town hall. Watching again after having read the book, I am surprised by how good it is. This was never going to be an easy book to turn into a film, and I think Strick made a good job of it. Other reviewers are bemused by the fact that it has been brought up to date, so that it takes place in 1960s Dublin rather than early-twentieth century Dublin. That seems to me to have been a good decision, because it wasn't really written as a period piece. The stream of consciousness stuff (particularly Molly Bloom's final soliloquy) works better in film than on the printed page. Barbara Jefford is a wonderful Molly - what else was she in?

Film Review: The Pirates! In an adventure with scientists!

Watched this on my mobile, so some issues with the quality of the image, and sometimes with the sound. A kid's film really, but I am a sucker for Aardman and will watch anything that they do. No effort whatsoever at historical accuracy, but I did rather like the animated version of Darwin. And making Queen Victoria the villain (villainess?) was a nice touch; indeed making the crowned heads of the world the collective baddies suited me just fine. You can't start children early enough on resistance to authority.

A Singularitanian Utopia or a wasted afternoon?

Sometimes you go to a talk or even that just blows your mind – you're overwhelmed with the breadth of the speaker's ideas, or the eloquence with which she concretizes and synthesizes thoughts that have jostled for attention in your own mind. Or you feel that they've opened a door to a whole new domain that until now had been entirely unknown to you.

Sadly, Ian Pearson's presentation at 'ASingularitarian Utopia Or A New Dark Age?' wasn't like that at all. Instead, it was a warmed-over mish-mash of technological cornucopianism, seasoned with Daily Mail-style reactionary harrumphing about 'political correctness gone mad'. It was sad, too, to see that there was little push-back from the audience. The London Futurists that organized the event seemed to lap it all up, and the question and answer session (you couldn't call it a debate or discussion) were really about matters of details. Afterwards, some of the comments posted on the meeting suggested that this was indeed English politeness rather than silent assent. Even where Pearson was at his weakest – his ignorant endorsement of climate change denial – the questions were the kind of polite requests you'd ask of a genuine authority on the subject. 

Pearson began with a brief restatement of the idea of the singularity – the notion that the rate of intellectual and technological change will soon approach an asymptote, and that this will lead to the emergence of superintelligence. Everything will start to change (that is, improve) very quickly, building on the ideas that have gone before, and we'll become superintelligent, thus getting lots of wonderful stuff that will solve not only our present problems but the underlying problems of the human condition, including sickness and mortality.

He argued that technology would indeed soon solve all of the problems that bothered us at the moment – resource problems would be solved by asteroid mining, for example, and better extractive technologies. The apparent crisis of water shortages could be solved by graphene straws, that could enable fresh clean water to be extracted from muddy puddles. This fatuous rubbish should have been indication enough that we were in the presence of someone who was prepared to announce 'solutions' to problems that he hadn't spent even a moment studying.

But we needn't have been worried. Pearson told us that he'd tracked the predictions that he'd been making since the early 1990s, and he'd been right 85% of the time. This does rather beg the question “If you're so smart why ain't you rich?”, and the obvious explanation that it's rather easy to make a lot of predictions that are going to turn out to be true. In 2030 cash will be worth less than it is today, shares will be worth more, and there will be more people around then there are now, and there will be a war going on somewhere, to quote four predictions that are very likely to turn out true.

I've always had near-boundless admiration for engineers. I love the orderly way that they approach complex problems and the way that they are able to organize themselves to work together. Policy-makers should take this kind of approach much more often. But Pearson's diatribe revealed the limitations of this perspective. There was absolutely no consideration that anybody had ever thought about any of these issues before, or that there was any need to bring any knowledge or ideas from any other intellectual discipline. For example, one of his technological riffs was the idea of 'bacterial computing' – that nanotechnology would make it possible to hybridize bacteria with self-replicating computers. Thus, conflating computational power with intelligence, and both with what is measured by intelligence tests, he declared it would be possible to make a pot of yogurt with the IQ of Europe. Similarly, it would be possible to make machines that were 'conscious', without any definition of what that meant (or acknowledgement that anyone else had ever thought about it), within two years. Well, I'm still waiting for my personal jet-pack.

When he'd finished telling us about all the wonderful stuff that was coming real soon – augmented reality, who would have though of that? - he then moved on to discuss the downside of all this change. The downside turned out to be liberal ideas. He put up a graphic to represent all of the dangerous nonsense that was leading us into the New Dark Age promised by the title. There is, it seems, a slippery slope that leads from equality for women, to racial equality, through equality for gay people and then on to animal rights, 'political correctness' and moral relativism. This in turn leads to the questioning of authority and the growth of 'anti-knowledge', which broadly means blog posts that Pearson doesn't agree with and Wikipedia articles that he finds wanting in some way. Actually my experience of Wikipedia articles on subjects that I do know something about is that they are usually pretty good; and such research as there has been done on the quality of Wikipedia articles seems to back up my experience. But why let actual research get in the way of a good rant?

'Moral relativism' in Pearson's view is any change in moral codes. So the decline in bear-baiting and public executions as a form of entertainment, and the advent of the idea that it's wrong for people to own other people, are presumably examples of moral relativism, and thus no doubt bad things. Curiously, he argued that 'political correctness gone mad' had resulted in the rise of a new 'Spanish Inquisition' (code for someone having challenged his reactionary ideas, since he didn't seem to have any visible injuries from his interrogation at the hands of this new Inquisition), while simultaneously lamenting the decline of organised religion which had previously provide us with a stable moral code. Hard to make this kind of stuff up. 

By this time I had almost lost the will to live, and if I'd been sitting on the end of an aisle I would have left. Unfortunately I wasn't, so I had to endure his declaration that he was an expert on climate science too, and he wasn't worried about climate change at all. There was 'a lot of crap on both sides of the debate', as much from what he referred to as the 'warmists' as from the deniers (of course, he didn't call them anything so pejorative . Anybody who disagreed with him was a mindless anti-science environmentalist, the sort of people who did more damage to the environment than all the corporations that there had ever been.

Time to declare a bit of an interest: I work as a technology analyst, and sometimes my clients want me to predict the future. Sometimes I try to do this, and I write about it. Sometimes I am spectacularly wrong – I managed to write hundreds of pages about 'value added data services' in the early 1990s without mentioning the internet, and I thought that SMS would never take off. I have no problem with people thinking about the future of stuff or technology, or about how our civilisation is going to turn out. Indeed, we have to do this if we aren't going to just let shit happen to us. Pearson's closing assertion that in the end our politicians will always wake up and pull us back from the brink of any disaster is belied by many examples of civilisations that did not pull back and went right over the edge to destruction.

But it's hard to resist the observation that this kind of futurology is not much more than science fiction, only without the literary merit. Although Pearson paused to appear to reflect on whether any of these 'inventions' would be a good thing, he didn't do much reflecting, let alone proper thinking about what the implications might be. It was if the phrase 'unintended consequences' had never been uttered by anyone, ever, and that there was no example of this anywhere in human history. On a more positive note, if Pearson really was BT's futurologist for 16 years, then there is hope for all those of us who do this sort of thing for a living. 

Review of "I give it a year"

For a romcom this was actually quite funny. Some really nicely observed bits of awkwardness. My favourite was the team dinner for the people working in the NGO, where they are dividing up the bill and discussing who did/didn't have a starter. The threesome scene was also very funny. Overall it was a bit less than the sum of parts, but better than most of the happier ever crap that gets made into romcoms.

Review of "Hitchcock"

A bit boring really. Must remember not to see films about film-makers. Hitchcock not particularly nice or interesting, even though he made interesting films. Was not nice to people, developed creepy crushes on his leading ladies, was not all that nice to his wife. No suspense in the film, because we all know Psycho is going to be a success. Not convinced by the hallucination scenes in which Hitchcock fantasizes that he is in contact with the murderer who inspired the book and film. Not bothered that he eats from the fridge at night and diets during the day - it's just not interesting.

Only one really funny moment which I won't spoil. Generally the film only comes to life when Helen Mirren is on the screen. Not a long film, but it felt long.

Review of The Old Ones in The Old Book: Pagan Roots of the Hebrew Old Testament by Philip West

This book describes how the Jewish (and subsequently Christian) religions emerged from a rather different set of beliefs and practices. The ancient Israelites and Judahites did not practice what came to be the Jewish religion. They worshipped a god called Yahweh, but they did not believe he was the only supernatural being. Sometimes they were monolatrists – that is, they only worshipped this god, even though they believed there were others. Sometimes they made side bets and also paid homage to other gods, including Baal (like Adonai, a title rather than a personal name), Anat and Asherah. It's easy to see the evidence of this in the Bible itself, once you read it with an open mind rather than from a perspective that believes the patriarchs, and the Israelites, were proto-Jews. West's book is nicely footnoted with proper references to the Biblical text without being dry and academic. He has a good feel for some of the linguistic issues in the text too – pointing out examples when it uses unfamiliar words for what would have been familiar objects, and thinking through what the significance of that might be.

He has a nice little riff on Polytheism vs Monotheism at the end, which I personally find quite compelling because I've been thinking on the same lines myself. We hear so often that Monotheism is morally and intellectually superior to Polytheism that we rarely stop to think why that might – or might not – be true. I'm not any kind of theist, but once you start to think about it Polytheism seems to make more sense of the world and its moral challenges than Monotheism.

It's only a little book, but it is a great gateway to the world of Biblical studies; proper Biblical studies, that is, not the kind of brain-numbing indoctrination that religious organisations' bible classes peddle. Once you acknowledge that the Bible is a collection of different books, written at different times by different people with different sorts of objectives, you can really begin to appreciate and enjoy it. It's both familiar (in that we know a lot of the stories and the characters) and strange (in that there is a huge amount of material that we just ignore because it doesn't fit into our religious schema). As an atheist I go back to it often, and never fail to find something both new and enjoyable. I'll keep West's book next to me when I do, and I'd be delighted to find more books by him.

One tiny little quibble; this is a popular introduction to academically respectable theological and biblical studies. So why no reference to another such book, “Who wrote the Bible?” by Richard Elliot Friedman, which is also a great account of the documentary hypothesis? Perhaps there's a good reason, but it seemed a surprising omission to me.

Film Review: Because I said so

Execrable. What was Diane Keaton doing in this? Surely she can't need the money that much. Not acting, that's for sure. Lousy plot, hopeless dialogue, rubbish directing. I know it's a romcom, but even so...

Film Review: Lincoln

Enjoyable film, not very nuanced history. Mainly looked great, in a grey and sepia sort of way. Mrs Lincoln (BTW Sally Field does look a lot like the pictures of her) was from Kentucky - someone with local knowledge tell me whether that was a good Kentucky accent?

The Southern representatives who came to negotiate peace terms were appropriately vile - wouldn't have been out of place in 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter'.

No suggestions as to any of the debates about whether Lincoln really wanted to free the slaves or preserve the union; nor any understanding as to some of the contradictory dimensions and racism within the Abolitionist movement.

Film Review: 'Exit through the gift shop'

Just watched this (recorded from Channel 4). Thought it was a really interesting film, though not entirely sure what it was about. Started out as a documentary about a guy shooting footage of street artists, and ended up as a film about the same guy deciding that he was a street artist - and selling his stuff for impressive prices. It seemed to me that he was no more an artist than he was a documentary maker, but what do I know? Or anyone?

Interesting footage of art collectors drooling over street art - there aren't many kinds of rebellion that can't be co-opted, are there?

Film review: Les Miserables

Just got home from seeing this. Bemused by the fact that everyone in the cinema seemed to think it was wonderful - a ripple of applause at the end, people all around me saying it was the best film they'd ever seen...

I thought it was mainly drivel. Occasionally enjoyable drivel, mind, with some great art design and scenery, some nice actors to look at, but still drivel. It's a film of the West End musical, not a film of the book, and if you liked that you'll probably like this.

It's basically a melodrama with three themes - love conquers all, God redeems and forgives everyone (except the baddie inspector, who has to kill himself when confronted by an act of charity without strings), and revolution is ennobling but not anything to do with politics. The revolution/barricade scenes are the most stirring and have the best music, but they are completely vacuous. The revolutionaries are wealthy students who want the people to rise up in their support, but they don't. It's pretty funny that when the central character, Jean Valjean, dies at the end he goes not to Heaven but to Revolutionary Heaven, with a super big barricade and all the characters who died in the film singing and waving red flags and tricolours.

And like the West End musical, there's not one good song in it. Half an hour later and I have forgotten them all.

Dave Rosenberg's The Battle for the East End

I really enjoyed reading this, and learned a lot about a struggle that I thought I already knew about. There is a lot of detail, and some really well chosen anecdotes and presentation of primary material. It would have been nice to have had more pictures, though these are available in lots of other places.

It's a very generous book. The author freely admits that most pre-war BUF members went on to fight for Britain against Hitler. He acknowledges Mosley's personal charisma, and the extent to which his economic ideas were genuinely advanced and even progressive. He's more than generous about the role of the Communist Party in the fight against Fascism, though he gives appropriate space to dissident Communists like Joe Jacobs who have criticised the sometimes dismal tactics adopted by the Party (until the 11th hour of the Battle of Cable Street it was telling militants to stay away from the East End and go to a rally for Republican Spain in Trafalgar Square).

In fact, the only group about which he's not generous is the official Jewish leadership, principally the Board of Deputies. It's easy to despise the supine, cringing attitude of the Board - which argued that Fascism per se was not a Jewish issue, and that it placed full trust in the tolerant culture of the British people and the institutions of the British state. But that's been the political strategy of Jewish leaderships pretty much everywhere for at least a thousand years, and while it's not pretty it can be said to have worked, at least for the leadership groups themselves, for most of this period. Allying with the authorities to seek protection from popular discontent is what Jews have done. Since most rebellions and insurrections up to the modern period failed, it was a strategy apparently justified by history. And it's not obvious, at least to me, that when these leaderships praise the wise and tolerant authorities, that they are as stupid as they seem to be. It is at least possible that they understand what they are doing - that they know that the British people are actually at best ambivalent about immigrants, but that they think it's wiser to praise them for their tolerance, and then to appeal to that 'better nature' than criticise them for their lack of it. They might be wrong, but that doesn't make them stupid.

My other criticism is that the book doesn't locate the Jewish struggle against Fascism in the East End in terms of the overall politics of the CP. It was Mosley's misfortune that the critical time for his movement coincided with the CPs turn to the strategy of the Popular Front, and that this strategy seems to have been successful in the context of the Jewish East End in a way that it was not pretty much everywhere else. By and large the CP's strategy of allying with the "progressive wing of the bourgeosie" was a terrible failure. In Spain it led to the crippling divisions within the workers' movement and the persecution of the left. But among the Jews of the East End, where the 'progressive businessman' was at least not an oxymoron, it made some sort of sense. The immigrant community contained lots of people who identified with the left even though they are middlemen, professionals, or petty traders.

It sort of sticks in my throat to see the CP characterised as 'democratic forces'. Actually this is the CP of Stalin, and its fight against Fascism was about to take a most unusual turn. The strategy that it adopted in fighting Fascism was always subordinate to foreign policy needs of Stalin's USSR. Maybe the Jewish People's Council was not only a CP front, but it didn't survive the CP's twists and turns, and it didn't become an alternative centre of gravity for the Jewish community.

Nevertheless this is a great, readable book which I heartily recommend.

Kvass

I made some kvass. I'd had it from a stall in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and it had stuck in my mind as a nice not-too-sweet soft drink.

I mainly used this recipe but I also followed the 'raisin in each bottle' technique from another recipe. I bottled it in PET water bottles and I gave them a good squeeze before I screwed the lid on. Even so they fermented a lot, and several of the bottles exploded, a bit like in this video.

Still, the kvass was nice, if not exactly like the one I had in the USSR. It was a bit darker. I suspect that this mildly fermented drink is a bit like what the 'small beer' that they drank in the middle ages was like.

Karen Armstrong's History of God

Putting my review here, in case the tax-dodgers at Amazon get grumpy and refuse to publish it.

"Lots of interesting information about debates within Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but a rather partial account that focuses on the intellectual content of these debates rather than their social, political and institutional context. So lots about the debate within Orthodox Christianity about whether God has one substance, or whether he is three or one person, but nothing about the process whereby Christianity became the state religion and how that related to the need for a single position on doctrinal matters. Similarly with Judaism - you'd think Hasidism emerged just as a reaction to intellectual currents within rabbinic debates; the massacres of the 1640s, and even the name of Chmielnicki, don't even figure.

Perhaps more important for this atheist reader, there is a sleight of hand which is barely acknowledged. The God worshipped by Judaism, Christianity and Islam is a personal God, and the idea for him emerged from a tribal deity that was very much associated with some human and some super-human characteristics. The God of the philosophers - some distant first cause without any personal or human characteristics - is a very different entity (or as she would have it, not actually an entity at all, but something more profound). It might make sense to build a set of social institutions around placating and 'worshipping' the personal God, but the second one can only be contemplated. Worshipping it makes no sense. And yet religious clever-clogs, and people who make a living out of religion, somehow manage to conflate the two. It would be unfair to say she doesn't write about this, but I didn't see it satisfactorily addressed.

That said, there were some really good parts in the book. This is the first time I've ever understood why it was so important for the Greeks to have those rows about the essential nature of the trinity - it was an argument about the limits of human understanding and cognition, which is important for us now in relation to cosmology and physics, but the Greeks didn't have the instruments, so they made it a discussion about God. And she also touches on the way that the Romantics replaced a sense of the divine with a sense of the aesthetic, particularly in relation to nature. As one who only has what other people call spiritual feelings in relation to this sort of thing, it's nice to know it has a lineage, and it actually made me want to go and read Keats and Wordsworth.

So all in all, time well spent, despite a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction about the book."