Merkel, May and Clinton and the return of the angry white man

Last year looked like a breakout year for female leaders in the western world. In June, Theresa May became prime minister of the UK; in early October, Hilary Clinton was in the ascendant (she was widely viewed to have thrashed Trump in the televised debates and ahead by a considerable margin in the polls); and Angela Merkel's role as German Chancellor since 2005 seemed unshakeable, as the longest-serving leader in the EU and G7 since 2014.

Now the tide has reversed. In November 2016 Clinton loses to Trump. In June 2017 May is shocked to have lost her majority in government, relying on the DUP as a crutch. In November 2017 FDP leader Christian Lindner pulls out of negotiations to form a coalition with Merkel's CD/CSU party in an apparent attempt to humiliate and weaken her leadership. Across the Western world, female leaders are humbled and punished for the 'hubris' of leadership in a way that will be familiar to any woman who has tried their hand at authority in arenas dominated by men.

In each case, who is the prime cause of this humbling? An angry white man. It may come as a surprise but the Donald, Jeremy Corbyn and Christian Lindner have two things in common: they use charisma to marshal anger at traditional modes of leadership; and they are men in a role traditionally occupied by men.

This combination has proved immensely damaging to female leaders, alongside declining privileges for white male populations, rising inequality, polarisation on the causes of declining privilege and an outraged sense of economic unfairness. For some portions of the electorate, whether consciously or unconsciously, it's a counter-revolt against the fruits of the feminist advance that has taken place since the 1960s.

Many perceived weaknesses of May (much as I dislike her e.g. for, among other things, her anti-immigrant values) and Clinton are amplified by a sense that they neither fit the iron lady role of past Anglo-Saxon female leaders nor the caring humane role traditionally desired in women; and that in walking the tightrope of a public persona they lack the charisma of their male opponents.

But I think it goes deeper than that to activity going on in the prefrontal cortex. Male privileges over female do not exist just in the human kingdom, but also in the kingdom of the great apes - and particularly our nearest ancestors, the chimpanzees. (I highly recommend Jane to everyone reading this; an astonishing film if you don't know the Jane Goodall story.) In the book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson show how male chimpanzees engage in intra-group hierarchical violence, violence against females and extra-group murdering raids. The most senior women rank below the least senior men. And just as in human beings, their behaviour is influenced by both logic and prefrontal cortex-mediated emotion.

So when many of us in the electorate are feeling emotional and want to pin the blame on others for things not going our way, naturally we point at the women at the top, unnaturally usurping traditional male authority. Sometimes they've got to power due to intra-group violence in the males of their party - witness May's easy path to power following the Johnson-Gove fiasco. And since the election in June this year, May has increasingly become a shield for the men advancing Brexit. She takes the flack so they don't get hit.

Why have these angry white men returned? 
1. The credit crunch, austerity, intra-EU tensions caused by state debt crises, and a general sense of malaise at the uneven gains of the past decade have all created a huge amount of anger. All of these issues seem to be caused by some remote logic, which makes sense enough to the technocratic governing classes, but little sense to the man in the street. Canny political actors have channeled this anger against the status quo.

2. Angry men are much more enchanting than angry women to the public at large. Angry men have figured out what's wrong with the big picture and they will forge a new path forward round the traditional thinking that sidesteps the technocracy seemingly at root of the malaise. Angry women are emotional and volatile and shouldn't be selected as leaders. Or so perception dictates. When sensible pragmatic, yet mutter Merkel becomes too much of a mutter and opens the border to immigrants, that's a step too far in caringness and must be stopped.

3. The internet has led to polarisation and media segmentation. The herd reactions, so brilliantly, sickeningly observed by Burke, are much easier to manipulate with micro-targeting. It shows in instant media online exactly who you should be angry with and who against. Stirring videos show the glorious angry white man in all his silverback glory telling it like it is; while the woman (excluding Merkel) robotically repeats worn political cliches that allow her to pass in the political sphere without being labelled emotional. And this polarisation plays both to the angry men of the radical left (Corbyn), right (Trump, Farage, AfD, Davis) and centre (Macron).

4. Traditional white male privileges are perceived as threatened. In the US, Trump says the threat is China, Mexico, North Korea - it's the yellow men, the olive men, the brown men. In the UK, it's nostalgia for the days of economic imperialism laissez-faireism when Britannia ruled the waves and never never never shall be slaves. In Germany, UK and the US it's the immigrants stupid. And this threat to the white order has parallels with threats to the masculinist order, parallels that tend to be exploited by the angry white men.

So when will we next see the political ladies in the ascendant? Not for a good long while, I'd guess, though Merkel may pull off the unexpected in the next few months. The political world of 2017 looks more like me and I'm angry about it.

Fragments of Feeling

A married friend, whose husband had months before asked for their divorce, once told me that she had never felt a sense of intimacy with him. But she still loved him.

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Is it wrong to write about someone else's feelings? I don't know.

-Feelings are real, her words.

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From encounters, I have learned that other cultures have a different dynamics of emotion from my own. An example at the broader level: shame is more prominent than guilt as an emotional driver in many Japanese cultures. But even entering the space of another family, one can feel sometimes the push and pull of repeated emotional positions, forces that have shaped the personalities of the family for years.

This is most evidently true for the very young, who depend day-by-day on their parent's or carer's favour. Each of us is born with some emotions more than others; but the particular emotions we have are shaped interpersonally.

If I write of someone else's feelings, I also write about how other's feelings have shaped myself and how my feelings have shaped others.

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I encountered a Czech couple in a hostel in Budapest once.

After a brief discussion with the Czech man, his partner said "I thought you weren't going to speak English on this trip." I had violated an unspoken rule.

I can't remember the context, but ironically I was telling him about Wordsworth - how in The Prelude, Wordsworth had been alienated by the city state and saw reconnecting with nature as the means to heal the violations of reason, and in particular, the kind of city violence unleashed by the French Revolution. This violence had caused a severe crisis in Wordsworth's personal life.

The Czech man replied that there were few such refuges, far from the urbanised world, in Europe anymore.

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I love cities. When I was young, I could not connect with Seamus Heaney and other nature poets I associated with the dominant poetic style of the 1990s. I have changed; but when the English countryside votes Brexit, tears rise in my heart.

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I don't know if I have ever met a person who accepts everyone. There are lines that cannot be crossed. 

If this is true for everyone, then we can say that each of us operates an unspoken set of rules. We have personal laws. We become angry or panic or react negatively when our laws are broken. 

Emily wanted a fairly predictable life. This summer I couldn't, or didn't, offer it to her.

Foolishly I presumed she would put up with the volatility.

Of the powers outside our control, there were three chief catalysts: the weather, my work and a seething anti-immigrant popular mood. May and June were the most miserable months of the year, weather-wise. My room flooded five times. My work hours went up and down like a yo-yo (mostly they were up). Then Brexit, and the appointment of Theresa May by default, our least favourite politician whose immigration policies had mostly kept us apart for more than ten months.

There were other big problems too, but I would rather not get into them. Suffice to say, the story I had been telling her and she had been telling herself about how moving to London would be better for her manifestly broke down when confronted with reality (a reality that could hardly be more badly timed).

I kept trying to make Emily happier, despite what was going wrong, by doing fun things on the weekend, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. But in doing so, I kept falling behind on practical decisions - wedding-related, or other aspects of personal life. And in between all this, I lost sight of the intimate side of our relationship, the world between us that had kept us together for five years.

That was the most frightening thing  - the sense that the various pressures around me had removed an essential part of myself, and which Emily would at one point confirm was the person she had fallen in love with. Then in July the most frightening thing was the breakup of our relationship.

Emily was faced with moving away from her country, her friends and her family. That's a lot of emotional bonds, and in retrospect I completely ignored this huge part of her emotional reality. I reasoned she was an intelligent woman who had made an intelligent decision and was blind to the fact that she was losing a lot of what made her feel great.

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Love needs vision to succeed.

A lover needs to recognise their lover's emotional realities, and even maintain some of their lover's fictions, or lose the loving bond. A marriage is no mere contract; a good husband or wife keeps their spouse's love in play and prioritises their lover's emotions. And, in different ways, I and Emily gave up before we got there.

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I came to emphasise in my mind that human beings have emotional realities, not easily sensible from their physical selves, while tutoring Keats' narrative poems. Keats plays tricks with both his characters and his reader's emotions in such a way as to reveal 

how the emotional reality of a person can be massively at variance with how physically they appear or seem; 

how interdependent our perceptions are with our emotions; and 

how manipulable our emotions and perceptions are. 

For our emotions are full of fictions - even, perhaps especially, the person who considers themself a 'realist'.

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The memory of Emily's love is falling away now. Mostly the past six months have been kind to me - family and friends gathered to support me, a few weeks after our breakup I went on a delightful holiday, then came back and joined a team at work that I greatly enjoy working with, I've been to lots of fun events - parties, gigs, plays, etc.

When I remember the source of my loneliness, it can bring sudden pangs of grief, but these seem to happen less and less now. I'm writing this piece partly so that I have something to look back at, to remember not to forget next time: -  that I only see fragments of feelings in others, which especially needs to be remembered for those I are most close to.

I feel ready to move on.

Family History 7: The Windmill

To be human is to be creative. Every day we must actively engage with a reality recalcitrant to our dreams and desires. Reconciling reality with our desires requires imagination and effort. Furthermore we must deal with others whose dreams may find the reality of your actions and opinions inconvenient.

The most celebrated embodiment of this contradiction in Western literature is Don Quixote, the knight of La Mancha who decided to imagine his reality as if it were his dream chivalric vision. [I confess to having only read a few passages.] Most famously, he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants.

For most of us this is just comic entertainment, just part of our European mental furniture about idealism and reality. But for some, this stirs greater imaginative feats… as it did for my grandfather (my dad’s father). In his book, The Long Winding Path, he wrote:

“One day he came across the biography of Miguel de Cervantes and on the front page of the book was a windmill.  Well, thought the boy, maybe the ironic windmill, of Don Quixote, can be put to such practical use as the production of electricity for such down to earth purposes as the lighting of homes and streets and making industrial production.  He discussed his ideas with his tutor, the engineer, and they came to the conclusion that the only way to demonstrate the idea was for the boy to put it all on paper, both in memoranda as well as in the design of the windmill, with detailed drawings.  The engineer promised to check both and voice his frank criticism as well as, if merited, his approval.  The project however, should be entirely the boy’s – from concept to execution, first on paper and, if possible later in erection of at least one such windmill.  They went into the project with the enthusiasm that the young possess. He wrote feverishly the memorandum based on climatic and meteorological data he found in that well stocked library.  This data was not too extensive.  In the Land of Israel, just recently taken over by the British, their predecessors hardly kept any such information.  Next, he went into the design of his windmill.  He has never done anything of this sort.  He therefore, did what actually amounted to pencil sketches, at first of what he conceived as the main parts and then the windmill as a whole.  When he was done, he showed it to his friend, the engineer, who examined it very carefully.  “Well”, he said, “this will not pass an engineering test, but it has all the elements for working drawings and for erection instruction” and he looked with admiring amusement at this fourteen year old.  “I suggest that you now show it to our new neighbour, the one on the other side of your plot.  He is a high school Principal and he may have some comments of his own”.”

In my imagination, what happens next is that the high school Principal encourages my grandfather to actually build the windmill, and they do. But when I return to the text, I realize that my imagination has erred,       - though what really happens is just as revolutionary for my family’s fortunes as if the windmill had been built.

Having shown his plans to the Principal, the Principal decides to take my grandfather out of agricultural school (he works on a farm with my great-grandmother; his father having died 5 years or more earlier in Alexandria). He offers my grandfather a full scholarship, as the school is far beyond my family’s means. My grandfather goes to the Principal’s Commercial high school where he receives a much better education. This education prepares my grandfather with the practical skills he would use throughout the varied entrepreneurial ventures that he would later undertake. Thus a better education radically improves his prospects.

The critic in me sees another important theme emerging in this passage. On the one hand, I see the emergent interest in engineering, electricity and power generation. Slightly earlier he writes

“And then he came across works on electricity.  He couldn’t comprehend it all…. after a couple of months he knew enough [from talking with his engineer neighbor] to imagine something about electricity and electric motors In the course of these discussions, he discovered the fact of the “prevailing winds” and their constancy, and he concluded that these winds, very reliable in that country, could be harnessed to create electricity if only a method could be adopted.  These thoughts kept at him constantly.”

After high school he would work for the Electric Power Corporation as a trainee to “help plan and construct electric power facilities.” Later in life, he would own and run a factory that produced the batteries that powered aircraft.

On the other hand, I see his interest in climate and meteorology – the invisible forces that govern the air around us. During the Second World War, he would fly aircraft to help the US government work out the weather when undertaking air missions.

Both of these powerful, seen-at-second-hand forces – electricity and air movements – would thus shape his life. He could merge the palpable and the impalpable to generate practical, tangible projects; make the visible from the invisible; and imagine some of the practical and yet historical forces necessary to make his family’s desire for a Zion in British Palestine a reality.

But his life was also littered with failures – from failing to secure funds in the US for a navy for the Haganah in his late teens/early twenties; to losing his entire business on a promise given by an Israeli minister; to filing for bankruptcy on a later entrepreneurial project involving construction late on in his life.

Part 3 to come – the windmill- the boom and bust of the risk-taker, the spinning fortunes of the ambitious; the cycles of family history.

“I have no reason to live” said David one Saturday afternoon when they met on the beach.  “Well, ‘create’ a reason” said the boy.  “You must aim for the ‘impossible’ and you make it possible.  That will give you reason to live until the end of your days”.

Love in the Stars

The Chilean desert is one of the best places in the world to view the stars. From there you can see not only the rings of Saturn (using a good telescope), but also Andromeda - the galaxy closest to the Milky Way. This is only possible in the Southern Hemisphere.
    Viewing these spaces, you contemplate the hundreds of billions of stars that make up each galaxy, and our infinitesimal place within the universe. ‘Really, we are nothing’ said my guide to the local landscape the Lunar Valley, ‘Maybe as a whole, as the human race we are something; but as individuals we do not amount to much.’
    His comments related both to the stars and to the hundreds of millions of years it took to forge the grand rock formations that were the subject of his tour. Everything about this region suggests a scale that surpasses human understanding. ‘To the Andean people who lived here before the Spaniards came, this landscape was not very important, it was just where they lived.’ Here too is scale.
    Five centuries have passed and while the unique cunza language of the former locals has gone (all but a few words, and no understanding of the grammar), a few forms of non-spoken language have persisted. The grandparents still perform rituals that have been going on for centuries. At the beginning of spring, at Pachamama festival, they and their children direct their energies to mother earth so that the earth will work with them for a good harvest (yes there are crops in the region). Yes, from a scientific perspective it is pointless, but from a human perspective it is not without worth - it honors a continuity with their ancestors, and it renews the relationship which each of us has with the ground beneath our feet.
    My guide was complaining that the next generation were watching the same cartoons as everyone else in the world (when I visited the supposedly isolated village of Iruya in Northwest Argentina, a cafe was showing the Simpsons). The rituals were appearing in their textbooks and they showed little interest in keeping with them. The past was becoming another story like the one I have been telling you.
    (TV and the internet are far more stimulating. Why are you reading this?)
    Tourists like myself come away with a different story - did you know that southern Bolivia, northwest Argentina, the Atacama desert are rich with a concentrated diversity of fabulous landscapes? Our eyes feast on the light of the sun as it shimmers across the rainbow-colored mountains, salt lakes, subtropical forests, sand dunes, etc, etc. We want to have our cake and eat it - see the place but also hope that the locals retain their traditions. We embody the millennia-old tension between continuity and advancement.
    Is it an advance that so many people appreciate this landscape in a way the locals did not notice? In New Zealand I was told by many - you get used to it and you don’t notice the beauty anymore. New Zealand is working hard to restore the ecology of its fjord lands and its mountain peaks (a sign on Ben Lomond asked visitors to forcibly tear out any wilding trees that they saw shooting up - they’re a European invader) and also selling jet-fuelled adventures up glaciers (‘It’ll be the highlight of your trip.’) Everywhere, everywhere I travelled I saw this contradiction.
    What you really learn from traveling through five continents in five weeks is:
    a) There’s always more to see.
    b) You’re a tiny fleck in the vast sea of humanity.

But a) and b) are hard to reconcile. The children want more Simpsons, more Spongebob, the elders and the nostalgist visitors want to retain the uniqueness of different locales on our planet. ‘They’re destroying what makes people want to come to their region in the first place’ (one fellow traveller told me about south-east Asia). One traveller to another: ’Did you get to Lombok? I didn’t like Bali either - too crowded with tourists - but Lombok was really something.’ Me, overhearing: ‘Isn’t this happening the world over? The place that was good to visit becomes overrun, like gentrification in the cities’ ‘Yes, and trip advisor is making it worse’ ‘It’s accelerating.’
    Unlike the stars which retain their distance, and are governed by unchangeable laws, we are constantly changing our path, following the feedback loop left by guides and other tourists to improve our experience, and rewriting our story to make it better. We tend to think of our selves as the epicenter of our universe with the lives of others appearing as a constellation around our own.
    For many of us, changes to this constellation are an inherent feature of modern life. Long gone are the days when we lived in a persistent community living out the same rituals and habits year after year, under the same stars.  Instead we tend to anchor our lives in love - the aspiration to form a binary star with another person whose mutual orbit with one’s self will become the stable centre of a family. This will in turn become the basis of future generations.    
    Thus, through love, we become a little bit more than nothing; we become a little bit closer to the permanence of the stars.

It’s important that future generations keep an eye on the stars - that the word does not just degenerate to associations with celebrities and ratings. Though we no longer navigate by the stars, they help us gain perspective on our little place in the universe.