Trinity iThink 2021

iThink 2021 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

RELIGIOUS STUDIES DEPARTMENT

Contents Editor’s Foreword – page 2 ‘Monuments’ by Barnaby Corry – page 4 ‘Does the theory of 'The veil of ignorance' help solve injustice in society?’ by David Aisa Miller – page 6 ‘An evaluation of the United States Electoral College’ by Jack Byatt – page 11 ‘Banning face coverings: far-right, Islamophobic oppression or a step towards liberation and equality?’ by Henry Bishop – page 17 ‘The Political Philosophy and Person of Noam Chomsky’ by Oscar Clarke –

page 20 ‘Hannah Arendt & the Banality of Evil’ by Joe Greenway – page 22 ‘Jesus: accidental, incidental or purposeful feminist?’ by Mrs Beresford-Miller –

page 25 ‘The United States of Europe: why the EU should federalise’ by Ruari Gannon – page 28 ‘Liberalism, Autocracy and Meritocracy’ by Finn Evans – page 30 ‘Zizek: A call to arms for the left?’ by Lukas Cobb – page 36 ‘Interview with Alejandro Bendaña’ by David Aisa Miller – page 38 ‘A review of the philosophical foundations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ by Ben de Sousa – page 46 ‘Is the Democratic Peace Theory still a viable theory in global politics?’ by Nathan Concagh – page 49 ‘Social Contract Theory’ by Ben Wilding, Luca Wade and Lucas Ferrar– page

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Foreword Political philosophy is a branch of philosophy that is concerned, at the most abstract level, with the concepts and arguments involved in political opinion. The meaning of the term ‘political’ is itself one of the major problems of political philosophy. Broadly, however, one may characterize as political all those practices and institutions that are concerned with government.

You may ask, “How is philosophy related to politics?”. Well, philosophy provides to political science - knowledge of ideal human behaviour, political values, good and bad in political theory, right and wrong laws, policies and governmental decisions and theory of ideal socio-political institutions.

This year has seen a lot of activity in the domain of politics. From the horrors of Trump’s presidency to Biden’s inauguration, from the death of George Floyd to the Black Lives’ Matter protests and the pulling down of statues - turmoil and unrest has been at the heart of recent headlines.

This magazine aims to provide an assorted array of articles from students concerning issues spanning from French secularism to philosophical enquiries into human rights, from the destruction of monuments to the banality of evil.

We hope you enjoy reading.

The Editorial Team Luca Wade (U6TJD) Nathan Concagh (U6TJD) Lucas Ferrar (U6HPP) Lukas Cobb (U6RMH) Thank you to….

Ben de Sousa, Henry Bishop, Barnaby Corry, Ruari Gannon, David Aisa Miller, Finn Evans, Oscar Clarke, Joe Greenway, Ben Wilding and Mrs Beresford Miller… for your contributions to this year’s edition of iThink.

Additional thanks to Mrs Beresford-Miller and Mr Smith for support.

Please note that all images used in this publication are public domain/are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Credit can be given on request to the editors of this publication.

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Barnaby Corry – Monuments Barnaby analyses the contention and solutions regarding archetypal statues On the 7th of June 2020, during the global Black Lives Matter movement that followed the killing of George Floyd in the United States, a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was torn down by protesters. In the 17th Century Edward Colston trafficked around 80,000 African men, women and children to America. The tearing down of this statue was a symbolic moment for the Black Lives Matter movement, both in the UK and all across the world. However, monuments with similar connotations to those of the statue of Edward Colston still exist all around the world.

These monuments are not necessarily united by one message of racism, sexism, homophobia, or the like.

Rather, these monuments are all linked by one underlying theme: symbolic humiliation. Symbolic humiliation is one of the three types of humiliation defined by Christian A portrait of Colston from the Neuhäuser, with the other two types being direct 1680s humiliation, and representative humiliation. Neuhäuser argues that symbolic humiliation occurs when a symbol of a group is defiled, and this defiling ‘is connected to past humiliations or the threat of present humiliations.’ Furthermore, if members of that group are faced with less concern than others by virtue of belonging to that group, because of the defiling of their symbol, or by the precedence of another opposing, exclusionary symbol, then symbolic humiliation is again occurring.

This therefore begs the question: what is to be done with symbolically humiliating monuments?

The answer is undoubtedly subjective, but a few good solutions present themselves. The first of these is to leave all monuments untouched. I believe that the condonement of public monuments that symbolically humiliate groups or individuals is normatively incompatible with an egalitarian liberal democracy, which the UK considers itself to be, given the nature of humiliation. However, a case may be made for leaving all monuments as they are, in that, were we to recognise the problematic nature of these monuments, we could come to terms with the past and ensure that the same atrocities are never repeated. This is the German idea of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung,’ - or the coping with or coming to terms with the past - the adoption of this idea by German people has led to a healthier flourishing version of Germany today. Examples of this can be seen directly in the military, where German soldiers can disobey any order that they deem to be unethical. The problem with this solution is that it can be considered to be too optimistic. Monuments with the purpose of having people understand and learn from the past can never be displayed in public because of the symbolic nature of a statue. The design of a statue is such that it is raised on a

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pedestal for all to see, and by the virtue of being on a pedestal, the implication of prestige is unavoidable. The statue, therefore, is seen in an incorrect light, being glorified rather than rejected.

The idea of learning from the past, however, can be preserved by showing troubling monuments in museums. By altering the context through which we see symbolically humiliating monuments, we can afford an atmosphere of understanding and learning rather than humiliation. Of course, monuments must be presented in a way that is unbiased, and safe for display, but even so, the purpose of museums as a way of learning about the past goes a long way in removing the humiliation from the monuments while still maintaining their message.

The final solution that I will address is that of destroying these monuments. Many argue that the pain and history carried by these monuments is so agonizing that the best solution is one of destruction. By wiping these figures from the world, the history of atrocity that comes with them will be wiped away too. However, I believe that in doing this, a necessary educational opportunity will be lost. Even today in the UK, we still have not come to terms with our history of atrocity; something that we must do. At one point in time, the British Empire covered 25% of the world’s land surface, and with expansionism comes bloodshed, exploitation and torture. It is not an understatement to say that the British economy, our economy, was built on the exploitation of others, but many of us have not yet reconciled and understood this past. Many people berate Germany for their history with the Nazis whilst they remain oblivious to the atrocities performed by the British Empire. An argument can be made for the razing of all humiliating monuments, and for our learning and reconciliation with the past to come from history books, but I believe that this learning would be far more personal, and have far more of a profound impact if we understand that these actions and figures of the past were once revered, which ultimately cannot happen with the destruction of these monuments.

The nature of problems of philosophy is such that there is no answer, but I believe that, whatever the answer to this problem is, the sentiment of Vergangenheitsbewältigung should be in the forefront of our reflection. Monuments like these can be very dangerous and damaging, but if they are treated correctly, they can provide an invaluable opportunity for growth.

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David Aisa Miller -

Does the theory of 'The veil of ignorance' help solve injustice in society?

David discusses the modern liberal theory and its possible application in the modern world John Rawls is a 20th Century American Philosopher who identified what truly might be unfair in society and how we might gather support for fixing society. He lived through many injustices himself like poverty in the Great Depression, the horrors of World War Two in the Pacific and the spread of cruel diseases, one of which killed his own brother. However, he did think that through the power of ideas he could fight injustice in the world.

In 1971 he published a book titled ‘A theory of justice.’ This book is what attracted so many people to him and Bill Clinton once called him the greatest political philosopher of the Century.

The book tells us firstly that things as they are now are patently unfair. Illusions, like the American Dream, were merely a clever political sleight of hand designed so that the powerful did not have to undertake the necessary task of reforming society from top to bottom. He wanted to show people how society was unfair and what they could do about it. He claimed that those who benefit from current injustice are spared the need to think too hard about what it would have been like to be born in different circumstances. To tackle this problem, he came up with the theory of: ‘The veil of ignorance.’ He asked us to imagine you were in a conscious intelligent state before your own birth but without any knowledge of what circumstances you were going to be born into, and therefore your future was shrouded by a veil of ignorance. You wouldn’t know anything about your future life like whether you would have a good education or have a good health care system or even if you would have housing. If we knew nothing about where we’d end up, would we feel safe to enter the society we live in today. This makes us focus on the injustices in society like poverty and inequality. Would you gamble your life now with the society we have?

Although this seems like a great risk, we already know what needs to be fixed. Any participant of the theory would want a society with good schools, good hospitals, a trustworthy government, fair access to the law and decent housing for everyone. We know what sort of society we want to live in, but we haven’t focused enough until now because the choices have already been made for us. The way we can solve our problems is by asking this simple question: How would I feel about this issue if I were stuck behind the veil of ignorance? Lots of us would have different issues we would want to change because we all live in different contexts but ultimately, we would all work towards the goal of being able not to mind if we born behind a veil of ignorance. The fact we can't do it now is a measure of how deeply unfair things remain and therefore how much we have yet to achieve but because of John Rawls we now have the theory and the opportunity to take more steps in the right direction.

I believe that 'The veil of ignorance' does not help solve the injustice in society for several reasons. One of my strongest arguments is that because it is just a theory it doesn’t require 6

anyone to take any action therefore it will have no real effect on the future of society and the current or subsequent injustices as demonstrated by the fact that the theory was first published in 1971 and the world remains a very unjust place. Theories are defined as a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained. Because their only intent is to explain the ‘problem’ and not actually demand any action or change their effect can be very minimal. One important consequence of this is people who don’t struggle in society with issues like poverty or inequality, such as the wealthy, will ignore it because they will not be motivated to act as their personal situation is fine. To add to this of the people in the government, who are the ones who have the potential power to reform society and eradicate the injustices we all see, are often the ones who are in fact wealthy themselves and thus will not be motivated to act as their personal situation is stable. A factual piece of evidence to prove this is when a Facebook post declared that 50 percent of members of Congress are millionaires, compared with only 1 percent of Americans as a whole.

Unlike many statements on Facebook, this one was truthful, and a key analysis portrayed that close to half of House and Senate members are millionaires.

Moving on, although many people will take their time and think about the theory and how it applies to them personally, the theory doesn’t in fact give any advice on how to change the situation. It only tries to show you a neutral perspective. Once you can see society like this it doesn’t tell you what to do which obviously doesn’t improve or help change the injustices in society. Moreover, most people who have the resources or the intelligence to fix these problems after seeing society behind the 'The veil of ignorance' won’t do anything because either they don’t need to because they are safe themselves or there are too many people against them.

One final point that I would like to make is that if it was real and the theory was put in place in society tomorrow, for example you were taken from your parents when you were born and given to a different random family in a random place then people would feel more inclined to act. But because this is evidently not the case and it is simply a theory that most people haven’t even heard of, not even me before a few weeks ago, the change we need or want will never really come because not enough people are in the situation where they desperately want change and these people who do want it are generally not in a place of power where their voice can be heard.

The World Bank recently confirmed on the 16th of October in 2020 that 9.2% of the world, or 689 million people, live in extreme poverty on $1.90 or less a day. Because of this, the reality of change is more of a dream than ever before.

On the other hand, I can see why some people might believe that 'The veil of ignorance' does help solve the injustice in society because it allows people to see society from a neutral perspective and be unbiased to all issues. This is the main reason why John Rawls thinks that 'The veil of ignorance' can help solve the injustice in society. Everyone in the world lives in their own unique situation with their own unique circumstances: different levels of income, different types of health services, different levels of education, different levels of housing, different levels of security and much, much more. Although this is good because it makes everyone special and

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unique it does make it very difficult to understand what life is like for someone other than yourself because you don’t know what their situation is or circumstances. Furthermore, your situation and circumstances can be what makes you, you. For example, if you were born in a position of wealth then it would be likely that you wouldn’t know or have to deal with problems of poverty or injustice. This could make you believe that the world is in fact a very nice and just place. Oppositely, if you were born in rural Nigeria then you probably have to deal with problems of poverty or injustice all the time. This could make you believe that the world is in fact a horrible place filled with cruelty. However, as mentioned before 'The veil of ignorance' allows people to see society from a neutral perspective and be unbiased to all issues because you haven’t been born yet and don’t know what your situation or circumstances will be. This helps solve the injustice in society because it urges you to make everywhere you could be born a place you wouldn’t mind going.

A counter point to the fact that people won’t act now because it won’t affect them personally is that what they could do has the possibility of affecting future generations. For example, someone might say that if they give money to a homeless woman it won’t help them. However, that homeless woman could use that money to buy a phone, get a job from the phone, find a husband at work, have a child with him and then that child might one day help out the person who first gave the money to the homeless woman. People who believe that if you do an act of kindness it will always come back to you might use 'The veil of ignorance' as a way to find what to fight for in society and where the most help is needed. Even if people don’t believe that it will help solve all the injustice in society, they can still use the theory as a way to find what are the worst things in society and what they can personally do to make their difference.

Another way you can look at this is we have a moral responsibility to make society as just and fair as possible and if this can be done by using the 'The veil of ignorance' then we should use this theory. The reason I think we have a responsibility to do this is because of several factors however the most important is that we have the resources and the opportunity to do so. If we can do something great and amazing for everyone then we should do it or at least try to. A famous quote that describes this situation by Winston Churchill is, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” If we have the intelligence to do so, we must do so. In my opinion, there is no harm in trying to make the world a better place.

Although it may not force you to act, once people can see the world behind 'The veil of ignorance' it should encourage them to feel empathy for others who are less fortunate than themselves.

Empathy that very well could lead to action that very well could lead to solving the injustice in society. Some Christians might also argue that we are stewards to God’s creation and thus have a religious obligation to protect and reform the environment which includes society.

The final point to consider about ‘The veil of ignorance' is that it can help to solve the injustice in society is that it is a great motivator to move to action and apply change in the world. There have been many large societal changes in the world that have all started with a single thought or an empowering speech that has then gone on to inspire generations to take action and solve a

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certain issue. The most famous and important example of a speech for me is the 'I Have A Dream' speech. "I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. It led to millions peacefully protesting demanding for their rights and for injustices like inequality to be abolished. The reason this relates to the ‘The veil of ignorance' is because Dr King at the March on Washington for Jobs although it may only be a theory that only and Freedom, August 28th, 1963 a few people hear about, it could well be enough to start the task of solving the injustice. Martin Luther King Jr also once said that, “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” This quote demonstrates how even the smallest things can help and you must always try. 'The veil of ignorance' does help solve the injustice in society because it is the only way we can solve the injustice in society, and we have to solve the injustice in society.

Overall, I believe that the 'The veil of ignorance' does not help solve the injustice in society because the theory is flawed on the grounds that you can never be neutral and look at issues from an unbiased perspective considering we all have our own personal opinions and experiences. In the theory, John Rawls, as mentioned in the first paragraph, wants us to imagine that we were in a conscious intelligent state before our own birth but without any knowledge of what circumstances you were going to be born into and therefore your future is shrouded by a veil of ignorance. The reason he wants us to be blind to our future is so that we take into consideration all of the possible places we could go, places that might experience things we ourselves might never have heard of or simply don’t want to experience because we think they are horrible or unpleasant. It is basically impossible to imagine you being in a conscious intelligent state before your own birth with no opinions. This is because we already have our own opinions and beliefs right now that have been created from this life, we are living now which can’t be ignored as we are trying to imagine this theory. Therefore, whatever we might try and think, is pointless because it has to be biased as we aren’t actually in a conscious intelligent state before our own birth with no opinions.

In addition, there is also no reason to think about what ‘I would do’ because it won’t affect what ‘I will do.’ Some theories including this one are based on hypothetical situations like in this case you being in a conscious intelligent state before your own birth. Therefore, if it is a hypothetical 9

theory then surely the results or the consequences of the theory can only be hypothetical and not real. If hypothetically I thought about what the world would be like in 50 years, I wouldn't start building a bunker or start stock piling food. Humans have evolved to survive in the present not the future or in hypothetical situations. It is often hard to think ahead. A real-world example would be how the future problem that will affect all of us and is affecting some of us now is climate change but most of our focus last year in 2020 changed to the Corona Virus which was/is the present. Can we solve the injustice in society by thinking about something we will do because of this new hypothetical perspective?

A similar argument to this is that some people, often the people who are well off now, might just decide that they don’t care about the future and only about themselves which is in the present.

They might be self-centered around themselves and to look ahead and to be sustainable might be too much for them. Some people might think that although the human existence will last for another hundred years, we’re not obliged to help people who don’t yet exist in the same way as we’re obliged to help people alive right now. Let's say you consider the following choice: is it better to cure one person who’s 60 years old of cancer and allow them to live to 80, or to bring one new person into existence who will live a good life for 80 years? Most people think we should help the 60-year-old, even though the new person gains four times as much good life. This proves that people are often very focused on the present so again we must ask: Can we solve the injustice in society by thinking about something that won’t affect us now but might affect someone else, not us, in the future?

Lastly, when John Rawls asks us to imagine that you were in a conscious intelligent state before your own birth but without any knowledge of what circumstances you were going to be born into, he assumes that because we are still in a ‘intelligent state’ we know what we would fix.

Most people I would say, looking through my own personal singular perspective, would want to focus on fixing the worlds' biggest overall problems which are according to The Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank that researches the smartest solutions to global issues, who organized a panel of five distinguished economists in 2012 to set priorities for fighting the 10 top problems in the world that can be solved are: armed conflict, chronic disease, education, infectious diseases, population growth, biodiversity, climate change, hunger and malnutrition.

However, because we only know the general problems or injustices like the ones mentioned and our own personal problems it means that that everyone else’s personal problems that we don’t know about won’t be included in our list so it means that the ‘The veil of ignorance’ can’t solve all of the injustices in society unless we allow everyone to express their own problems so that all the injustices are covered. For example, some people might assume that rich people don’t go through any injustices because they can solve all their problems with money but problems like mental health and other issues can’t be solved with money so that might not be included on the ‘list’ of injustices. This one example conveys how it would be impossible to create a list’ of all the injustices in society as society itself has been designed so that it is extremely hard to hear everyone’s individual voices.

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In conclusion, I believe that 'The veil of ignorance' only partially helps solve the injustice in society because: it us just a theory so it doesn’t force anyone to do anything; it only helps to think about the injustice not actually do anything about it because it is not real meaning, there are no real consequences or actions; you can never be neutral and look at issues from an unbiased perspective because we all have our own personal opinions and experiences; people have hidden injustices that wouldn’t be heard by others; there is no reason to think about what 'I would do’ because it won’t affect what ‘I will do’ and finally some people just don’t care about the future and only about the present. In spite of this it does, as I say, partially help solve the injustice in society because: it allows people to see society from a somewhat neutral perspective and be somewhat unbiased to all issues, it gives us a way of being responsible and finally the theory is a great motivator to move to action and apply change in the world. To add more uncertainty, this essay is also not as helpful as it could be because it has not been written behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ itself and consequently is based on my own biased opinion meaning that the conclusion I have come to is solely based on my situation and doesn’t include everyone else's’ view so when evaluating my thought process keep in mind that this is only my opinion, and everyone has their own opinion. I would like to finally add that I hope one day we are able to find the right way that helps solve the injustice in society.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail.

Jack Byatt – An evaluation of the United States Electoral College Jack evaluates the US’s controversial electoral system and why it’s unlikely to change any time soon The 3rd of November 2020 (the constitutionally mandated Tuesday following the first Monday in November) saw 155,485,078 Americans1 cast their votes in a Presidential election shrouded in hitherto unseen controversy. Though determined the most secure Presidential election in American history2, the politically volcanic Trump administration came to its epitome in his frantic dismissal of the results as a ‘mountain of corruption [and] dishonesty’3. With the democracystraining election season behind us, and Warlord Biden given mandate following his January 20th 1

https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2020presgeresults.pdf https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinatingcouncil-election 3 https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/trump-tweets-election-fraud-conspiracy-instead-of-marking-veteransday/ar-BB1aULh2 2

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inauguration, the question of whether the newly appointed warlord would act on significant preelection calls for Electoral College reform became ever-more pressing.

Demand for a reform or abolishment of the Electoral College came in the election period from voices as such as Hilary Clinton4, as well as a growing pantheon of pressure groups: National Popular Vote and A Call to Reform are a popular selection. These appeals for change, more a renewed pressure from Trump’s original 2016 win over then-Democrat nominee Clinton, look to be growing in momentum after each election, thus making it seem only a matter of time until change to some degree is achieved for a system increasingly branded as anti-democratic and severely outdated.

The Electoral College system was established in the U.S. Constitution instead of electing the president by popular vote or Congress – it is a process, not an organisation or place, and summed up best by the U.S. Embassy: ‘Each state elects the number of representatives to the Electoral College that is equal to its number of Senators—two from each state—plus its number of delegates in the House of Representatives.’5 wherein the House of Representatives has a number of delegates proportional to the state’s population, determined by decennial censuses (ie California has 53 delegates, and Delaware has only one). The Electors are minor political officials, usually selected by local party branches or presidential nominees, and meet in December to cast their votes for the party they pledged to (though they do not have to cast their vote for any candidate, even if they have pledged to – though voting against a pledge is almost unheard of and often carries legal consequences). Almost all states decide on party’s electors through a popular vote, with a first-past-the-post system wherein all Electors will be for the party that wins the state-wide popular vote.

The political reasoning behind the college is ostensibly classically liberal, and, as with the Constitution as a whole, is built on federalist principles of devolving powers to states to limit the control of the centralised government upon the American people in order to protect them from governmental tyranny and grant them maximum liberty in their lives. It has the ideological throughline of the founding A map illustrating the electoral college of the of America: finding human beings United States, and the results of the 2020 election rational and capable of self-sufficiency and thus requiring government to provide such liberty through as little intervention as possible, 4

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1338548429753081868 https://uk.usembassy.gov/the-electoralcollege/#:~:text=As%20prescribed%20in%20the%20U.S.,popular%20vote%20or%20by%20Congress.

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or ‘negative freedom’ – put perhaps most concisely by Thoreau as ‘That government is best which governs least’.

The system, though antiquated, does provide equality for its states, a quality that would arguably erode with the establishment of direct, popular votes instead. American lawyer, judge and previous Elector Will Sellers delineates that: ‘A presidential campaign aimed at achieving a popular vote majority would completely ignore most states and focus, instead, on a few populous states containing the nation’s largest cities. This urban-centric strategy would silence the political voice of most regions of the country.’6 citing that a reform of the Electoral College would violate the principles of equality central to classical liberalism and thus reflected in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’. The minority voices of lower-populated states would be drowned out in a popular vote system - this, it is argued by defenders of the Electoral College, is the tyranny of the majority, or mob rule, feared by the Framers of the Constitution.

The term ‘tyranny of the majority’ whilst usually attributed to the American Founding Fathers, is best expressed by French 19th Century political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, in his 1835-’40 ‘Democracy in America’. It is essentially the democratic weakness of ‘the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority’7 oppressing and ‘trampling the rights of minorities’8 likened to that of despotism by J. S. Mill, in his 1859 ‘On Liberty’. The relevance here is that in a popular vote system, states with small, minority populations would be ignored for the majority of massed populi in cities by presidential nominees, making the minorities in rural states irrelevant to the President once in office. Simply put, would a President considering their re-election wish to advance the issues of the small minority, or the majority from whom they can extract more votes.

This system, it is argued, guarantees the need for a President to treat minorities fairly and consider smaller states through federalising electoral power.

The College is guarded earliest in The Federalist Papers of American Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, written as 85 newspaper-published articles under the collective pseudonym ‘Publius’ in 1787 and ‘88, to argue for the adoption of the U. S. Constitution. Federalist No. 68, by Hamilton postulates that the College defends against the ‘obstacle’ of ‘cabal, intrigue, and corruption’ against republicanism, and further that ‘the Executive should be independent for his continuance in office on all but the people themselves. He might otherwise be tempted to sacrifice his duty to his complaisance for those whose favor was necessary to the duration of his official consequence’.

Essentially, that the President is elected (indirectly) by the people and thus will not be biased towards anyone to whom he owes the ‘favor’ of election. Lastly, election by all the people 6 7

https://www.city-journal.org/in-defense-of-the-electoral-college Federalist No. 10, James Madison, 1787

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State and Local Politics: Institutions and Reform, Todd Donovan, Daniel A. Smith, Tracy Osborn, Christopher Z. Mooney, 2014

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ensures ‘The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications’. It is important to note that Hamilton was arguing this against contemporary suggestions for the election of the Executive to fall on Congress, and hence Hamilton’s argument here is that an election falling on the people ‘of the whole Union’ guarantees more scrutiny and hence a better-suited President.

Historian Allen C. Guelzo moreover defends the Electoral College system on the grounds that ‘Abolishing the Electoral College now might satisfy an irritated yearning for direct democracy, but it would also mean dismantling federalism. After that, there would be no sense in having a Senate (which, after all, represents the interests of the states),’9 and is supported by the Federalist No. 39 by James Madison, which established American republicanism as predicated on shared power between state-based and population-based government, with the election of the President a mixture of the two. A reform to popular vote, Guelzo argues, ‘would point toward doing away with the entire federal system’ of state power, arguably making the populace far less protected from governmental ‘legislative overreach’10.

On the contrary, however, critics of the Electoral College frame it as an antiquated relic - a ‘quadrennial running of the presidential obstacle course’11 for Yale University Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar, which stands not as a testament to incorruptible American federalism, but to the consistent obfuscation of democracy. After all, several elections – namely 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – have resulted in victories for presidents who did not win the popular vote. Amar goes on to argue that the College as an institution was preserved past its argued obsoletion in the 1800 ratification of the 12th Amendment for one reason: ’Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.’. To skew the vote in favour of slaveholding Southerners, the College was devised - a direct vote would exclude the 500,000 strong Southern slave population, whereas James Madison’s suggestion of the College, with slaves populations counted into the number of delegates (albeit at 3/5 the rate of free men), gave Southern states more electoral power and therefore ensured their powerful support for the Electoral College system, whilst ensuring slaves’ continued disenfranchisement.

Moreover, given the comparative populations of states and representatives, some smaller states votes are worth more than citizens’ votes in larger states - a Wyomingan has over three times the voting weight of a Californian12, which violates the democratic principle of ’one man, one vote’. Although defenders of the College are quick to point out that nowhere in the Constitution is ’one man, one vote’ enshrined, it is codified though the 1964 Supreme Court Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, wherein the Court ruled that the electoral districts of state legislative chambers 9

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/in-defense-of-the-electoral-college Federalist No. 39, James Madison 1787 11 https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/ 12 https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade.2010.html 10

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must be approximately equal in population – and hence formulated ’one man, one vote’ as American legal precedent, thus granting the argument from inequality of votes credence. 'One man, one vote’ is fundamental as a principle to the classic liberal value of equality between all men, demonstrating that reform for the Electoral Colleges lies, and is justified in the ideological grounds upon which it was built.

This inequality in voting weight furthermore challenges democracy through its use with a ‘firstpast-the-post' or ‘winner-takes-all' system – Lynda Hall for Lone Star College13 uses a study’s14 example of Ronald Reagan.

‘If Reagan can obtain 40,000 votes in Louisiana or 20,000 votes in Illinois, he should campaign in Louisiana. Yet Louisiana only carries 10 electoral votes whereas Illinois is allowed 26 electoral votes. In this instance, 20,000 votes are more important than 40,000 votes.’

It is clear why many Presidential campaigns focus almost entirely on the electorate of select few swing states, and hence owe the aforementioned ‘favor’ of election not to the American people as a whole body, but to the often very select few who tipped the state in their favour. Of course, with a winner-takes-all system, a candidate could win 51% of California’s votes and receive all 55 Electoral College votes – this is the system used by all US states bar Nebraska and Maine, who adopted since 1992 and 1972 respectively a congressional district appointment of one electoral vote, rather than have all three dictated by popular first-past-the-post voting.

One of Guelzo’s most desperate arguments for the Electoral College is simply that: ‘Ridding ourselves of the Electoral College would not automatically install a national popular vote for the presidency; that would require a highly complicated constitutional amendment specifying comprehensive details for casting such a national vote, and might even trigger calls for a complete rewriting of the Constitution by convention. Simply doing away with the existing process without putting a new one in its place could create the biggest political crisis in American history since the Civil War.’ Essentially, it is too complicated and difficult a process to succeed. This is a very poor argument: in 1968 replacement of the College with a National Popular Vote had bipartisan Congressional support, as well as 80% of the public15. The change was thwarted only by segregationist Southerners, who feared a National Popular Vote would challenge their dominance over Black voters. They filibustered the Amendment, blocking any debate or potential passing of the legislation, until it was abandoned in 1970.

In overall conclusion, it is obvious that the Electoral College is severely outmoded and unfit for purpose, in dire need of reform. I find most attractive proposals to tackle the most corrupt 13

https://www.lonestar.edu/reform-electoralcollege.htm https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262096455_Should_the_Electoral_College_Be_Replaced_by_the_Dir ect_Election_of_the_President_A_Debate 15 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/podcasts/the-daily/electoral-college-trump-clinton-gore-bush.html 14

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element of the system – the winner-takes-all state election scheme and make the delegation of electoral votes for each state proportional to the votes for each candidate, ensuring a more equal representation of the state’s voting and reinforcing the rights of minorities, whose votes are entirely meaningless in a system with no regard for the votes of those who did not achieve majority in the state. It would lastly mean that the president would almost always be the winner of the popular vote also.

Ultimately, I believe that most support for the status quo of an evidently broken system originates in the failure to recognise the Constitution as a means to an end of classic liberal ideals, and that if the electoral system - as New York Times editor Jesse Wegman opines: ‘Despite what you may have learned in school, it was not the product of careful design by brilliant men. Thrown together at the last minute by the country’s founders, it almost immediately stopped functioning as they thought it would.’ - no longer supports these ideals, then it must be amended, changed and reformed. The obedient, reflexive idol-worship of the Constitution seems institutionalised in the American psyche. The classic liberal values upon which it was written now form the mainstay the American political right (likely the doing of Reagan and various late 20th Century republican ilk), and hence it is baffling to witness the values of equality and freedom in elections ignored in favour of salivating defences of the Constitution as immutable, even when its dilapidated electoral systems shun those values, with which it was written.

Further Reading The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay United States Constitution & United States Declaration of Independence Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville On Liberty - J. S. Mill Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? - Alexander Keyssar Two Treatises - John Locke Walden - Henry David Thoreau (it isn’t even relevant it’s just really good!)

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Henry Bishop -

Banning face coverings: farright, Islamophobic oppression or a step towards liberation and equality?

Henry discusses the secular reforms in France and their implications on liberty On 14th September 2010, the French Senate passed ‘Law of 2010-1192: Act prohibiting the concealment of the face in public space’, which banned any clothing which covers the face, with exceptions for health, professional, artistic or sporting reasons, and established punishments of a year’s imprisonment and a €30,000 fine for anyone who forced someone else to wear such clothing (with harsher punishments if that person is a minor), and a €150 fine for those who violate the ban. On 1st August 2018, a similar ban came into effect in Denmark, with an approximately €134 fine for anyone wearing garments that hide their face.

Whilst items like balaclavas, helmets and (non-coronavirus related) masks were therefore also outlawed as part of these measures, there was a clear target of the laws – burqas, one-piece veils that cover the face and body, and niqabs, veils that leave an area around the eyes but cover the rest of the face, both worn by Muslim women. The de facto targeting of the practice of a particular religion has caused heated debates in countries that have imposed bans and countries that haven’t, as well as in multinational political organisations.

In France, the ostensible justification for the ban stems from secularism – the absence of religion within the State and public spaces. Indeed, the ban was upheld in 2014 by the European Court of Human Rights, which held that the “legitimate aim” of the law was the idea of “living together”. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that “the Republic lives with its face uncovered”, and many suggest that banning veils helps with integration into Western French women protest the burqa and niqab ban in societies. However, the United Paris, 2010 Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) criticised the law, arguing that “France had not adequately explained why it was necessary to prohibit this clothing”. Out of an estimated (as it is illegal in France by the same doctrine to gather data on religious groups) 5 million French Muslims, only 1,900 women were estimated in 2009 to be affected by the law. On the one hand, that such a small number of

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Muslims partake in the practice could be said to suggest that it is insignificant, relative to the ‘togetherness’ of the Republic.

However, the relatively miniscule number of people affected by the legislation, when considering the time spent on it and the opportunity loss to pass other, more wide-ranging laws, could lend credence to the wider criticism of laws banning face coverings: they are just pernicious attacks on Islam. A 2009 report in Denmark estimated there were, at most, 200 niqab wearers in Denmark, and in the first year of the law being applied, there were 23 fines. This could suggest two different things. Either the ban was targeted at a miniscule non-problem to secure the votes of Islamophobes, which in France is supported by reports that President Sarkozy was presented with existing laws that could have been used to ban full face-covering veils, but decided to pass a new law, perhaps not coincidentally before the 2012 presidential elections against parties including the far-right National Front, which threatened to take away voters from his centre-right Union for a Popular Movement. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry in France also produced a report before the ban was adopted that heard 200 witnesses, only one of which was a woman who actually wore a face veil, and she was only heard on her own request. If he and other politicians genuinely wanted to see integration, then tackling economic and social inequality and discrimination would likely be more prescient than targeting a minute minority within a minority. The other possibility is that the law works and provides enough deterrent for not only those who already wear face-covering garments but also other Muslim women not to cover their face in public, but many would assert that this is an abhorrent use of legal power.

In the wake of controversy in the UK in 2006 after Jack Straw, a Member of Parliament, revealed he asked Muslim women to lift their veil in his surgeries, Ken Livingstone said what he perceived as the demonisation of Muslim women “[echoed] very much the demonology of Nazi Germany when Hitler said it was the Jews' fault and the problems were brought upon themselves”. The UNHRC said of France’s ban that it “could have the effect of confining [Muslim women] to their homes, impeding their access to public services and marginalising them”. Many have asserted the ban contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 9 of which prescribes the right of each citizen “in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance”, which is clearly infringed upon. An Amnesty International expert on discrimination in Europe argued that “A complete ban on the covering of the face would violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who wear the burqa or the niqab in public as an expression of their identity or beliefs”.

Nevertheless, this right is subject to limitations “for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”. Whilst there are some farcically hyperbolic arguments about the niqab and burqa, particularly in the UK, like Philip Woolas’ argument that women wearing these garments are “frightening and intimidating”, and David Davis’ fear over whether the government is “inadvertently encouraging a kind of voluntary apartheid”, there are more grounded concerns that veils in Islam are signs of oppression, and are incompatible with many modern countries’ ideas of human rights, as cogently expressed in the

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European Convention (along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), which would mean that the ban could be said to protecting morals and the wearers’ rights and freedoms. The European Court of Human Rights stated that “the face plays a significant role in social interaction”. Mohammed Moussaoui, the president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith opposed any legal ban but was in favour of discouraging Muslim women from wearing the full veil and said that it was out of place in France. The Chair of the UNHRC echoed this sentiment, saying “many on the Committee, including myself, regard [the custom of veil-wearing] as a form of oppression of women”. If these arguments are accepted, then the practical elements of bans like the number of people affected could pale in significance to the necessary and powerful ideological statement against the oppression of women.

This argument is dismissed by many. Even if it is accepted that veils are symbols of oppression, what is more oppressive from that basis – fining the small group who truly believe that veils are symbols of status, their devotion to their religion, or their piety, or allowing them to keep on wearing them? Baroness Warsi said “If women don’t have a choice, they are oppressed”. In combatting perceived oppression, bans on face coverings are oppressive themselves, and given the small number of veil-wearers in many countries where bans are in effect or being considered compared to the likely degradation of the politics and governments of countries that do enact a ban and the profound constraining effect on those who are affected by it, even if veils are oppressive, further oppression is a rash and overly-destructive response. The idea that facecovering restricts social interaction is also fairly weak, and it isn’t a government’s job to dictate the social interaction of its citizens anyway.

In conclusion, banning face coverings isn’t always a far-right, specifically Islamophobic move – in 2004, France banned all ostentatious religious symbols from schools in the name of secularism.

Whether this is too extreme can still be contested, but not every ban on face coverings is necessarily extremist or Islamophobic. However, because of the small number of women who wear face coverings and the division that bans cause, I reject any arguments that bans are positive, practical and liberating strides towards equality. Even if one accepts that they are ideologically or pragmatically necessary, they are at best blunt instruments and negative, constraining steps, rather than forward-thinking, positive and constructive policy.

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Oscar Clarke –

The Political Philosophy and Person of Noam Chomsky Oscar talks about the personality and ideology of Noam Chomsky “The most important intellectual alive”. This is how the New York Times describes the linguist and philosopher who, outside the circles of craft beer drinking metropolitan liberals, is little known. Chomsky is many things, primarily: a linguist, cognitive scientist, philosopher, and an eminent public figure, who revolutionised linguistics by assuming language is uniquely human based on biological cognitive capacity. However, cognitive science and linguistics are not as rousing to debate around the dinner table as politics is – unless one has a particularly fiery disposition for cognitive science.

Chomsky was born into a family of Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia on the 7th December 1928.

Early in his life he developed a keen interest in anarchism from reading alternative books from a New York book store. His early interest in politics is clearly demonstrated by him, age 10, writing and publishing an article on the rise of fascism in Europe, following the fall of Barcelona to the army of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War in the Catalonia Offensive, a subject built to intrigue the mind of your average 10 year old. Chomsky has not stopped writing ever since having published more than 150 books. He is currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) at the age of 92, and is the most quoted living author.

It would not be too unfair to liken Chomsky to the likes of Bernie Sanders, not only due to their similar, wizened appearance, but also because of their very left-leaning political views. Chomsky is a self-defined libertarian-socialist or anarcho-socialist. Libertarian-socialists roughly believe in two main things: libertarianism and socialism. Astonishing. Socialism advocates for greater worker control of the means of production within a society, abandoning the neoclassical notion of absolute self-determination for common-ownership and cooperation established through democratic processes – much like a social democrat (e.g. Bernie). However, there’s also that libertarian bit, so, this socialist system has to also ensure and maximise the individual liberties of people, and dilute the concentration of power away from one individual. Chomsky however, does not view these rough umbrella positions as solid political theories, but as ideals that meet the needs of the modern human. In the case of libertarian-socialism Chomsky believes that these ideals are: liberty, community, and freedom of association.

Chomsky’s outspokenness regarding his political views has led to many controversies over his many years as a political dissident not just from the right but from the left as well. A pertinent example of this being his support of Robert Faurisson right to free speech in the 1970s. Faurisson was a French lecturer and notable holocaust denier. Chomsky as a result found himself plunged into unwarranted controversy. Being Jewish, Chomsky was naturally diametrically opposed to

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Faurisson’s beliefs but came out in defence of his right to say what he said, arguing that freedom of speech must extend to all viewpoints, no matter how unpopular or fallacious that view may be. The Faurisson Affair left his reputation, particularly in France, damaged for decades. Ever ready with the pithy one-liner, Chomsky stated that “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” This remark is quite pertinent to the current climate of ever-increasing political polarisation, Chomsky like Orwell can teach us a lot about tolerating those we disagree with, a virtue many need to learn.

It is not just his political stance that has drawn the ire of criticism but also his stance on American foreign policy, particularly in matters of war. He is an ardent critic of what he deams ‘American Imperialism’, believing the underlying principle of American involvement in other countries such as in Vietnam and the Middle East is to ensure a society that is economically and politically controlled by the US in order for them to be compliant with their interests – similar to the policies enacted during the age of colonialism by the likes of the UK just less transparently obvious. He rejects the notion that the US and other complicit nations have had benevolent motives behind their various invasions such as the spreading of democracy, but instead commit egregious acts of war out of veiled self-interest. He has consistently criticised US involvement in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict where the US has consistently blocked a peaceful settlement between the warring parties and with the US’s continued support of the Saudi Arabian government who Chomsky labelled ‘grotesque’ over their condemnable human rights record.

As a socialist, Chomsky also has a tendency to criticise capitalism, particularly the more market driven model that exists within the US. He highlights the fact that US society – and if we treat the US as a microcosm here for the world more generally – has become increasingly unequal, with economic and political power being held disproportionately by the wealthy elite. As such, society to him is becoming increasingly out of the control of the people which it claims to represent. Chomsky sites Chomksy speaking at Chatham House in 2015 big business as one of the key perpetrators about US Foreign Policy of this divide stating that “it is ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They are totalitarian institutions – you take orders form above and maybe give them to people below you. There is about as much freedom as under Stalinism”, this is a very similar to belief to that held by Thomas Jefferson who also believed that “the end of democracy will occur when government falls into that hands of moneyed corporations”. However, Chomsky also has a clear distain for Leninism, Marxism, Stalinism, and authoritarian socialism generally, instead advocating for greater control of the means of production through a democratic government and workers councils. In this 21

Chomsky is harking back to the values of classical liberalism, allowing greater individual participation in democracy, as Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address; “democracy is the government of the people, by the people, and for the people”, so greater individual involvement can only increase the ‘democratic-ness’ of democracy something which Chomsky is desperate to preserve. In his mind, an individual having more control over their productive life will only increase the satisfaction one derives from work and instil in people a greater sense of purpose and inevitably happiness as well as increasing the freedom of that person.

Chomsky’s ideology seems to combine the collectivist tenants of socialism with the more individualistic principles that arise out of freedom and democracy, and in so doing, he seems to have fashioned a set of beliefs that may stand us in good stead in a future where the world is becoming more polarised, isolationist and suppressive by the minute. “We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas” and Chomsky’s ideas for curtailing the biggest ills of capitalism, introducing collectivist socio-economic policies whilst still encouraging the expansion of freedom and democracy may just be one of the ‘good ideas’ he is talking about.

Joe Greenway - Hannah Arendt & the Banality of Evil Joe discusses how seemingly “normal” people can end up committing some of the most abhorrent acts imaginable Why do ordinary people do horrific things? This is the question that the political theorist Hannah Arendt asked as she reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Eichmann was the SS Officer for Jewish Affairs in Nazi Germany, and responsible for the logistics of the Holocaust – the transporting of Jews from occupied countries, to ghettos and extermination camps in World War Two. As such, he is often seen as the face of the Holocaust – the monstrous demon responsible for this unprecedented genocide. Arendt begins her work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by dispelling this myth, and revealing the unexpected reality of Eichmann: a quite normal, middle-aged bureaucrat – rather boring to listen to in fact, speaking often in cliches. Eichmann was not a high-party official, not a general, not a Reich’s minister, nor, as people believed, was he the psychopathic ‘mastermind’ behind the Final Solution. Arendt saw Eichmann as merely a cog in the machine – a bureaucrat following the orders of a demonic regime: ‘They knew, of course, that it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster … The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ This is not, of course, to say that Eichmann was innocent – there is no

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denying his crimes, but the question, to Arendt, is how such an ordinary person can commit such heinous acts?

Arendt answers this with her idea of the ‘banality of evil’: that evil acts are not necessarily perpetrated by evil people; instead, they can arise through ‘thoughtlessness’ – a detachment from reality resulting in unthinking conformity and complacency. It is this disengagement with reality that is crucial in understanding how Eichmann was able to justify his actions to himself.

Eichmann describes himself as an ‘idealist’, someone he says, who is able to sacrifice people for an idea – the prioritising of the general and universal, over the individual and particular. This ‘ideal’ was the German Reich, the ‘thousand-year Reich’ as delivered through the Fuhrer, Hitler.

What underwrites this is a kind of religious fervour – that this wasn’t simply nationalism in the sense of ‘do this for Germany.’ – the Third Reich was to be the ‘thousand-year Reich.’ Everything that Eichmann did had to be done to establish the thousand-year Reich – an almost religious mission of which the extermination of the Jews was a cornerstone. When Eichmann carries out his orders, he isn’t complying with some normal commitment or instinct like fidelity to a family or a community, or even fidelity to Germany as a nation; it was fidelity to the Fuhrer, who was really a channeling agent for the establishment of this thousand-year Reich: ‘What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique.’ Arendt sees this profoundly in Eichmann’s use of cliches and ‘stock phrases’ – preeminent examples of generalisation, which defended him against reality and kept him from thinking in concrete terms, or aware of his own self-deception. He characterises his job as a struggle with a respectable enemy, who are ‘idealists’ just as much as he is. Eichmann’s disillusionment can perhaps best be shown in his final statement before his hanging: ‘Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget.’ Arendt writes of this: ‘In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral.’ Coupled with this obscene idealism is an avoidance (not ignorance) of the truth.

For instance, use of ambiguous language, such as ‘the Jewish Question’ rather than specific reference to gassing for instance. A trick that Himmler taught, was to turn the ‘animal pity’ that many felt for the Jews, inwards onto yourself: ‘the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!’ The cunning behind this is that it does not normalise the activity of the killing, but rather acknowledges that it is not normal, yet appeals to a supernormal time: you’re being asked to something which your inner instincts tell you is terrible, but the way you get around it is to hold onto your duty, to tell yourself that it is merely a difficult obligation to fulfil in unprecedented times. In essence, you acknowledge that this action is morally wrong – but you claim that it needs to be done in service of a greater good – the thousand-year Reich – an unprecedented ideal with massive historical ramifications - “a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”. It was this phantasmagoria of power, success and triumph to come that enabled people like Eichmann to detach themselves from their conscience and ignore the reality of their actions.

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An argument used by the defence was essentially that Eichmann was morally unlucky: he was a simple man, looking for success, and happened to live in a society where success was seen as being a good Nazi – doing what Eichmann was doing. Because of this, there was little or no external conscience in Germany to tell Eichmann that what he was doing was wrong: the Nazis thought it was normal, many Germans, and even some Jews cooperated. As Arendt explains: ‘He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgement has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him.’ Furthermore, it was simply not true that you could refuse to participate. There is a misconception that it was a corporation, where if you didn’t like what was happening on one floor, you could transfer elsewhere – but this couldn’t be further from the truth. While Arendt points out that there was no evidence that anyone was ever imprisoned or executed for rejecting certain jobs, for someone as driven for success as Eichmann, it was unthinkable to quit your job – he describes it as ‘inadmissible’ – no one acted like that. Imagine yourself in Eichmann’s position: a lower middle-class, failing travelling salesman until he became a Nazi – a chance for a new start and successful career – pursuing this success, this sense of duty and bureaucratic achievement, would have meant everything. He thought of himself as the social inferior of a lot of the people around him, and wanted desperately to live up to the prevailing ideas and values in his society. In this sense, yes, he was extraordinarily conformist – his conscience was entirely tied up in approval from superiors and respectability, which is what made it unthinkable for him to quit his job. Given this, it is easier to see how he could have been caught up in the idealism described earlier – particularly when considering the story Hitler – the lance corporal who became Fuhrer – it would have been inspirational for Eichmann. Eichmann remarks, ‘The man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Fuhrer of a people of almost eighty million… His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.’ Eichmann was a man who desired success but had the misfortune of being in a society that, at the time, valued and approved of appalling things. His desire for success and his fervent belief in the ideal of the thousand-year Reich resulted in detachment from reality and conscience: he did not think about his actions and their impact on others: he did not bother to say ‘No’.

Is Eichmann still morally responsible then? The circumstances surrounding him at the time certainly influenced him, yet Arendt still concurs the verdict of the trial: his execution. She identifies his error as a failure of judgement – Eichmann had a defect in thinking – in his language, cliches, and inability to think from the standpoint of others – he depended on external conscience to formulate his values, when in fact, Arendt argues he should be able to tell right from wrong purely by his own judgements. This emphasises a more Kantian principle – to be a legislator for morality yourself; an autonomous moral agent. The issue with Eichmann’s position was that the Holocaust was unprecedented – there were no ‘rules’ to follow, therefore it required engaging in real thinking; looking at things from the standpoint of others, to make your judgements. Yet because of Eichmann’s inability to think – his thoughtlessness – his banality – he became just another cog in the machine of the Holocaust

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Mrs Beresford-Miller

– Jesus: accidental, incidental, or purposeful feminist?

Mrs Beresford-Miller looks at the life of Jesus and discusses whether his acts could brand him as a feminist To many liberal Christians, particularly female ones, the message of Jesus is synonymous with tolerance, equality and respect. Jesus is known, after all, to have helped many women; the Widow at Nain, the bleeding woman, the woman caught in adultery and Mary Magdalene are just a few stories of Jesus helping marginalised and troubled women. His message of “Love Thy Neighbour” is purposefully inclusive and genderless and incites those who follow his message to treat all people with love according to the Golden Rule. However, in more active feminist circles, Jesus is to be criticised as a male saviour who came to save men and who, according to feminist theologians, such as Mary Daly and Daphne Hampson, ignores the plight of women and perpetuates the ongoing patriarchy supported by male dominated religious institutions. So, with this conflicting narrative, how are we to view Jesus’ ministry, message and indeed his messianic mission? Is his message twisted by those looking for a feminist icon or is he to be lauded as one of the earliest feminists?

Certainly, at first glance, we appear to have a problem. Jesus blesses many marginalised groups in society; the poor, the forgotten, the disabled, the imprisoned but never overtly women. He helps various women who are themselves victims of the patriarchal authority structures of the time but never explicitly criticises the world that sees them damned for being ill, widowed or simply having the misfortune of being born a woman in first century Palestine. When he outs the bleeding women who, in Luke 8, is secretly healed just by touching his cloak, we can assume that he does this in order that all will know she is healed. She is no longer outcast, deemed as unclean because of her long-suffering gynaecological illness of menorrhagia, because Jesus’ healing of her brings her back into society. However, at no point does Jesus speak about the abhorrent treatment of a woman suffering from illness, he doesn’t castigate the crowd for their illtreatment of her, like he does when he criticises the Pharisees for their love of money and nor does he condemn a world in which someone who is ill is outcast from those who should be caring for her. Yes, he praises her faith but at no point do we hear him chastise society for classing a suffering woman as unclean and unloved by God. When Jesus rescues the woman caught in adultery from death by stoning, he does not call for equality by asking the man similarly guilty to step forward and defend the woman. In the Beatitudes, we do not hear Jesus call for gender equality and “Blessed are the women, who’s plight in this world is far harder than those of men” is noticeably missing. Put simply, Jesus does not come across as a purposeful feminist in the gospel narratives of his life.

However, if we look further in the text, we see examples of women playing a prominent role in the early church and of Jesus valuing their salvation equally with those of men. In Luke 10, Jesus is at the home of two sisters, Mary and Martha, and is enjoying their hospitality. Mary is sitting

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at Jesus’ feet, listening to his teaching whilst Martha busies herself preparing for their guest. Martha asks Jesus to tell Mary to help her but the reply is surprising as it places importance not on the domestic but on the spiritual. Mary is to be praised for she has prioritised spiritual improvement. Earlier in Luke, in Chapter 8, we are told of women, important to the mission, who accompany Jesus and minister to his needs. Indeed, Tom Wright notes that these women, “have done the unthinkable: they have left the well-defined social space of home and family, where they had a role and a duty, and have chosen to accompany Jesus and his followers on the road from place to place, looking after their needs and doing so, moreover, out of their own pockets”. Clearly Jesus was not opposed to women being a significant part of his ministry. They also play, arguably, one of the most seminal roles, as witnesses to the resurrection. The gospels present this moment with their usual slight differences but all four gospels writers Jesus and the Samaritan woman at agree that it is Mary Magdalene and some the well, a figure from John’s accompanying women who witness the empty tomb, Gospel (4:4-26). In Eastern are first to see the risen Christ and report these matters Orthodox and Catholic traditions, to the male disciples. The fact that their witness is she is known as Saint Photine ratified by Peter’s confirmation is likely a later addition in a world where women could not be trusted to bear witness in a court of law. The fact is, Jesus, who died on the cross asking for his mother, who loved the company of women, asked for their spiritual involvement, chose to reveal himself to the very people who had risked their lives in coming out of hiding to anoint his body. So, if we have a messiah who respected and valued women, we perhaps have more of a problem; why did he not advocate for them more vocally?

His belief in the value of women seems to be more accidental than purposeful. Why did he not speak up for them and champion equality in an age where women were treated as second class citizens? The dawn of a new church and a new covenant with God is the perfect time to do away with marginalising women and instead of championing this cause, Jesus is silent on it, paving the way for hundreds of years of Christianity ignoring the female cause.

Perhaps it is at this point that we must acknowledge the shadows that may be behind a lot of this confusion, the early church, the Roman Empire and the patriarchy of general society from time immemorial. There is overwhelming evidence that the role of women in the very beginnings of the Early Church was strong and meaningful. We know from 1 Corinthians that Chloe, a prominent woman of Corinth, played a part in running and financing the Christian community there once Paul had moved on towards Rome. Although little is known about her, she is wealthy enough to have her own household. We can infer that she is intelligent, she recognises potential schism in the newly formed Corinthian Christian community, and also that she was significant in the community, as Paul chooses to listen to her concerns. We know that Phoebe was another 26

woman of the early Christian community of some importance. She is mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Romans as one who has been trusted with delivery of his epistle when he is detained in prison. It’s clear that although Paul has a trouble history with feminism, (let’s not forget he famously recommended in 1Timothy that women remain silent in church and in Ephesians that they be subordinate to their husbands) he recognises the important role woman can play and that they are equal in spiritual matters. The earliest Christian community had women in roles of importance but by the Edict of Milan in 313CE, which saw Emperor Constantine make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, women had been swept aside and re-marginalised.

Indeed, in 584CE, the Synod of Macon, saw the Church debate matters such as the humanity of women and whether or not they were possessed of a soul. We need look no further than the early church fathers to see a complex and challenging view of women. Augustine writes beautifully about his mother but in the same text, The Confessions, he discusses women being a barrier to men and subordinate, always, to their husbands. There is some evidence from his correspondence that St. Anselm thought it possible that women could be equal to men in their role as Handmaids of God. However, Aquinas, the Bull of early Christian writing, discusses frequently woman’s inferiority to men, their primary role as reproducers and that they are misbegotten men. There is certainly a strong argument that whilst Jesus’ message and that of his earliest apostles was meant to be inclusive, Christianity becoming a mainstream official religion of a dogmatic super power lead to business as usual when it came to the position of women in society.

Jesus spoke out to change society, to advocate for the marginalised and, arguably most importantly, to ask us to reconsider our societal bias which is skewed against people who don’t match up to our ideas of perfect. Did he explicitly mention women? No, but he did show respect to them and ask for others to do likewise. Did he mention that your neighbour might be a woman, or ask that women’s illness but treated with charitable kindness or that we should stop any mistreatment of women? All again, no. However, Jesus’ message should transcend the need to consider individual groups. Yes, he doesn’t explicitly mention women but nor does he mention the disabled by name, or different racial groups or people with particular jobs. He keeps his messages broad for a reason, blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek and blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you (Matthew 5) are all statements that could apply to women in first century Palestine. Jesus’ overriding messages were to love thy neighbour and to treat others as you want to be treated. When we forget the vital role that women play in all areas of society, the economy, the workplace, indeed the world, we forget this message and we forget the purpose of Jesus’ ministry, change.

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Ruari Gannon -

The United States of Europe: why the EU should federalise Ruari discusses the history of European federalism and why he thinks the EU should seek to federalise further The EU is at a crossroads: it can choose to continue to operate as normal, and tear itself apart, or it can truly unite by forming a federal union. I am a federalist because I understand, as recent events such as Brexit, Covid and the refugee crisis have shown, that the Union is fragile and has no long-term future if it carries on under the same system.

I believe that the EU should form a federal union as it is the only way of overcoming the shared problems that face the continent, and the only way of solidifying Europe’s place in an increasingly eastern looking future. It is necessary for the EU to further integrate and act as one in an age of globalisation.

Economically this means the EU will be better able to compete with large trading partners. Do you think that a small nation such as Belgium or the United Kingdom are economically anything in Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson the world compared to nations such as the US, discuss one of the threats to a theoretical China, India, Brazil, or Russia? The world has federalised Europe; Brexit changed since decolonisation; and no this is not about “making Europe great again” in any sense, but finding our place in the world as a peaceful nation of nations, yet in itself being a responsible and democratic potential superpower. Together the European nations would be the world's second largest economy, with the number one spot being within reach, and much more self-reliant and confident then it is now.

Only a European approach, as opposed to a national approach, can provide solutions to increasingly global challenges. The reasons for a European federation are not so far from why the European community was created in the first place: not to condemn the continent, and the European states, to isolation and geopolitical irrelevance, but to make Europe strategically independent from other superpowers, able to defend itself and its people, and to promote peace and democracy in a continent that was for too long in bloody conflicts.

A federal Europe is an idea that does not fit the typical left right spectrum. People as different as Yanis Varoufakis, Italian socialist leader Nicola Zingaretti

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and neoliberal French president Emmanuel Macron, centrists such as Tony Blair and Conservatives such as Michael Heseltine have all called for greater European integration and cooperation, even the British icon and Brexiteer favorite Winston Churchill said in a speech held in Zurich in 1946 that “There is a remedy which ... would in a few years make all Europe ... free and ... happy. It is to re-create the European family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe.” With this plea for a United States of Europe, Churchill was one of the first to advocate European integration.

A federal Europe would not mean loss of cultural identity for each of the member states- many large countries have many distinct cultures within them, but they still act as one. Do you think the culture in Miami is the same as in Kansas? Or the same in Arizona and Alaska? Culture varies within countries, and it would be the same for a federal Europe- the European people would have their state identity as well as their European identity. In fact, I would argue that a federal Europe would further protect and solidify various European identities against a backdrop of globalisation and a rapidly increasing global population. I might also add that although Europe is and always will be a continent of many nations, cultural trends such as baroque, realism, romanticism (to name a few) managed to coexist within European society simultaneously, as have ideas and political ideologies, which shows that throughout history there has always been room for a shared pan-European identity.

I support a federal Europe based upon the current swiss system. The Swiss Federal Constitution declares the cantons (states) to be sovereign in their own right, and each canton has their own constitution, legislature (parliament), executive (prime minister), police system and courts. The central swiss government only controls affairs and laws that affect all the cantons at once, whilst the cantons themselves have control over education, tax rates, labor laws, welfare policies and so on. This system of extreme decentralized decision making has turned Switzerland, a country which has four official languages, into a model democracy which I believe would be best suited for a grand European federation. The states within the federation would be like the swiss cantons in that they are legally sovereign and maintain many of the same powers as they did before the federation. The central European government should only control international trade, industrial planning, and defense. I also think it would be wise for the EU to have multiple capitals, as Switzerland does, for example, one city (say Brussels) could be the seat of the executive, another city (say Strasbourg) could be the seat of the legislature, another (say Krakow) the seat of the judiciary, with three financial capitals in London, Paris, and Frankfurt, along with each state having their own capital (similar to the state capitals in the US).

I also understand that there are already countries with their own federal system, whose states might lose power if their federal government instead becomes the state government in the EU. For example, Germany has its own federal states such as Hesse or North Rhine Westphalia,

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which might lose their localized power to a German federal state. However, I propose that all areas with their own current levels of autonomy should be their own states within a European federation. This would mean that countries such as Germany will be broken up, but I do not necessarily see this as a bad thing; it would mean nowhere loses their autonomy, and it would level up in the sense that it could see states of approximate uniform population- Germany currently has 83 million people (about eight times the population of Sweden), but North Rhine Westphalia, a current German state and under my proposal a state within the European federation, has 18 million people, a similar amount to Romania and the Netherlands, thus making sure political power is proportionally level. This could ultimately help solve the perceived problem that too much power within the current EU is held by the French and Germans (as Eurosceptics like to boast).

Federalism would mean that the 27 (or more) EU countries agree to end their independence and submit to rule from a European government. It is not a decision one takes lightly. However, Europe needs to become bigger as the world gets smaller, and federalism is the only way European nations can remain significant in the future.

Finn Evans -

Liberalism, Autocracy and

Meritocracy Finn presents a theoretical (and humorous) discussion between four different philosophers regarding their views on the state Host:

Hello! Today we’re going to be hearing a debate between four famous philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, Plato, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill… and yes, we’ve revived them all just for this! Today they will be discussing how they think society should be governed, and their reasoning behind this. There are three main ideas that will be discussed today, Autocracy, supported by Hobbes, Meritocracy, supported by Plato, and Liberalism, supported by Locke and Mill. First they will each explain and justify their own position, and then each theory will be criticised by the others and will each have the opportunity to defend their positions. First to explain their view, will be Hobbes, who supports autocracy!

Hobbes:

Thank you very much, and good day to you all. As you said, I support autocracy. Autocracy is a system of government where one leader has supreme power over a state, whose decisions are final, and cannot be overruled. Before you all call me an evil, power-hungry tyrant, I’m not suggesting I should be that leader… although, I reckon I’d be quite a good one… just that more gets done when somebody has the absolute power as

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they have the ability to make things happen, without having to go through time consuming polls and debates.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, a world where there is no government, no law and no society: the state of nature. How would life be? It would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. People would go around fighting for possession of important land and stealing vital tools and possessions. No development would be made, because whenever somebody would make a useful tool, a thriving farm, a beautiful artwork, someone else would come along, kill them, and take it. Now, we may not all agree what the greatest good is, but we can all agree on the greatest bad: a violent, painful death, that we all want to avoid. That, however, would be common in the state of nature, so people should band together to avoid that. People sign a social contract, not physically of course, to avoid this danger, but of course in doing so give up their freedom, as they are not allowed to commit murder and violence.

The social contract, however, relies on a strong central authority to avoid fighting, and therefore requires us to give all our power to one figure, the Leviathan, who has ultimate control so that they can protect the people, and provide the best life possible.

Host:

Thank you Hobbes, that is a very interesting… and potentially controversial… point of view. Now we will move on to Plato, who believes in Meritocracy!

Plato:

Thank you! Indeed, I believe in meritocracy, which is a government based on those deserving to be the leader most. Here’s my question for you, who are the best people to be in power? Here’s a hint: they should be good, wise, unbiased and incorruptible. That’s right… Philosophers! A deserving leader should be good, and a key topic of study in philosophy is ethics and morals, meaning philosophers strive to be good and are always looking for the most good ways to behave. Secondly, a perfect leader would be wise, and what is philosophy in general? It’s the search for wisdom. Philosophers are wise, and always strive to be wiser. Thirdly, a good leader should be unbiased, and philosophers always have an open mind as they only care about knowledge, not other things. Finally, they should be incorruptible, just like philosophers, who do not care about power or strength, just wisdom.

You might be thinking: ‘yes, but who picks the philosophers?’ and there is a simple answer for that. There will be people picked from society at birth and taught independently to be great thinkers, the likes of which have still not been seen today. A group of vastly intelligent incorruptible philosophers would be formed by this process, which would repeat forever, while the philosophers rule perfectly, and society is brilliant.

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Host:

Thank you, Plato, for your unique ideas, and next we have John Locke, with liberalism.

Locke:

Thank you. Liberalism is the philosophy that we should be largely free to do what we want. In fact, it isn’t exclusive to meritocracy or autocracy, as it is a principle of how the government should govern, not a method of selecting the governing body itself. However, it is exclusive to Leviathan Autocracy, which massively limits your freedom, and I also personally disagree with meritocracy.

Lets discuss the state of nature again. I don’t think life would be so brutish, I think we would enjoy our freedom, and mostly be cooperative, as cooperation would be optimal for survival. However, you’re right Hobbes, there would be a few less rational people, probably those like yourself, who would go around brutishly stealing and murdering. If not stopped. This means, though it costs some freedom, we do have to sign the social contract, and trade a few rights for security. However, notice I said a few rights, not all of them. We would want to retain as many rights as possible, while also enough security to protect ourselves. A few key rights that people want are the right to life, liberty and property, and that right to liberty extends as far as you do not damage these for somebody else.

For example, you may possess a weapon, but you may not use it to hurt somebody else. You may own a prison, but you may not use it to hold somebody else hostage. You may own a hammer, but you may not use it to damage somebody else’s property. As otherwise we are completely free, the government must not get involved in anything else, and their only job is to protect these three rights. If they fail to do this, then they can be deposed and replaced.

Host:

Thank you, Locke, for your optimistic theory. What do you have to say about liberalism, Mill?

Mill:

In many ways, I agree with Locke, but he hasn’t quite nailed it. He’s right that people should have the freedom to do what they want, but the few restrictions are slightly off. The only restriction to humans’ freedom is that they may not physically harm others. This is the harm principle, meaning that you may punch and kick as much as you want, until you punch somebody.

This, of course, doesn’t include sports such as boxing, as both parties have agreed to the violence within the rules of the sport. Of course, however, any action that violates these rules is then illegal, as it is not agreed and consented.

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There are also other ways that people should act, but that isn’t the same as legal or illegal. People should try to ensure that the most happiness is achieved, but it wouldn’t be illegal not to.

Host:

Thank you Mill. Now we’re going to return to Autocracy and the Leviathan, and you will have the opportunity to challenge this theory, and Hobbes may defend it.

Plato:

Thank you. First, I wish to point out that there are no measures against corruption. If the Leviathan has absolute power, then how do we ensure it doesn’t go to their head? The Leviathan has absolute power, so what’s to stop them taxing excessively and mismanaging the money? They can’t be opposed, so why wouldn’t they? There have even been historical examples of this happening.

Hobbes:

I think you’ve missed the point of autocracy. It is not intended to give a leader excessive parties and their own flamboyant lifestyle. To stop them is the threat of rebellion.

Plato:

So you can oppose them?

Hobbes:

No, but…

Plato:

Yes?

Hobbes:

Only if they don’t fulfil their duties.

Plato:

I… see…

Locke:

Also, do you really think removing everybody’s rights is the best thing? How would people be happy to live in that sort of society if they’re always scared the Leviathan will punish them. People want the freedom to do what they want. Yes, we don’t want to die violently, but would you lock yourself in a cell your whole life to avoid it?

Hobbes:

The Leviathan exists to get things done, and yes, they should have ultimate control. How are people going to get along if they don’t have an enforcer.

Host:

Thank you all, I hope that’s provoked some thought. Now let’s criticise meritocracy.

Hobbes:

Well, Mr Plato, if you’re so concerned about corruption, do you not think there’s room for corruption in meritocracy? Becau-

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Plato:

Of course not! The philosophers are educated such that they can’t be corrupt.

Hobbes:

But who picks the babies? Can’t bribery from the parents be involved there?

Then, who teaches them? How do you ensure the teacher isn’t corrupt? And anyway, nobody’s perfect, a strong sense of power could still corrupt the philosophers even after they’re adults.

Plato:

Firstly, the babies are picked at random, by philosophers, who are incorruptible, so there is no corruption there. Then the babies are taught by the incorruptible philosophers, to be incorruptible.

Hobbes:

How does the process start, without room for corruption?

Plato:

It gets started by existing philosophers, like me.

Hobbes:

Sounds pretty corrupt to me. Why do you think there’s never been a historical example of meritocracy?

Plato:

Autocratic rule has only ever been started by the power-hungry autocrats.

Mill:

Secondly, how do the philosophers know what the greatest good is?

Everybody has a different opinion of that, like Hobbes told us. Existing philosophers can’t decide. Also, how can they sympathise and understand the situations of people in everyday society, if they have been entirely separate?

Plato:

It all lies in their supreme intelligence, unmatched by anyone before. As their sole reason for being is learning, they will have the intelligence to know these things, as they have been educated perfectly and are perfectly intelligent.

Host:

Very interesting! Now we will move on to liberalism.

Plato:

Firstly, if you’re free to do anything, how is anyone actually protected. You can own a weapon, you just can’t use it, but if someone does try to use it, how can you stop them. The person they attack with it hasn’t been protected. You can lock the offender up after, but this is justice, not protection, the victim has still been attacked. Then, when you punish the offender, you only take away freedom, by either locking them away or fining them, which are things that an ordinary person can’t do to someone else.

Locke:

I disagree that justice isn’t protection. If somebody fears the removal of their rights, which are what everyone values most, they will not commit an

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offence. Also, the government is allowed to infringe on people’s rights, if that person has infringed on somebody else’s.

Hobbes:

When are you infringing on somebody else’s freedom, rather than them infringing on yours? What if somebody cheats in a sport, for example. If you tell them that they can’t do that, aren’t you infringing on their freedom, by stopping them? But if they cheat in the first place, aren’t they infringing on everybody else’s right to playing the game? Then, who goes to prison? Do you both? Is it even serious enough for the government to get involved? The rules aren’t clear cut enough. If it were a Leviathan in charge, they’d make the decision, and that’d be final.

Mill:

Your situation is rather ridiculous, but the government wouldn’t get involved.

Games aren’t rights, there’s no infringement there. Anyway, I agree, vagueness is one of the flaws in Locke’s liberalism. Following the Harm Principle, though, nobody’s been hurt so its ok.

Hobbes:

What if a toddler hits their sibling? Can the parent punish them? Does the government punish them? Is it fair?

Mill:

Firstly, the parent’s can’t punish them with violence, but they can punish them. Of course the government don’t get involved, since the children are part of the parents’ duties, as established when they had the child.

Host:

Well, thank you all for coming today. Its been very interesting, and I hope its provoked plenty of thought. However, we’re going to have to stop there, and end your temporary reincarnations. Thanks, and goodbye!

Philosophers: No! We had information to share about the afterlife……………

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Lukas Cobb -

Zizek: A call to arms for the

left?

Lukas discusses the controversial philosopher and his ideology Born in Slovenia 1949, Slavoj Zizek has been labeled a ‘communist superstar’, ‘the Elvis of culture theory’, but also ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the west’. Arguably the greatest philosopher alive, his expertise stretches from psychoanalysis to continental philosophy to film criticism and is a self-confessing Marxist. However, Zizek passionately rejects the communism witnessed in the 20th century, advocating for an academic reimagining of the word- and it is indeed this communism which offers a tempting, all-encompassing hand to the mess the world is in. With his rejection of both liberal and conservative ideas, both left and right-wing populism, Zizek’s philosophy offers a more radical solution to the shortcomings of capitalism- but ultimately his ideas seem doomed to remain as an analysis of how things are as opposed to the influential call to change he believes we need.

Zizek’s strongest argument for his radical ideas comes from his fierce condemnation of capitalism, and in particular capitalism’s inadequacy to address the multiple issues facing the world today: climate change, immigration crises and the prospect of total digital control. Since no capitalist system can offer any meaningful solution to any of these, an emerging communist system with radical action is the only true hope humanity has. Zizek suggests we are heading towards a ’climate Zizek (left) with former Prime Minister of Greece, apartheid’, where the wealthy- Alexis Tsipras (right) those largely responsible for the growing emissions- have the funds to escape overheating, hunger and conflict, whereas those in poverty are forces to bear the brunt of climate change, whilst having the least capacity to protect themselves. Furthermore, current leaders (and indeed any leaders under our liberal democracies) are far too indebted to capitalism to make any meaningful change: they are simply administering the situation in line with capitalistic interests.

By contrast, large scale collective decisions (such as worldwide norms of per capita energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions) which run directly in opposition to the ‘spontaneous’ logic of capitalist development is the only way to ‘stop the train’ running towards global catastrophe. The immigration crisis is also potentially unsolvable from within the capitalist

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framework: an emerging idea among the left today is that of the ‘nomadic proletariat’, which suggests that Marx’s ‘class struggle’ is no longer between the capitalist ruling class and the proletariat, but rather between those who live in the comfort of the western ‘civilized’ world, and those who are devastated by the impact of global capitalism but are excluded from it- often now taking the form of immigrants, and requiring global change going beyond policies of ‘open borders’ to overcome. Finally, the growing danger of a digital age of ‘surveillance capitalism’ threatens to turn the consumer into the commodity, enslaving us to tech where, according to Zizek, we can ironically then experience the highest form of ‘freedom’: ‘to surf the web.’ These growing antagonisms of capitalism, as well as more traditional Marxist arguments of the exploitation of the individual, are what drive Zizek to advocate ‘communism not in the 20 th century sense, but a global organization that can control and regulate the economy as well as limit the sovereignty of nation states when needed.’

However, for Zizek, the answer to our problems does not lie in the modern liberal left, which he suggests is the ‘last defense’ of capitalism. By focusing on issues of gender or racial equality (albeit very real and necessary issues to tackle), modern day liberals suggest true liberation can be found from within the capitalist system (it cannot), which ultimately draws away from the true class struggle from which all other issues stem. Similarly, left wing populists such as Bernie Sanders make the mistake of creating an ‘enemy’ (such as republicans), whereas in reality the problem is the system itself, and pinning it to one individual creates the illusion that only one person stands between us and liberation. The failures of the left to address the true issues is largely a result of the capitalist system’s ability to preserve itself, and suggest that solutions to our dissent comes from inside the system, not outside. For example, Zizek argues that we all feel guilt as to the state of the world, and hence for our participation in capitalism. However, this guilt is easily pacified: for example, the promise that Starbucks 'encourages ethical trading and sustainable farming’ turns buying coffee into an ‘ethical experience’ and therefore ‘it is in the consumerist act you buy redemption for being a consumerist’. Likewise, the liberal, anti-capitalist ‘free love’ movement of the 1960’s was quickly hijacked by hedonistic right-wing advertising, suggesting that the ‘sex, drugs and rock n roll’ lifestyle could come from within the capitalist sphere (and indeed be bought). To summarise, Oscar Wilde argues in his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Capitalism’ that charity only prolongs the disease of capitalism rather than curing it by suggesting a long-term solution is not needed- and likewise, many liberal left ideas only exist to preserve the capitalist status quo under the illusion of real and meaningful change.

How, then, might radical enough change to overcome these catastrophes come about? In his essay ‘Only Autistic Children Can Save Us!’, Zizek argues in favour of Greta Thunberg and her simple ability to see the facts of climate change as they are, without the political baggage politicians have attached to the issue. By form of analogy, she can see the emperor naked, whereas the political sphere pretends to see him clothed. Unfortunately, climate disasters such as the Australian bushfires are still sparce enough to only momentarily capture our attention, whereas the growing digital control is slow enough (and appealing enough) to convince us it's for our own good. Zizek therefore, rather pessimistically, postulates that the only hope for actual 37

radical change will come in the form of an actual global catastrophe, requiring ‘a state of emergency enforced on us by an apocalyptic threat’, and (assuming this catastrophe is not lethal) the subsequent emergence of communism. And now, with startling immediacy, Zizek’s academic postulations have been thrust into reality with the coronavirus pandemic. Perhaps a little too fast, Zizek published a book on the pandemic in late March 2020: despite rejecting the temptation to lean into Marx’s historic determinism and suggest the pandemic hides a ‘deeper meaning’, Zizek is certainly hopeful that it will encourage a ‘global healthcare network’, increasing trust in science and the abandonment of ‘market mechanisms’ as the solution to our affairs. The pandemic therefore opens up the possibility to the reinvention of communism: not an ideal based on ‘solidarity between people’, but rather a pragmatic communism of survival.

However, it is in this newfound relevancy that Zizek’s philosophy may also suffer. Zizek has long advocated that for now the left shouldn’t act (else we end up with the mistakes of Marxism of the 20th century), but rather think up new long-term solutions to our predicament, hence somewhat detaching his ideas from reality. With the coronavirus pandemic thrusting his ideas into a far more plausible light, it is clear (and Zizek acknowledges) that we are still far from any kind of global communism which he envisages. By contrast and despite their flaws, the current liberal left has been far more successful in implementing real, pragmatic change: for example, the BLM movement has undoubtably had a positive impact on working towards global equality.

Perhaps, then, Zizek’s ideas work best when merely a hypothetical- his ideas form a valuable call to arms for the left to think beyond left populism and liberalism, and rather consider solutions that lie outside of the comfort zone of capitalism. Despite this, in practice his ideas still portray a pessimistic future of the world: one where we cannot escape the ‘inevitability’ of global capitalism, and then ultimately pay the consequences.

David Aisa Miller –

Interview with Alejandro

Bendaña Context: Dr. Alejandro Bendaña was born in Nicaragua in 1950 and is considered one of the world's leading experts in peacebuilding. He served as the Nicaraguan Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Director General of Multilateral Affairs and Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry during Sandinista rule in Nicaragua, from 1979 to 1990. Thereafter he served as a consultant for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Culture of Peace Program and for ex-combatant reintegration in Central America, Colombia and South Africa. Dr. Bendaña also founded the Centro de Estudios Internacionales in Managua, Nicaragua in 1990, and was serving as its Director in July 1997. In 1992-93, Dr. Bendaña was Tinker Professor of Latin America History at the University of Chicago. From 2002 to 2016 he worked for the United Nations and other organizations in peace-building programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Between 2014 and 2015 he served as Senior Mediation Advisor in the UN Department of Political 38

Affairs. Holding a PhD from Harvard University in History, Bendaña is the author of Power Lines: US Hegemony in the New Global Order (Interlink, New York, 1996). He is also the author of Sandino, Patria y Libertad (Anama, Managua, 2016), considered by the American Historical Review to be the “definitive biography of Sandino.” His most recent book is Buenas al pleito, mujeres en la rebelión de Sandino (Anama, Managua, 2019). He is an inspiration to his country and seen as a figure of hope all around the world.

Questions: David: What is the most difficult part about being a peace negotiator and what is the easiest part?

Alejandro: The most difficult part is probably, in my experience, trying to remain aware of your own prejudices, your own bias, your own presumptions, your own culture, your own education and institutional thinking. Because if you're coming from the outside, if you're a third party, the assumption in the question is that the peace negotiation is external. Because it can be internal and then a lot of these difficulties don't apply as much. If it is external, then the negotiator comes in with a lot of baggage which they may or may not be aware of. Nobody comes in as a blank slate. One also must be careful not to inject oneself too much and directly.

The easiest part is probably giving advice and giving an opinion, making technical assistance available and supporting with resources. There's no great science in that.

David: Would you say this because most of the places you're going to don't have the resources that that you provide?

Alejandro: My experience has been that this has often been the case, because over and above what you can do as an individual if you're a negotiator or you're a mediator, this is what the UN, the EU and some big international NGOs will do, is provide advice, support and services. They also might sometimes provide training at the level of the parties or what's called the track two or track three civil society. They also might develop guidance on thematic issues or provide research that might be required. Sometimes central level governments are very weak and then communication becomes a problem between the central level and local levels. That's the type of background support that one can provide without specifically being there directly.

David: How often are politics involved in peace negotiation and does it make it harder or easier?

Alejandro:

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Well, politics are always there. The essence of negotiation is this and the peace process is fundamentally political. Although not exclusively. It will make the task easier if you can reconcile political positions among the parties. But it makes it difficult if the politics are limited to the immediate interest of those sitting around the table. It can be harder if you're trying to achieve sustainable peace and the parties involved are not interested in some group elements or have a vested interest against that and that's when you try to get social issues resolved. But the politics are always there, and ideally you want to make sure to see a value-based and human rights-based politics. Certain principles are taken as a framework because otherwise it will just be vested interests driving the negotiation and it can hijack the process. They could call it peace and it may be just be a cease fire.

David: Have you ever done something that you thought was impossible but then achieved it, and if so, how did you overcome your doubt?

Alejandro: Well, your grandmother probably told you I was part of a generation that set out to get rid of a 40-year-old family dictatorship in 1979. Still in my 20s. That didn’t seem impossible but highly improbable and many thought that it would never take place within our lifetime. But suddenly it happened: the dictatorship collapsed. So, the answer is yes, I think it did seem overwhelming.

The odds and the symmetry in power seemed impossible to overcome but then it was achieved.

Then comes the doubts as to whether the price that is paid for what you intended to do once you achieve that objective and I would say this happens at a later stage. But for the most part it is that sort of struggle, trying to put the doubts out of your mind or trying to deal with it later off in order to achieve the immediate objective. And who knows, maybe we should have been more worried about the doubts earlier on. That's hard to say. I think the key in ‘79 was just pushing on, working hard and above all, working collectively in an organization.

David: Did you ever have a set of rules that you followed to assist you in seeking the best possible outcome, and if so, have you ever broken them in any way?

Alejandro: Often, you'll read about principles and rules which are now often called tools or toolboxes that the mediator should use as if you were going on to repair a broken-down engine but that's not necessarily the best approach. Of course, you must have some guidance in mind. But in my personal experience, what is eventually most critical is to listen. Sometimes we don't listen enough. To try to understand where people are coming from and why. And try to identify commonalities and where the gaps are between a series of positions. There are classical 40

mediation techniques like you would find a marriage counselor use for example or someone that's dealing between a company and the union. With peace, it's a bit more complex and it would be wrong to apply the same set of rules. Although listening and trying to understand is important, it becomes difficult to listen to people feeding you a lie. It becomes difficult when you're listening to people and you know their lying or bull****. Or maybe you must figure out why they're lying or how they are lying. The most difficult task that I ever faced was having to deal with people that were thugs, and they were a member of one of the parties. You can't be totally naive about that. It's not a question of good guys and bad guys. But there are parties that in many negotiations are simply immoral in their acts or in their assumptions. So that's difficult.

It is hard to keep your impartiality in those cases, but you must try, particularly if you've got your own terms of reference up: what you can do and what you can't do.

David: What was your hardest ever negotiating task? Was it in Nicaragua?

Alejandro: In Nicaragua there wasn't really, before 1979, much negotiating to do. I mean it was war. Although all wars end in some sort of negotiation and therefore there might be some negotiations at the end around the terms of Armistice etc. Then there was another end to the War of the 1980s which was more protracted and had international presence that involved political give and take. But the hardest situations I ever faced were in places like Somalia and Libya, where you have totally An image of the celebration of the 38th escaped your frame of reference and anniversary of the Socialist Sandinista you're dealing with tribal and clan revolution in Nicaragua, which triggered USphenomena. You know we don't get backed rebel groups to fight an insurgency training for that. You're dealing with against the government cultural issues. In Nicaragua people were on different sides of the fence, but you still shared the same religion, the same ethnicity, the same language, the same sense of humor. In that context, it was far less complex. When I had to work with the UN in Africa, to deal with some of those issues you no longer felt like history was going in a straight line but it was going in circles and you had to deal with cultural and militaristic practices like traditions of vengeance. I suppose this could have been like Europe up until the 18th or 19th century or large parts of it. That was the hardest one because you had to adapt, and

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you had to try to understand. As well as dealing with thugs or dealing with a cultural tradition that, for example, just excluded women altogether. If the UN people tried to say: Why are all the negotiators elderly men? We get back that that was their first point of consensus: we don't need women in the room. Do you accept that? That is, that is tough. Youth were also excluded. Other times it was just overwhelming. In Somalia you could work out a local peace agreement or different types of representation of distinct people along ethnic land clan lines but then suddenly, we started getting refugees. Then the composition of the population changed and therefore the arrangement that seemed proportional five years ago was no longer seen as representative and it was no longer seen as legitimate. So, then you had to go back to square one. And that's pretty much where your successes are only temporary. You can bring down the violence and contain the conflict. That's a partial success, but the hardest thing I faced was negotiating with cultural components.

David: What do you think are the main pitfalls which cause negotiations to fail?

Alejandro: Sometimes specialists believe that the conflict is not right for settlement. If the conditions aren't there yet, you can't try to hold things or put a lid on things. You must remember that certain people feel different ways about negotiations. For some, negotiations are also war by other means so they are doing battle around the table. Trying to see if they can negotiate what they couldn’t get by armed force using pure negotiation or by political, national or international pressure. Maybe one party is just stalling for time and there's no genuine political will. Maybe it's just negotiating while it's building up its capacity for violence or trying to solve a particular issue.

I think that's always been a problem. You realize more and more that negotiations fail to deliver sustainable peace because they are not inclusive. You've got the parties that are at war, who of course must be there because you might have to negotiate cease fires or whatever. But inclusiveness is getting other actors around the table. And when that is not there then you can't expect the peace to hold on or because the parties will change and then you must go back to where you started. It's also a question of not having a clear vision or a road map of where you go after the cessation of hostility. What's the 2nd, 3rd and 4th step? But now we're no longer talking about negotiation. But a negotiation table or a peace process. More recently, they talk of state building process. How does a country stitch itself back together? If that hasn't been thought through, then the negotiations can fail. If they fail and they don't go back to war you still have achieved a great deal, but it failed to deliver on the development of longer-term stability.

David: How do you think peace negotiating will change in the future?

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Alejandro: It's changing right now. Just take the pandemic for example. The Corona crisis has made peace efforts much more difficult. In addition to the old tensions, we have the new tensions. In addition to the old fragilities, you have the new fragilities. Now I'm referring to the part of the world that I am more familiar with like Africa and Latin America. The question then becomes: How does negotiation and mediation adapt and how quickly can we do that? Sometimes you discover things along the way like now it's more difficult to have face to face contact. The face-to-face dynamics is important, sitting around the table literally. But when this is no longer possible or it becomes very difficult, the task becomes hard. It seems almost impossible but then there was a big push given to Peace Tech and virtual platforms. We even found it easier to bring other people that otherwise wouldn't have made it to talk about the process. What we're seeing is the possibility of bringing more people than previously. The whole question is trust building and face to face meeting with someone is still very much needed, but virtual platforms are giving people additional channels to reach each other and much more globally. It brings more groups together in a country such as Nicaragua not for peace negotiations, but general negotiations. You can bring people in that otherwise couldn't come to the capital and have them participate. I think that some other offices in the UN and elsewhere are actively exploring opportunities that different technologies can offer to local or international peacemakers. We call it Peace Tech. We need to further explore the potential of virtual reality for mediation and see if we can come up with tools because that’s changing. What's also changed is that there are more climate and ecological considerations which are becoming more and more important in peace processes than before.

We also need to recognize migration patterns and how they affect the prospects of an enduring, sustainable peace. The point is not to continue thinking of peace and negotiations simply in terms of attaining stability but being able to contribute to sustainable environmental practices, reverse climate change and address migration flows whilst still working towards peace.

In Northern Africa the process of desertification means that more land is taken up by the desert and being lost with more drought conditions causing more pressure on resources and land. For example, in Sudan there could be more fighting over a reduced number of resources particularly land, minerals or water. You now have the tools that can tell you which areas are going to become strained and then if you look at the national borders, you can almost predict where tensions are going to blow up, particularly if they intermingle with ethnic's divisions or historical inequities.

This can and should help peace negotiations.

There are things that might change, and they are things that shouldn't change such as continuing to be values oriented and human rights focused because you just can't throw out the human rights framework simply for the sake of getting out of a jam. It's important and it's not emphasized enough. It's not a question of technical ability. You're not going in as a medical doctor with a mindset that you have seen this before and this what you have learnt, and this is what you apply to the patient. In fact, the first thing that you learn in medical school, I am told, is to listen to the patient. Let them describe what they feel. You might have an idea from the books, but if

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you do not listen, if you don't have that collaboration then your specialization can’t be applied.

You're not a good doctor and not a good healer. You're not contributing to reconciliation. That's important. Then there are certain things that you simply can’t accept because it's not in your own normative framework, so then you know it's just better to get out.

David: Do you think that there are any areas in peace negotiations that need to be used more? You talked about technology, but are there any areas that haven't been researched or has humanity used all its negotiating ‘skills’?

Alejandro: We need to understand more about the phenomenon of culture. You can't go in and simply take a course or two in mediation and then become a licensed mediator ready to serve anywhere in the world. We're learning it doesn't work in that way. I was talking about having to deal with Somalia and by that time I was a specialist in X, Y and Z. But I had to re interpret X, Y and Z in the light of local culture, local conditions, local situations. You get into a tricky area here that anthropologists love to debate which is when you have found cultures with drug usage, violence and/or prone to oppress women and the youth. So then the question becomes how do you promote positive cultural change because there can be negative cultures. How do you work with culture in order to prevent bias or someone might say how do you work with the grain of culture and not against the grain coming in with your little recipe book? I think it goes back to the importance of listening. It'll get you back to research and get you back to studying and to try to understand where people and identities are coming from and not simply, with a view of solving their problem, but also, we have discovered more when looking at indigenous ways to resolve conflict. If you look at any society like in Somalia and if you go back enough you will find that they always had ways to deal with their problems and conflicts. In many areas it had to do with the elders, the wise man who sort of knew how to work out their issues. Sometimes they used religious ways of keeping the peace. Maybe not a just peace but they were listened to. They were not trained as such, but they developed through experience and deep knowledge of their own people. But the plea I am making here is for understanding the value of local indigenous methods of conflict resolution, reconciliation or transformation. They might not even use the same words because sometimes our own Western words can't be well translated into the local languages. I remember in Somalia we used to keep talking about “security” and we worked with a translator and the translator would use the local word and then I would get difficult looks because security seems like a positive thing for us security and to them it sounded more like the Gestapo. That's what the word was associated with, so we had to breakdown that sort of barrier to find out what are their terms. We found proverbs and religious stories from the Qur'an and from the Bible with lessons of peace and wisdom. These were just theories of mediation and not official techniques, but storytelling can be helpful if you look hard enough because they've been around for a very long time. Translation can kill it if you translate a proverb it then loses its value so that's where the distance between cultures is a disadvantage. There are things that must be explored so that 44

we can get at what should be a common denominator of justice for both victims and for offenders and for society. There may be different paths to that, so I think there's a potential there. What we need to learn more of that in order to do a better job at preventing violence and prevention.

Overall, we must look at newer and better ways of preventing and solving conflict. But also rediscover old ways and to do so from a western perspective with humility.

David: If you could change three specific things in the world to help make peace negotiating easier, what would that include?

Alejandro: It would apply more to certain people that to others but wastefulness is one thing I would change.

Wastefulness is linked to greed which is connected to living styles which is associated to certain systems consequently promoting living styles that reward or condone greed and wastefulness. I think we're looking at something broader. You asked for three things, but everything today is connected. If you can't connect those three things then they're probably not the best things that need to be changed. You must change in a way in which the personal considers society and the societal also considers the person. It can't be one dimensional. I can change myself, but I don't believe that I'm changing the world if I become a saint tomorrow. Larger changes that don’t change individual human behavior are also a problem. There's a clear issue like how you preserve the planet which is probably the most fundamental. A second issue would be the redistribution of power between the corporate world and masses of society, between men and women but also between nature and human beings. One thing we could benefit from is, as they call it in South America, respect the rights of nature. And it's not simply a question of getting along. It's a question of nature as a subject of rights. If we could look at nature in that way that could be the avenue to the fundamental changes that are needed, but it's not whether I can change, it's what needs to be changed in getting people that feel that way and to interact with each other and go to work.

David: Imagine you could start all over again. What would you do? What would you study? What subjects would you take to get the most important skills for becoming the best peace negotiator you can be?

Alejandro: I don’t think it's an element of skills. Skills would not be the right term. I would call it sensitivities.

Being a peace and justice maker, is not something you can pick up on YouTube. I think what you do need are, in personal terms, is the ability to apply humility from the very beginning. Education is important and we can get the PhD, but it doesn't make us any smarter. If you don’t have that humility, then you're going to fall to the presumption that you know more than the other and that's dangerous because that's not a good negotiation skill or peace building skill. Or worse, you 45

put all the others in a box, I know better, and they don't or they're simply like this. For example, when people think of African values or African cultures when in reality there are hundreds of them. You don't fall into orientalism that Edward Said talked about. It's not brain surgery. There you could talk about skills and even then, there's always ethical issues about how and when to operate. I think I would have studied more sociological anthropology in order to try to understand how other cultures work but not with a view of judging them but with a view at looking at other logics.

It's a question of applying that there are many common senses. As someone once said, ‘Sometimes common sense is the least common of the senses.” It’s also about knowing what to keep and what to throw out. You must build up your own core values and principles. More than values as values can change; your principles must be rock solid. Based on principals, you gain an understanding in order to get at the larger goal, which for me was greater social equality in a way that celebrates human differences and therefore, gets on a better path towards freedom. There's a lot of balancing acts there, but I think that's what has guided me in knowing where I could and could not compromise dealing with governments, international organizations and so many others.

Ben de Sousa -

A review of the philosophical foundations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Ben philosophically reviews one of the most important documents in modern political history and the difficulty in its criticism The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an instrument of customary international law which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. It consists of 30 articles which cover ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’, such as Article 3, which states that ‘Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person’. The UDHR has its basis in the concept of fundamental human rights, which has been developed by various philosophers such as Jacques Maritain, Immanuel Kant and Karl Rahner. However, although the adoption of the UDHR was, and still is, widely viewed as a positive step, the very idea of ‘universal human rights’ has often been criticised on a philosophical level by thinkers like William Sumner, Richard Rorty and Jeremy Bentham.

The philosopher whose ideas most directly influenced the UDHR was Jacques Maritain. Maritain strongly believed in natural law ethics and thought that we could know the natural law primarily through ‘Connaturality’, which is acquaintance with the natural law through our experiences, rather than through reasoning. He argued that natural law provided the basis for human rights.

Through the natural law he thought we could discover ‘an ideal order, with its roots in the nature

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of man and of human society, [which] can impose moral requirements universally valid in the world of experience, of history and of facts.’ Maritain was also involved with the drafting of the Declaration in his role at UN. In his book ‘Man and the State’ (1951), he wrote that ‘During one of the meetings… at which the Rights of Man were being discussed, someone was astonished that certain proponents of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on the draft of a list of rights’.

As a result, he believed that human rights could be universal, so even if moral relativists, who believe that the moral principles of a particular country or group of people are shaped by their unique cultural background, argue that morality cannot be objective, it is still possible to find common ground when it comes to the fundamentals of morality.

Immanuel Kant was another philosopher whose ideas influenced how the concept of human rights eventually developed into the UDHR. His justification of human rights was primarily based on the principles of equality and the rationality of humans, and hence our morally autonomous nature. The idea of universal guidelines that lead to equality and morality can be based in Kant’s philosophy through his categorical imperative. This can be summarised as determining that an action is ethical if it respects the preciousness of human life by not treating other people as means to an end and if it can be successfully universalised (applied to everyone). Kant therefore set the precedent that it is possible for basic moral rules that apply to all human beings to be created by human beings due to our rational, and thus autonomous, nature."

However, there are many philosophers who have criticised or put forward concerns about the concept of human rights, and in particular the idea that any kind of moral principle can be ‘universal’ in nature. One of these criticisms is put forward by moral relativists. Because they believe that morality cannot be objective, the idea of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights is illogical to them as it purports to provide a universal moral standard that cannot exist. Moral relativists are also concerned that the UDHR could be a production of an ethnocentric process, which is the assumption that, in this case, the moral principles of authors of the UDHR could provide a standard by which those who may not hold the same moral principles would be judged with. The anthropologist William Sumner summarised this when he wrote that ‘the mores (customs of a particular culture or individual) can make anything right and prevent condemnation of anything’, showing how moral relativism means that the very concept of universal moral principles may be flawed. The American Anthropological Association strongly advocated for this criticism of the UDHR. In fact, during the lead up to the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, a group of Asian states signed the Bangkok Declaration, which reaffirmed their commitment to the UDHR, but also emphasised the importance of sovereignty and cultural differences in determining what constitutes a right, therefore criticising the concept of universal moral principles.

A criticism of the rational philosophical basis of human rights in general was put forward by Richard Rorty. Rorty argued that the idea of human rights is irrational and is based on a sentimental view of humanity. This is because, in his opinion, morality originates in the heart, through a sympathetic identification with other human beings, rather than the head, and is

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therefore emotional rather than rational. However, it is worth noting that Rorty does believe that human rights are a ‘good and desirable thing’. Rorty therefore argues that even though human rights may not be rationally defensible, it is not a negative thing that they are grounded in an emotional appeal to relate and connect with the suffering of others. Other philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Mackie also presented similar arguments which criticised the concept of human rights for purporting to be objectively moral when they, in a similar way to moral relativists, believe that morality is a subjective expression of an individual’s emotional preferences.

Perhaps the most famous criticisms of the idea of absolute human rights (that which cannot be abrogated under any circumstances) was provided by Jeremy Bentham, who declared that it was ‘nonsense upon stilts’. He strongly criticised the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). Bentham argued that if everyone possessed absolute rights, then those rights would become meaningless. This is because, for example, if everyone had an absolute right to freedom and liberty, then everyone would be free and able to abrogate the right to freedom of others. This criticism exposes a deep flaw in the concept of absolute human rights that would be almost impossible to remedy. Although the authors of the French Declaration acknowledged this criticism, Bentham responded that ‘It would be self-contradictory, because these rights are, in the same breath which their existence is declared, declared to be imprescriptible [absolute]; and imprescriptible... means nothing unless it excludes the interference of the laws’. Therefore, a philosophical dilemma is developed through this contradiction within the idea of absolute human rights. However, this dilemma could potentially be resolved through the use of J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle, for example, where the laws enforced by a government may only abrogate the right to absolute freedom if that right is being abused with the intention of causing harm to another.

Therefore, although the concept of absolute human rights may be flawed, that does not mean that the concept of human rights in general is flawed as well.

However, I must conclude that it could be argued that criticising the UDHR itself on a philosophical level is weak, because it does not purport to be based on a philosophical understanding of the concept of human rights, instead, the Preamble of the UDHR appeals to the ‘inherent dignity... of all members of the human family’. The concept of ‘human dignity’ being protected through human rights is most prominently defended by Karl Rahner, who related it most strongly with freedom and liberty. Therefore, all the criticisms detailed above cannot be practically applied to the UDHR despite all being strong philosophical critiques of the general concept of universal and absolute human rights.

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Nathan Concagh -

Is the Democratic Peace Theory still a viable theory in global politics?

Nathan critically analyses the geopolitical theory and weighs up whether it is still relevant, or whether it has ever been The Democratic Peace Theory is a well-known phenomenon in global politics and international relations, essentially stating that democracies are unlikely to engage in armed conflict against each other. There are several factors held motivating peace between states, including but not limited to; the fact that democratic leaders are, by definition, held to account and forced to accept responsibility for war losses to a voting public, the fact that democracies are generally not inclined to view countries with adjacent policy and governing doctrine as hostile and the fact that democracies generally tend to possess greater public wealth than other states, thus avoiding war to preserve infrastructure and resources. Whilst this theory was not studied to a great extent until the 1960s, the foundations of this theory stretch back to the 18 th century, with philosopher Immanuel Kant foreshadowing the theory in his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Kant set out that a world which only contains constitutional republics was only one, but still a greatly important, condition for perpetual world peace. Kant’s theory was that a majority of the people would never vote to go to war, unless in self-defense, which would mean that if all nations were republics, it would end all war, because there would be no aggressors.

However, like any other political theory, it faces great amount of criticism. For this theory, it is often criticised on the grounds that it conflates correlation with causation.

Additionally, and arguably the most poignant criticism is that the academic definitions of ‘democracy’ and ‘war’ are already loose as they are, let alone the fact that they have the ability to be manipulated to prove either side. Ultimately, whilst one can draw conclusions as to whether the theory still holds up, the nature of international politics and conflict in the 20 th and 21st centuries are so complex it is difficult to measure the viability of the theory. Whilst there has been no war at quite the same drastic scale as the second world war since its end, conflict has raged throughout the world since. But, because of the nature of the theory, it still stands up, as there has been no war between two genuine liberal democracies to date. Cynically, one could argue that the Democratic Peace Theory is not about maintaining peace between democracies, but instead maintaining the current state of international capitalism that greatly benefits the

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world’s largest (democratic) economies. The theory is interesting, contentious and incredibly relevant, and most exciting, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from.

One could say that the Democratic Peace Theory is still viable, as in the space of time since the theory has been accepted as a recognised part of international relations, there have been no major wars between established democracies. Since the 1960s, there have been very few armed conflicts between recognised countries, with even fewer actual declarations of war. The majority of the conflicts that have occurred have been civil wars, proxy wars and insurgencies, with democracies being greatly involved but never being in direct confrontation with one another. A notable example of this would be the involvement of the United States and Russia in the Syrian Civil War, with the Russian government backing the Syrian government and the US backing Syrian opposition forces and Kurdish militias; directly in opposition to the Syrian government. Whilst Russia itself has an incredibly volatile political system that can barely be called a democracy, its position as one of the world’s largest economies essentially puts it in a place where it can be slotted into the theory. There are too many common interests for Russia and the US to be in direct conflict with each other, despite however poor the relations between the two countries may get. This can also be shown through the lack of a coordinated international response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Donbass. Above all, there has simply been no armed conflict between two liberal democracies, ever really. Since most western nations have taken on universal suffrage and have allowed all those over the age of 18 to participate in democracy, there have been no direct confrontation between two countries which subscribe to this.

However, this is where the problem with the theory arises. My definition of democracy is not the same definition that may occur in a dictionary, and may not be the same as the definitions set out by the United Nations or the United States. Britain was classed as a closed anocracy (essentially semi democracy) at the time it was engaged in war with the United States in 1812, when the US also saw itself as a democracy. If one is loose with the definition of democracy, itself being a notoriously difficult term to pin down, the theory loses all meaning as well.

Israeli historian Azar Gat argues that it is not democracy in itself that leads to peace but other aspects of modernisation, such as economic prosperity and lower population growth. The dramatic growth of wealth during the 20th century is a great incentive to maintain peace.

Democracies are now more reluctant to go to war with one another because they are simply too focused on amassing wealth for themselves and would see war as a detriment to this. Instead, these countries can still use conflicts of other sorts to make money for themselves; the US military budget has increased by over $400 billion since 2001 (when the perpetual ‘War on Terror’ began), with several tens of billions of dollars being poured into arms procurement, an industry that greatly benefits the US economy. Ironically, it is some kind of perpetual conflict that secures the US military’s relationships with companies such as Boeing, Lockheed, Colt and General Motors.

One factor that Kant could not have predicted when he originally set out the theory was just how dramatically warfare has changed in the last 2 centuries. At the time that Kant was writing, most wars were fought in the form of set piece battles, where statesman like generals would be often

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confined to having their armies shoot at one another in open ground. At that point, the size of one’s army was equally as important as the tactics used. However, warfare since then (especially during the 20th and 21st centuries) has proven that one does not need a large army to overcome another. Most frighteningly, it has been less than 100 years that humanity has possessed weaponry that has the theoretical capability to end all human life on earth. The theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was coined in 1962 by Donald Brennan, a political strategist for the Hudson Institute. Brennan actually came up with the acronym ironically, essentially stating that the situation itself is irrational. MAD is essentially the military doctrine that if a fullscale nuclear strike is undertaken by two or more sides, it would end in the complete inhalation of both the attacker and defender. It’s based in the theory of deterrence; that is to say the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons.

Whilst one can say that MAD is the pinnacle of the futility of war, one could also say that this is also the height of the Democratic Peace Theory. The few nations that have nuclear capability share (mostly) common interests globally, let alone the fact that if they went to war with another, it would have catastrophic effects not just for themselves, but the entire world’s population. To paraphrase, nuclear weapons have built ‘Democratic Peace’.

Ultimately, in my view, the only way the Democratic Peace Theory can hold up in modern political discourse is if we concede that ‘democratic’ actually means ‘invested in global capitalism’.

However, the original conception by Kant of a voting public still being against war remains generally true, with wars only being popular in democracies when they are seen as being in defense (hence why only 34% of Americans favoured the war in Iraq by 2007, three years after the initial invasion). Overall, as mentioned earlier, the definitions of democracy and war are so contentious and malleable, it makes this theory notoriously difficult to discuss and attach merit to. In my view, the theory seems like an attempt by neoliberals to instill regime change wherever they deem it necessary in an attempt to create peace, but instead only to facilitate a country into the system of global capitalism so it can be exploited like every other. However, if a by-product of this is peace, one must resign themselves to admitting that it is a good thing.

Social Contract Theory –

Three of Trinity’s top thinkers explore three other thinkers’ views on the notion of a social contract 51

In political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Enlightenment Era and concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.

Social contract theory, nearly as old as philosophy itself, is the view that persons' moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or mutual agreement among them to form the society in which they live; an agreement between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each. In primeval times, according to the theory, individuals were born into an anarchic state of nature, which was happy or unhappy according to the particular version.

They then, by exercising natural reason, formed a society (and a government) by means of a contract among themselves.

Although similar ideas can be traced to the Greek Sophists, social-contract theories had their greatest prominence in the 17th and 18th centuries and are associated with such philosophers as the Englishmen Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the Frenchman JeanJacques Rousseau. What distinguished these theories of political obligation from other doctrines of the period, was their attempt to justify and delimit political authority on the grounds of individual self-interest and rational consent. By comparing the advantages of organized government with the disadvantages of the state of nature, they showed why and under what conditions government is useful and ought therefore to be accepted by all reasonable people as a voluntary obligation. These conclusions were then reduced to the form of a social contract, from which it was supposed that all the essential rights and duties of citizens could be logically deduced. The three major formulations of thee social contract put forward by the aforementioned thinkers will be discussed here.

Ben Wilding - Thomas Hobbes Initially, Hobbes imagines a world where humanity is free from external authorities, each person maintains ‘perfectly private judgement’. He refers to this as the “State of Nature”, an existence in which individuals have complete agency and control over their actions. Despite the immediate implication that such a world may remove prejudice and power abuse, provide equal opportunity, and allow people to flourish – in fact, Hobbes highlighted the flaws in such a lawless society coming into fruition. Firstly, our lives would be far more simplistic and primitive. Without the initialisation of a collective civilisation, we would lack the co-operation to make significant progression in society. We would therefore lack the ability to utilise resources for structure, we would have no sense of navigation for we would not have the instruments required, we would not have a detailed sense of time, nor would we appreciate art or literature. Life would ultimately remain a basic fight for survival and thus would be unfulfilling and resulting in humanity losing its purpose and sense of progression. More importantly though, such an existence exposes our fundamental human nature, as Hobbes states in his book, ‘Leviathan’: such a “dissolute condition of masterlesse men, without subjection to Lawes, and coercive power to tye their hands from rapine, and revenge…the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” We may not be inherently evil but we are certainly similar in physical 52

and mental attributes which gives everyone a sense of vulnerability. Combine this with the will to preserve our own life being our strongest motivating force, we will naturally compete and dominate in order to assure this survival and reduce our vulnerability – even at the potential peril of those around us. According to Hobbes, this is our “right of nature”. However, through the ethical principle implied that any necessary means is acceptable to achieve the most important end; being that of our own survival, this “right of nature” becomes a dangerous right “to all things.” There are many different unethical ‘means’ that people use, such as competing for optimal living conditions through invasion of land or stealing of resources. This is bound to occur because of the completely subjective morality in an existence where there are no governing authorities enforcing external laws. People can decide for themselves what is morally acceptable, and this will inevitably lead to disagreement. Furthermore, a minority of people will disregard ethical decision making all together – Hobbes refers to them as “Vainglorious”, those who are power-hungry and seek to exploit others for personal gain no matter whether they believe this action to be morally wrong or not. Ultimately Hobbes is correct in highlighting that our autonomy, although desirable on the surface, will lead to a war of “all against all”. Thus, an absolute authority is required to remove subjectivity and the resulting division in peoples’ moral decision making.

Hobbes believed we are rational human beings and thus we are keenly aware of the flaws in a “State of Nature”. We are also therefore aware of the necessity of establishing a Sovereign Authority to govern us and our ‘Social Contract’ to this authority. Any reasonable person can conclude that a lawless society is an unreliable method of realising our important human ends. What does guarantee these ends - such as survival and prosperity - is peace, “peace is good, and therefore also the way or means of peace are good.” Ultimately if we strive for peace then Abraham Bosse’s famous etching for the we must achieve it through creating rules cover of Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’. The image itself that prevent division and war. This can be represents the theory of the social contract, viewed upon as replacing our natural rights with a monarch being made up of their own that can be harmful with limited rights that are subject to societal laws.

This subjects surrendering of a certain amount of liberty to gain security of preservation is Hobbes’ Social Contract. He uses the Biblical ‘Golden Rule’ to illustrate his idea of limited rights: it reads, “Whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them.” This is that one must treat others as they wish to be treated and in relation to sacrificing our “right of all things”, Hobbes writes, “Be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.” An example would be giving up the natural right to steal another person’s food to survive so that they also give up their right

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to steal your food. Ultimately, this law must be enforced externally to be universal and this leads Hobbes to conclude that establishing a Sovereign Authority is required. Furthermore, the importance of an undivided governing authority is key otherwise political disagreement ensues that can lead to ineffective government or else degeneration into civil war. Such events can be seen to take place in America, such as the vast difference in policies between Democrat and Republican parties as well as the, at times, violent battle between rival supporters, epitomised by the Capitol riots earlier this year. Moreover, people must be obligated to follow government rules unless it puts their life in unjustified danger. This is because to allow people to deviate from the law based on an individual situation creates an infinite regress of citizens becoming their own authority until society loses control. Nevertheless, Hobbes also accounted for potential abuse of power from governing authorities. Despite the importance of absolute rules, there must be political legitimacy from the Sovereign Authority. Specifically, it must protect all people (without favouritism to the strong over the weak) who consent to obeying their laws – forming an ideal reciprocal relationship between government and populace, harmonising political obedience and peace. Overall, Hobbes provides a Social Contract theory that stresses the importance of lawmaking to discourage a potentially harmful level of autonomy, but also one that is applicable and avoids tyrannical rule.

Luca Wade –

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau’s early work argued that the development of civilisation had actually led to a decrease in happiness, and that humans should live instead in a state that was as close to nature as possible. The Social Contract, with its famous opening sentence “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains”, stated instead that people could only experience true freedom if they lived in a civil society that ensured the rights and well-being of its citizens. Being part of such a society involved submitting to the ‘general will’ – a force that transcended individuals and aimed to uphold the common good. Here, I will convey Rousseau’s own utopia which can be found in his seminal work The Social Contract (Du contrat social, 1762).

With the celebrated phrase, "man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains," Rousseau asserts that modern states repress the physical freedom that is our birthright and do nothing to secure the civil freedom for the sake of which we enter into civil society. Legitimate political authority, he suggests, comes only from a social contract agreed upon by all citizens for their mutual preservation. Rousseau calls the collective grouping of all citizens the "sovereign," and claims that it should be considered in many ways to be like an individual person. While each individual has a particular will that aims for his own best interest, the sovereign expresses the general will that aims for the common good. The sovereign only has authority over matters that are of public concern, but in this domain its authority is absolute: Rousseau recommends the death penalty for those who violate the social contract.

The general will finds its clearest expression in the general and abstract laws of the state, which are created early in that state's life by an impartial, non-citizen lawgiver. All laws must ensure

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liberty and equality: beyond that, they may vary depending on local circumstances. While the sovereign exercises legislative power by means of the laws, states also need a government to exercise executive power, carrying out day-to-day business. There are many different forms of government, but they can roughly be divided into democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, depending on their size. Monarchy is the strongest form of government and is best suited to large populations and hot climates. While different states are suited to different forms of government, Rousseau interestingly maintains that aristocracies tend to be the most stable.

The government is distinct from the sovereign, and the two are almost always in friction. This friction will ultimately destroy the state, but healthy states can last many centuries before they dissolve. The people exercise their sovereignty by meeting in regular, periodic assemblies. It is often difficult to persuade all citizens to attend these assemblies, but attendance is essential to the well-being of the state. When citizens elect representatives or try to buy their way out of public service, the general will shall not be heard and the state will become endangered. When voting in assemblies, people should not vote for what they want personally, but for what they believe is the general will. In a healthy state, the results of these votes should approach unanimity. To prove that even large states can assemble all their citizens, Rousseau takes the example of the Roman republic and its ‘comitia’. Rousseau recommends the establishment of a tribunate to mediate between government and sovereign and government and people. In cases of emergency, brief dictatorships may be necessary. The role of the censor's office is to voice public opinion. While everyone should be free to observe their personal beliefs in private, Rousseau suggests that the state also require all citizens to observe a public religion that encourages good citizenship.

Rousseau's principal aim in writing The Social Contract is to determine how freedom may be possible in civil society, and we might do well to pause briefly and understand what he means by "freedom." In the state of nature, we enjoy the physical freedom of having no restraints on our behaviour. But by entering into the social contract, we place restraints on our behaviour, which make it possible to live in a community. By giving up our physical freedom, however, we gain the civil freedom of being able to think rationally. We can put a check on our impulses and desires, and thus learn to think morally. The term "morality" only has significance within the confines of civil society, according to Rousseau.

Not just freedom, then, but also rationality and morality, are only possible within civil society.

And civil society, says Rousseau, is only possible if we agree to the social contract. Thus, we do not only have to thank society for the mutual protection and peace it affords us; we also owe our rationality and morality to civil society. In short, we would not be human if we were not active participants in society.

Lucas Ferrar -

John Locke

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There is something fascinating about thinkers who later become the foremost critic of themselves. Perhaps the most famous example of this was Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus inspired Logical Positivism through its correspondence theory of truth, which he spent the rest of his life attacking through the concept of ‘language games’. But a close contender for this self-criticism must be John Locke (1632-1704), who moved from a position of extreme conservatism early on, espousing the importance of absolute monarchy and religious uniformity, to a position of unusual toleration where government required the consent of the people. This change reflects a shift in his circumstances, as for the first twenty years of his academic career he was in the cloistered, scholastic environment of Oxford, from which he was liberated by employment for the radical Earl of Shaftesbury.

In his ‘Two Tracts on Government’, Locke argued for a supreme magistrate figure, who should be the sole judge of ‘matters indifferent’, i.e. religious worship. He argues that “there has been no design so wicked which hath not worn the vizor of religion, nor rebellion not been so kind to itself as to assume the specious name of reformation”; in other words, a lack of religious uniformity will soon lead to conflict as different sects seek to impose on others. Locke asks whether more danger lies in a disorderly mob, or a single, wise ruler, displaying the heavy Platonic influence of the ‘philosopher-king’ model. He even uses Plato’s ‘ship of state’ metaphor, which claims that the state needs a capable ‘captain’. This is a hugely conservative vision of the Social Contract, defending the recently reinstated monarchy, but there are perhaps hints of the greater liberality to come. For example, Locke suggests that whilst monarchs should outwardly force subjects to obey them, they are powerless to ‘cast men’s minds and manners into one mould’, and in fact to try and alter inner conscience would be a sin – this suggests a difficulty in controlling subjects without their consent. Locke expanded this theme in a later essay on the ‘Law of Nature’, which argues for an absolute moral law, and that a good policy is one that can be obeyed without issues of conscience, now seeming to oppose religious uniformity. There is also a fundamental issue in that to ignore one’s conscience and follow the magistrate would be to turn away from God; but to follow one’s conscience and ignore the magistrate would lead to ‘a state of war’ – this issue could only be resolved through a shift in thinking.

This shift became apparent with the publication of ‘An Essay on Toleration’, which argued that the magistrate should interfere with nothing other than preserving the peace, in stark opposition to the earlier ‘captain of the ship’. He argues that this is both morally and politically superior, since much conflict has been caused by the attempted imposition of religious beliefs. Thus it can be seen that Locke flips to the polar opposite of his previous stance that there should be religious uniformity, but with the same aim of preventing conflict. Since the aim is political stability, the magistrate may still, for example, suppress religious publications which might lead to ‘the disturbance of government’ – freedom of belief is not the same as freedom of expression. This is also no utopian view, since neither atheists nor Catholics enjoy the tolerance extended to Protestants. But Locke is clear that using force to change opinions is “the worst, the last to be used, and with the greatest caution.” This can be in some ways read as an early form of the Harm Principle, as outlined by the utilitarian J.S. Mill – believers are essentially free to do what they want, as long as it does not cause harm to others. This development in his political thought culminated in the seminal work ‘Two Treatises’. The first of these was a rebuttal of the works of 56

Sir Robert Filmer, who supported the divine right of kings, and consisted of a large amount of Biblical analysis. Of greater importance was the second treatise, which outlined Locke’s vision of a government based on majority consent. He rejects slavery, because rule must be consensual, and by definition one cannot consent to slavery. Crucially, he also suggests that people may rebel when the magistrate acts contrary to the trust placed in them by the people. There must always be a balance of power, and Locke remarks strikingly that ‘the reigns of good princes have always been most dangerous to the liberties of their people’, since the subjects become far too accepting control, which may be exploited by the next magistrate.

To conclude, whilst Locke began in a Hobbesian position, supporting absolute monarchy, he finished quite antithetical to it. Hobbes presents in many ways a more coherent and convincing account – for example, Locke’s state of nature is one of anarchical peace, with a minority causing issues, which raises the question of why government is necessary. There are many questions raised unanswered, such as the extent to which freedom of expression may be suppressed. Moreover, Locke’s idea of government by consent can be seen as too idealistic – we don’t exactly opt in to society, and especially in a globalised world it seems almost impossible to opt out. Nonetheless, his insistence on a ‘consenting majority’ laid the foundations for the emergence of British democracy which was to take place in the 18 th century, and thus it seems that Locke, unlike Hobbes, was on the right side of history.

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