Bad Bank, Bad Capitalism!

Mark Featherstone

The day after I posted my most recent piece on the Sociology Criminology Blog concerning the credit crunch I spoke to my father about the current economic situation. Although he is technologically illiterate and had not read my post, he asked me what I thought about the American Treasury’s proposal to open a ‘bad bank’. He told me that he thought it was problematic that the tax payer was being expected to bail out private banks that had made enormous profits from the boom economy over the past twenty years. More especially he explained that he was surprised that the Bush Administration, which has always championed Friedmanite neo-liberal economics, would turn away from free market ideology in order to embrace socialistic principles of state managed economics.

Given that my father completed his formal education at the age of 15, I was surprised that he had immediately grasped the problem with the American Treasury’s multi-billion dollar proposal to set up a publicly funded bad bank. I responded that I thought the current situation, which has seen the nationalisation of various private banks, presented Anglo-American society with a choice: either our political leaders will recognise the moral dimensions of the credit crunch and democratise the economy, by providing the public with economic rights equal to the financial outlay required to stabilise the crashing market, or they will use tax payers’ money to stabilise the economy only to allow the robber barons of capitalism to go about the business free of regulation once political intervention has successfully rebooted the failing markets.

The problem with the second option is that it will not only restart the unsustainable credit boom, but also leave the Anglo-American political elites with no money to fund the already minimal welfare states they currently operate. If the former political champions of neo-liberalism, who are currently conveniently condemning the banking elites for their reckless behaviour, choose the second option we can therefore expect to see cut-backs in public provision and the subsequent condemnation of outsider groups, such as the unemployed, single mothers, and refugees, over the next couple of years. In much the same way that it is prudent for our politicians to scapegoat the banking elites at the moment, because they need public money to stabilise the market thrown into chaos by deregulated bankers who were simply following the economic ideology laid out by a generation of neo-liberal politicians, it will be necessary to condemn welfare scroungers in the near future, when it becomes clear that there is no money left in the public coffers to pay for social security.

At this point, the credit crunch will be forgotten. Instead, we will be confronted with new ‘social’ problems – overblown myths concerning the evils of unemployed welfare cheats who want to get paid for sitting on the backsides, single mothers who have children in order to get a council house, and refugees who want to come to our country to ‘steal our jobs’. It may even be the case that global terrorism will make a serious come back in the media in order to unseat economic uncertainty in the pecking order of public fears and re-establish radicalised Islamic youth as the key internal enemy. What better way to deflect our attention from the identity of the real internal enemy, the political-economic elite, what Naomi Klein calls the corporatist class, who are set on making money whatever the social cost, than by invoking the racist fear of the other, the outsider masquerading as insider.

Following our short discussion, my father and I agreed that the Anglo-American political elites should not be allowed to take the second route out of the credit crunch and that the result of any public rescue package should entail the democratisation of the economy: regulation of the market, restrictions on private credit, and the redistribution of resources from rich to poor in order to fund new welfare programmes. But how can we ensure that this happens when it is likely that Klein’s corporatists will simply play the masses and re-establish the existing balance of power? The answer is that we, the citizenry, must ensure that we are not robbed by the corporatists who have led us into the credit crunch. Whether we are capable of this critical action is a different matter.

What we need to make sure the credit crunch ends with the correct, moral, outcome is sociological intelligence or sociological vision. Clearly, this is a faculty that my father possesses, probably because he was schooled in the class politics of post-war Britain, and never bought into Thatcherite ideology in the 1970s. Unfortunately, the children of Thatcher and Blair cannot fall back on such everyday critical faculties, which is probably why I was so surprised by his insights, and must learn our sociological vision through engagement with the old masters in the classroom. This is what I have understood through a combination of early socialisation and higher education.

Finally, let me reiterate the key point of my previous post on the credit crunch which was reinforced by my conversation with my father: we need sociological thought more than ever today in order to provide some kind of moral / ethical / social vision in a world which has been emptied of any sense of responsibility for other people. Under current conditions, characterised by neo-liberal Thatcherite ideology which undermines every form of critique, it is unlikely that we will seize the opportunity for redress provided by the credit crunch. However, this is what we must insist upon. Neoliberalism may be over, but we cannot allow the corporatist robber barons of capitalism to restart their unsustainable programme of global plunder with public money. The fallacy of scientific monetarism, the belief that the market will run itself, has been exposed. Akin to the 1930s, when laissez faire thought was first laid bare, and Keynesianism appeared on the scene, we must seize this opportunity to evolve a new redistributive social order. In short, we must impose sociological thought upon the current situation. We must use the bad bank to kill bad capitalism.

Big Bang Day or The End of the World as we Know It

By Mark Featherstone

Image from www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/08/particlephysics.physics

Sometime on Wednesday 10th September Scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, will turn on the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) or ‘God Machine’ in an attempt to re-create the conditions of the big bang which originally gave birth to the universe. The LHC, dubbed the ‘God Machine’, is the world’s largest particle accelerator. Constructed under the Earth’s surface near the French-Swiss border, the objective of the LHC is to fire particles around its 17-mile circumference 11,000 times every second before smashing them together to simulate the conditions at the moment of the birth of the universe. According to CERN scientists the colliding particles will produce temperatures 100,000 hotter than the sun and enable them to observe the production of the famous Higgs-Boson particle which, in theoretical terms at least, gives all other particles their mass or weight. Thus CERN scientists believe that they will be able to observe the very production of mass or, in philosophical terms, the emergence of something from nothing through conditions generated by the ‘God Machine’.

The history of modern culture is characterised by critiques of supposed scientific attempts to play God. In this respect the invention of the LHC is no different. Less than ten days before the proposed turn-on date for the ‘God Machine’, critics from the scientific community, led by German Chemist Otto Rossler, launched a legal bid against CERN in the European Court of Human Rights. Rossler’s claim was that the attempt to replicate the conditions of the big bang could inadvertently produce microscopic black holes which could subsequently grow uncontrollably until they swallowed the entire planet and everybody on it. CERN’s position, which was that theoretical evidence suggests that any microscopic black holes produced by the ‘God Machine’, would immediately collapse in on themselves long before they could have macroscopic effects, was upheld by EU scientists. As a result the clock is ticking. According to critics of the ‘God Machine’ if we are not swallowed by a black hole, we will suffer through the production of ‘strangelets’, a ‘vacuum bubble’, or a variety of other totally theoretical un-intended consequences.

Given that I am not a theoretical physicist, I am in no position to comment on the relative value of Rossler’s apocalyptic view, which seems to have been dismissed by the scientific community, but there is more to the ‘God Machine’ than its scientific significance. For sociologists and cultural critics what is significant about the LHC, and the various responses to its creation, which range from quasi-theological claims about unlocking the secrets of creation itself to apocalyptic fears about the collapse of the planet into a man-made black hole, is that it has captured the public imagination in ways that the theoretical science which underpins its construction never could. What is this wider cultural significance?

In the first instance the LHC’s promise to unlock the secrets of the origins of the universe touches humanity’s primal need to understand the conditions of its own existence. Long before the Ancient Greeks first began to develop theoretical physics, prehistoric people had contemplated the stars and imagined their own origins. Before science became the dominant mode of thought, the form of knowledge which we turn to in order to understand our own existence, people thought about the world through religion. In much the same way that the ideas of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein failed to unseat religion, it is unlikely that the ‘God Machine’, which may uncover the origins of the universe and eventually explain how nothing suddenly became something, will ever stop people believing in their various Gods, simply because what it will never be able to uncover, or provide, is the human ‘meaning’ of the universe. No matter what the ‘God Machine’ enables scientists to say, it will never allow them to tell us why life matters.

Perhaps one day in the near future, the ‘God Machine’ may allow scientists to explain how nothing became something, and thus solve one of the most vexing problems in the history of philosophy, but they will never be able to answer the more trouble question that haunts the only self-conscious animal on the planet. Given that there is something, rather than nothing, what is the significance of existence? Why does ‘the something’ matter? If, as modern philosophers have long suspected, there is no meaning in existence, how should we live? How can we live in a meaningless universe? The beauty of the religious answer to this question of existence was, of course, that it was insoluble, in that nobody could prove the existence of God one way or the other, and that the more or less likely existence of what philosopher’s call a prime mover meant that somebody or something had cared enough to invent people in the first place. What would it mean if we were to discover that the universe was truly self-generating and that explanations about origins do not require a prime mover?

The German writer Friedrich Nietzsche told us that God is Dead in the 19th century and dropped humanity into a meaningless void characterised by despair, boredom, and the violent will to create or impose meaning upon the world. Other writers took up Nietzsche’s challenge. The famous Russian writer Dostoyevsky expanded upon Nietzsche view. He believed that if there is no God everything and anything is permitted. In this context ‘everything permitted’ essentially meant that people could become Gods, that they could remake the world in their own image, and uncover the secular origins of the world and universe. Fast forward through the history of what sociologists call modernity, which takes in Mary Shelley’s original scientific dystopia Frankenstein, the technological nightmare of world war I, the Holocaust, the Atom Bomb, and Chernobyl, and it becomes clear that in many ways the fear of technology expressed in the court challenge to the ‘God Machine’ is not without precedent or in cultural terms really all that surprising.

Humans have a long history of fearing science and technology, dating back to the ancient myth of Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the Greek Gods and had his liver eaten out by a vulture for his trouble, and the prediction that the ‘God Machine’ will create a black hole which will swallow the planet is simply the most recent in a long line of techno-scientific dystopias, which include the fear of computer technology, expressed in films such as The Terminator and The Matrix, and the fear of genetic engineering, examined by horror movies, such as Godsend. What horrifies people about science and new technology is the idea that even though humans have risen to the status of Gods in their heads, they are still prone to error and cannot be trusted with their new-found Godlike powers. Thus, in much the same way that everyday life is littered with good intentions gone bad, we suspect that the grand schemes of scientists will eventually lead to catastrophic consequences.

If we follow the logic of the French thinker, Paul Virilio, who has written about the idea of the accident, we may conclude that the problem with the ‘God Machine’ is that it offers a techno-scientific dystopia for a global age. Whereas the techno-scientific accidents which originated in the 19th century, such as train wrecks, threatened the lives of the people on the crashed train, and the techno-scientific accidents of the 20th century, such as Chernobyl, threatened the lives of people on a particular continent, the potential techno-scientific accident of the 21st century, the ‘God Machine’, threatens the existence of the planet itself. But beyond the obvious problem of the un-intended production of a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth, I think that the real human fear that the God Machine speaks to is the fear, or perhaps a better term is anxiety, that there is no real meaning in the universe, that everything ever created was simply an accident of colliding particles, a kind of cosmic crash, and that as a result nobody or nothing really matters to anybody or anything beyond humanity itself.

If this is, in fact, the case then it might be that we have been teetering on the brink of a black hole, a void of meaninglessness, which has allowed us to treat millions of people in the world like so many atomic particles devoid of meaning and significance, long before the LHC was invented or even imagined. In this respect we do not really need another doomsday scenario, a vision of world collapsing into a black hole, to drop us into a techno-scientific dystopia, because in many ways, and for many people, we are already living in a techno-scientific dystopia where life means very little. How, then, can we defend against our anxiety about meaninglessness, which I would argue has been projected onto the ‘God Machine’, and its potential to create a black hole destined to swallow the world, and generate some kind of human significance in the world? My answer would be that we must respond to the possibility of meaningless, and the idea that the creation of the universe was the result of colliding particles, by creating a meaningful social world and treating other people as more than stupid colliding particles. This is what the famous sociologist Emile Durkheim meant when he said that God is society. His view was that society, the place where we meet and talk to other people, is the space were meaning is created. There is no meaning outside of the human world. It is only when we recognise this fact, and restate the importance of the original ‘God Machine’, society, that we will be able to understand the value of the LHC without anxiety about the threat of global destruction.