A few weeks ago I was making my way into work, catching up with the overnight news of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Things that Trump did on inauguration day had a whiff of fascism. But seeing Elon Musk make multiple Nazi salutes on stage left me aghast. It fascinated me to see people and institutions bend over backwards to accommodate alternative interpretations of what Musk did, including the Anti-Defamation League which said “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute“, and Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, who said that Musk “is being falsely smeared“. It’s as if calling it what it clearly was — a fascist salute — would cross a line.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who didn’t see the Musk gesture in the same way. However, in our discussion he suggested that people going to jail in the UK for what they said on social media was fascist. I wasn’t so sure. Believing in ‘free speech’ as a principle doesn’t necessarily mean you get to say anything you like to anyone whenever you feel like it. There have to be rules. I’m definitely not a free-speech absolutist. As I wrote in my recent weeknotes:

At the forefront of my mind this week was the concept of free speech, given the widely-reported changes at Meta. A conversation with a friend and a Stratechery post by Ben Thompson challenged my thinking, which led me to try to find resources that would help me to refine my understanding. I’ve bought Regulating Free Speech in a Digital Age by David Bromell as recommended by Heather Burns, as well as Fearless Speech by Mary Anne Franks. I lean towards free speech, but having this week learned about the paradox of tolerance, I know that I’m not a ‘free speech absolutist’. But I don’t know where or how the line should be drawn.

On one level, putting people in prison for writing a post on Twitter or Facebook seems extreme. But it doesn’t seem right that people can publish posts encouraging others to burn down hotels and religious buildings without consequence. Is jailing people for their posts fascist? I didn’t think so. But I wasn’t completely sure.

By chance, I saw that Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey had posted an ‘emergency’ episode of their Origin Story podcast, called Trump’s inauguration: Can we call it fascism yet? The fact that the title was pitched as a question, while the image for the episode is a picture of Elon Musk doing his Nazi salute, shows that this wasn’t something straightforward to answer. On the podcast, Ian Dunt decided that yes, we can call this fascism, and explained why:

Dorian Lynskey: …it has to be said that Elon Musk throwing what appears to be a fascist salute more than once doesn’t require the historian Richard J. Evans to decode that one. Ian, obviously one does not like to be hysterical about this. We were talking about how not to cry fascism and everything. What did you make of the inauguration?

Ian Dunt: Oh, I would really like to cry fascism now.

DL: OK.

ID: I mean, there’s a certain… I know that you’ve discovered that apparently the frog’s in water and it’s bollocks, and apparently the frog does jump out of the water, but you do sort of feel because it’s like an everyday degree by degree by degree increase, you feel trapped by it. There is a point when you have to take a step back or deal with… I mean, I could do all of this list with Trump, obviously, but you have to do it with Musk. It’s like just over the last couple of months, this is a guy that is explicitly telling people, go out and vote and support Tommy Robinson, Alternative for Deutschland, extremist street thugs. These are the people who support him. He’s interacting with far right accounts. He’s using all of the modern day online far right imagery, Pepe the Frog and all of his nonsense monikers that he’s adopted. The accounts that he interacts with, the conspiracy theories that he spreads, they’re all on the far right. So then when he gets up and repeatedly does something that looks like a Nazi salute, if that was someone else, if it was George Bush who did it, you’d think like, “he got that all funny and it came out weird and don’t be weird about it.” But it takes so much generosity that you have really reached the point of being fundamentally irrational to not interpret it in this way, given the series of actions that led up to it. Years ago, when we did our episode on fascism, we were like, you need the alarm to be pulled when things get really sketchy. Well, to me, honestly, yesterday, that’s what really sketchy looks like.

The episode also had a reading from their most recent Origin Story book, called Fascism, which sounded exactly like what I was looking for. So I picked up a copy and dived in.

The book explores fascism primarily through the history of the two classic examples where it was indisputably how the countries were run — Italy under Mussolini (whose political party was literally called the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the National Fascist Party) and Germany under Hitler. There is general consensus that these were both fascist dictatorships, but they were very different to each other. Part of the problem with calling anything ‘fascist’ today is that you are immediately drawing a comparison to these two regimes, both of which precipitated extreme suffering through their actions in World War II:

If you invoke 1930s Germany to criticise a draconian right-wing policy, you will be widely understood. But if, for the sake of accuracy, you reference modern Hungary, 1970s Chile, 1940s Spain, or even 1920s Italy, most people will not have any idea what you are talking about. This narrow band of shared knowledge erases most of the history of authoritarianism and creates a false binary: either a country is a healthy, tolerant democracy or it is on the road to Nazism. The vast middle ground must be understood, now more than ever, because that is where the populists operate. Even if we are in the business of sounding the red alert about them, we must have a sense of the precise threat they pose if we are to effectively challenge them.

Using the word ‘fascist’ for something ‘less’ than Nazi Germany seems to either be too over-the-top, or has the effect of diluting the meaning and impact of the word. (This is echoed by Dorian Lynskey’s tentative approach in the podcast episode to the question of whether to “cry fascism” or not about Trump and Musk.)

And now, in the early twenty-first century, we seem surrounded by figures who can’t reliably be called fascists but who trade in similar feelings and inspire similar anxieties in their opponents. That makes us want to call them fascists – to shake people by the collar and tell them that we’ve played this game before and it did not end well. But it deprives us of the confidence to do so, because we’re never quite sure if we’re using the word correctly, or if deploying it will make us look like hysterics.

But trying to pin down exactly what we mean by fascism is inherently difficult. It isn’t the same as other ideologies:

There is no flawless, objective test for fascism. This is not due to any weakness in scholarly analysis, but to the weakness of fascism itself. We can define socialism very easily, as the collective ownership of the means of production. We can define liberalism as the belief in the freedom of the individual. That is because these are both meaningful political traditions with a huge body of intellectual contributions. We struggle to define fascism because it is not a meaningful political tradition and it has few, if any, intellectual contributions.

The authors suggest that something does not need to be ‘fully fascist’ for the word, or a derivative of it, to be useful in pointing out something that is on the road to fascism:

One solution is semantic: terms that allude to someone or something having fascist elements without necessarily satisfying the full definition. President Biden referred to Trump’s philosophy as ‘semi-fascism’, a term also used by the historian Stanley Payne. There are many other variants: proto-fascism, quasi-fascism or borderline fascism. And there is the term ‘fascistic’, to describe a particular element of a populist movement. These phrases can seem slightly cowardly and evasive, but they’re actually very helpful. They provide options. They let you point to worrying elements of a movement or party without having to go all the way. They add nuance while retaining the capacity for historical comparison and political warning.

The rise of populism across the worldis something to be concerned with in the same way that we should have been concerned about the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s:

Fascism and populism share a conceptual root. They both feature an all-encompassing insistence on the ‘will of the people’ as the only source of political legitimacy, unlike liberalism, which places a strong emphasis on individual rights, diversity and the separation of powers.

Ultimately, there is no easy checklist that you can use to define whether something is fascist, although Umberto Eco tried with his list of the 14 common features of fascism.

This, then, is the moral lesson of the story of fascism. It is not necessarily about precise definitions, or watertight checklists, or strictly policed usage. It is about recognising that fascism appeals to some of the darkest instincts of human nature: the hatred of difference, the yearning for order, the sublimation of the individual to the group, the enchantment of violence. At heart, Orwell suggested, fascism meant ‘something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist . . . almost any English person would accept “bully” as a synonym for “Fascist”’. The story of fascism shows us what happens when these instincts are given free rein and reach their ultimate expression. It therefore serves as a reminder to treat with extreme vigilance any individual or group that seeks to encourage those ideas, and to dedicate oneself to stopping them.

Having read the book, I don’t see how jailing people for social media posts that incite hatred and violence can be considered to be fascist. Being the bully, hating the differences that refugees, asylum seekers, people of colour or LGBTQ+ people represent and promoting violence towards them is fascist. For a tolerant society to thrive, paradoxically my belief is that it needs to be intolerant of this kind of world view and behaviour.

It took some weeks for me to finish this very large book. I was given this as a very thoughtful Christmas gift, but ended up buying and reading an ebook version of it as there was no way I was going to lug this around with me.

The authors started writing with the intention of creating a McCartney solo-specific version of Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, but found that they couldn’t avoid telling a story at the same time. The text of the book is punctuated by distinctive sections for each recording session, in a consistent format, informing us of what songs were worked on. They also include a little narrative to add some colour to the events:

This book was a great read. I’ve consumed so many Beatles-related books over the years, but there was still lots in here that I didn’t know. For a Beatles nut, I’m actually not that familiar with McCartney’s early solo discography. I’m a long-time fan of McCartney (1970) and Band on the Run (1973), but have only recently picked up Wild Life (1971) and am yet to explore Ram (1971) and Red Rose Speedway (1973). It’s been fun to read about a track and then listen to it on a streaming service, particularly when I wasn’t familiar with it. For the songs that I was familiar with, there were fascinating nuggets and insights. For example, I hadn’t realised that the high-pitched sound a few seconds into The Lovely Linda, the first track on Paul’s first solo album after the Beatles broke up, is the squeaking of a door that was accidentally captured and left in. This is the first example in his solo career of going with the flow when something happens:

Unlike other artists and producers inclined to erase extraneous noises or accidental instrumental strikes on individual tracks, Paul would leave them as they were recorded, allowing the potential to “explore the accident, not fix the mistake” as Seiwell put it. Though aiding the creative process, for Alan Parsons this posed a problem. “You try to keep the tracks clean and try to avoid having to pull down faders every time if there is a noise or a talking voice or something,” he explained. “Whereas McCartney was notorious for never allowing engineers to wipe anything, so it always made the mix take twice as long.”

It was amazing to hear that Henry McCullough got to appear on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon through the accident of Wings being booked in a neighbouring studio:

“They were next door making Dark Side of the Moon,” said Paul. “The engineers were quite interchangeable, so an engineer that’d work on their stuff would work on ours. And he did play us some of the Dark Side of the Moon stuff.” For an hour or so, during the weekend of January 19 and 20, Wings and Pink Floyd joined forces, on Pink Floyd’s turf, when the latter were recording voices that would be woven into the fabric of several songs.

…

And so it was that a hazy recollection of McCullough’s—“I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time!”—found its way into ‘Us and Them,’ a track on one of the most revered albums in the history of rock.

Despite its size, the book didn’t feel overly-long or too detailed. I found myself picking it up at any available moment and was disappointed when I reached the end. Fortunately there’s a sequel in the works that is due out in December this year, covering the period 1974–1980. Here’s how we leave things:

With a critically lauded, Gold-certified hit album on his hands, Paul found himself in a very different position at the end of 1973 than he’d been in at the end of 1969. Four years earlier, he was crawling from the wreckage of the Beatles, unsure of himself and his future. But he had also been nursed, coaxed, and sweet-talked by Linda into recognizing his strengths sufficiently to borrow a Studer four-track from EMI and set down some tunes, taking his first steps toward reinventing himself. But what he recorded then was a motley batch, assembled largely of belatedly finished songs from the Beatle days, revived and polished juvenilia from the late 1950s, and jams molded into instrumentals. He started with only two new songs; others had sprouted as he worked, including the enduring ‘Maybe I’m Amazed.’ But the music on Band on the Run was fresh—its oldest songs were written during the Red Rose Speedway sessions—and the album was fully conceived before the first session.

I’m excited to find out what the next book brings.

Finished reading How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter. I picked this up from Heather Burns’ 2023 ‘get ready for the coming US election’ reading list. The title is perfect, as the book is literally a narrative that explains the research into the conditions that can typically lead to civil war. It’s been interesting to read this in such close proximity to the riots in the UK that have been taking place over the past week.

A central point of the book is that countries that are neither full democracies nor full autocracies as defined by the ‘polity score’ — known as ‘anocracies’ — are the most likely to experience instability and/or armed conflict. There is danger as a country moves through the anocracy zone, whether that is a country that has declined from being a full democracy, or a country that is moving at speed towards full democracy.

The USA slipped from a rating of 10 in 2015 to a rating of 5 in 2020, following the insurrection on 6 January that year. It became an anocracy for the first time in over two centuries.

Once a country is in the anocracy zone, the biggest warning sign of a civil war is the appearance of a faction, a political group based on ethnic, religious or racial identity rather than ideology. Civil war is even more likely in countries divided into two dominant groups, where one group represents 40–60% of the population. The group that once held power and feels it slipping away is likely to be the one that starts the violence.

People may tolerate years of poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. They may accept shoddy schools, poor hospitals, and neglected infrastructure. But there is one thing they will not tolerate: losing status in a place they believe is theirs. In the twenty-first century, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.

In recent years, social media has accelerated this process. The proportion of Americans getting some of their news from social media has increased from 23% in 2013 to over 70% today. The platforms promote “a sense of perpetual crisis”. The riots in the UK over this past week are fresh in my mind as I re-read this:

Disinformation spread by extremists discredits peaceful protesters, convinces citizens that counterattacks by opposition groups are likely, and creates a sense—often a false sense—that moderates within their own movement are not doing enough to protect the population, or are ineffective and weak compared to the opposition. It’s at this point that violence breaks out: when citizens become convinced that there is no hope of fixing their problems through conventional means.

I’m not sure that this is exactly what is happening right now in the UK — so far the riots don’t seem to have spread to moderate people — but I can see how it might happen.

Walter weaves the ten stages of genocide into her narrative. According to Wikipedia, stage 4 is ‘dehumanisation’, where “One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases.” The ongoing narrative about refugees and asylum seekers in the UK’s most popular newspapers promotes this way of thinking, and has been so painful to see.

“THE ‘SWARM’ ON OUR STREETS” is a disgusting headline. The Daily Mail has been pushing this agenda for as long as I can remember. It may be impossible to draw a direct line between these front pages and the riots that have been happening in the UK over the past week, but they can’t help.

The author also mentions Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), an organisation that publishes fascinating reports and datasets on how countries around the world are democratising or autocratizing. The recent reports are jarring.

V-Dem, the Swedish research institute, collects detailed data on the different types of democracies around the world and then rates them on a 100-point scale with 100 being the most democratic and 0 being the least. According to the institute, Spain has suffered one of the worst declines in Western Europe, followed by Greece, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Austria. Nordic countries, the most liberal in the world, have also dropped since 2010: Denmark, the number one ranked democracy for most of the past hundred years, has been downgraded 10 points on V-Dem’s scale; Sweden has been downgraded 35. The swift rate of democratic decay around the world has been so rapid that V-Dem issued its first “Autocratization Alert” in 2020.

The book explains that the most effective way for a country to avoid violence and civil war is to strengthen the quality of its governance, and make people feel that the systems and institutions are working. People need to value their democracy and believe that it is effective. Doing this is “significantly more important” to avoid conflict than improving the economy.

“…three features stood out: “the rule of law” (the equal and impartial application of legal procedure); “voice and accountability” (the extent to which citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media); and “government effectiveness” (the quality of public services and the quality and independence of the civil service). These three features reflect the degree to which a government serves its people and the degree to which its political institutions are strong, legitimate, and accountable. Improvements in governance tend to reduce the subsequent risk of war.”

The book is a quick read on a tough subject, giving an excellent overview of the resources and evidence available.

I’ve finished reading Mapping The Roads: Building modern Britain by Mike Parker. A beautiful little book that had been on my shelf for years. It’s filled with gems, such as:

• Driving on the left became law in 1722 in an effort to deal with congestion on London Bridge. (Driving on the left makes sense as tradition for horse riders in a world where most people are right-handed; that hand is free for greetings or drawing swords.)
• In 1895, Britain had around 15 cars. This swelled to 700–800 by the turn of the century, 8,500 by 1904 and more than 85,000 ten years later.
• Bridget Driscoll was the first pedestrian to be killed by a car in Britain, in 1896. The coroner said he hoped that “such a thing would never happen again”.
• The AA had people on patrol who would salute members showing their badges. If the AA patrol person didn’t salute, you could stop and ask them why and they could then inform you of a speed trap ahead.
• Fuel cost the equivalent of £2/litre (in 2016 prices) in 1920.
• The road numbering system in England and Wales is focused on London, with the M1 going directly north and the numbers ascending in order in a clockwise direction. Scotland got roads beginning with 7, 8 and 9, centred around Edinburgh. In both cases the most important roads got the shortest numbers.
• The first petrol station opened in 1919. Ten years later there were 54,000.
• The first motorway in Britain was…the Preston bypass, not the M1.
  

The book has so many lovely maps and illustrations. Pitched at just the right level for a road-curious nerd without getting lost in the detail, it was a joy to read.

The book is a polemic that explores technology, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence and asserts that they are always biased. It has really got me thinking and seeing things in a different way. It reminded me of when I read Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist in that it has given me a completely new way of seeing the world. Recently I have been reviewing documents on ethical AI and I am now looking at them in a completely different light.

This coded language shows up everywhere once you are attuned to it. Consider this IBM AI governance report, which reads: “Extensive evidence has shown that AI can embed human and societal biases and deploy them at scale. Many experts are now saying that unwanted bias might be the major barrier that prevents Al from reaching its full potential. . . . So how do we ensure that automated decisions are less biased than human decision-making?” This is problematic because it assumes that Al’s “full potential” is even possible, which has no evidence aside from the imagination of a small, homogenous group of people who have been consistently wrong about predicting the future and who have not sufficiently factored in structural inequality. The question of “How do we ensure that automated decisions are less biased?” reinforces this problematic assumption, implicitly asserting for the reader that computational decisions are less biased. This is not true, and IBM and other firms should stop writing things that include this assumption. The technochauvinist binary thinking of either computers or humans is the problem: neither alone will deliver us.

I loved the insights on how inputs into machine learning models come from a world that is inherently biased, which will always lead to tools that are biased in some way. Many examples are given of how the systems that have been trained on this data enforce and amplify the existing patterns. For example, where exams couldn’t take place in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, algorithms were used to determine pupil grades instead. The book gives examples from the US, but I distinctly remember the fiasco here in the UK. Assigning grades to students based on historic data from their school, or through the use of any other other demographic information, may seem ‘fair’ to those people designing the algorithm. But to any one person being judged by the system it is deeply unfair.

The book explores the use of machine learning systems by the police. Historic data shows where arrests have been made and who was arrested, but not necessarily where crimes have been committed and who did them. This bias creates a feedback loop where predictive technology asserts that future crimes will be committed in similar areas, by similar people.

The thing is, everyone is a criminal to some extent because everyone has done things that violate the law. For example, white and Black people use drugs and deal drugs at equal rates. Bias determines who gets constructed as a criminal; not everyone gets caught, not everyone gets punished, and some people get punished more than others. The unequal application of justice can be seen in crime maps. Look at a crime map for any major city, and it’s pretty much the same as the map of where Black people live. Again, not because Black people commit more crimes, but because the things we call “crime maps” are actually arrest maps, and Black people are arrested for crimes at a higher rate. When you train algorithms on crime data, you are training the algorithm to over-police certain zip codes or geographic areas, because that is what has happened in real life in the past. You are training the algorithms to be biased.

There’s a fantastic example where someone has put together a ‘White Collar Crime Risk Zones’ tool which identifies ‘hotspots’ in a similar way to other systems. For New York City you can see that the major ’risk areas’ are clustered around the financial districts.

Broussard asserts that people coming from the data science/technology world often assume that they can use their tools to get insights in whatever field they are applying them to, without considering the long history, large body of work and experts that have been in this space for many years before them:

One of the big misconceptions of data science is that it provides insights. It doesn’t always. Sometimes the insights are merely things that the data scientists didn’t know, but people in other disciplines already knew. There’s an important distinction between what is unknown to the world versus what is simply unknown to you. Data scientists in general need to do more qualitative research, and talk to experts in relevant fields, before designing and implementing quantitative systems.

I loved the insight that designing tools for inclusion actually makes them better for everybody. It got me thinking about the minimal effort that I have been putting in to adding alt-text to images on this website. The tools I use for blogging don’t help me but I know there will be a way to do it. I’ll try harder. It’s not really acceptable that images are inaccessible to vision-impaired readers in 2024.

Useful innovations like the typewriter, text messaging, audiobooks, remote controls, wide rubber grips on kitchen tools, voice assistants, and closed captioning all stem from designs for disability. “When we design for disability first, we often stumble upon solutions that are not only inclusive, but also are often better than when we design for the norm,” Roy said. “This excites me, because this means that the energy it takes to accommodate someone with a disability can be leveraged, molded, and played with as a force for creativity and innovation. This moves us from the mindset of trying to change the hearts and the deficiency mindset of tolerance to becoming an alchemist, the type of magician that this world so desperately needs to solve some of its greatest problems.”

Although I found the writing style quite dry, I’m very glad I picked this book up. I’m going to be thinking about its insights long after I’ve put it down.

In short, the broader the use case and more general the AI deployment, the riskier the outcomes are likely to be. Using a large language model to summarise or convert content is a good use case. Offering an AI-powered general purpose chatbot to your customers is likely to cause a plethora of problems, particularly where you are not able to vet the data that the model has been trained on. Businesses need to make sure that they aren’t getting themselves into sticky situations by moving too quickly or deploying technology that can break in unexpected ways. Governments and regulation moves slowly, but at some point it will catch up and there may be a lot of companies exposed to lawsuits and fines when it does.

This book is required reading for everyone involved in looking at Generative AI for their business or in their work.

Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked him what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, economics, and law.

“How about fiction-novels, plays, poetry?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I have never had time for them. There is so much else I have to read.”

I said, “Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time. I don’t know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I had only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it.”

My friend nodded gravely. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact.”

But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Finn, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. And if you want to know about Pennsylvania of the last hundred years, you’ll read O’Hara or you’ll know less than you might.”

The chapters of the book give different slices through the author’s life and experiences, kept fresh through the angles that they take. In one chapter late in the book we are given what I assume to be a ‘typical’ day in her life as a teacher, from when she wakes up until she’s back in bed again.

The book is life-affirming and relatable, with a few nuggets of wisdom in its pages:

Most of them are getting the questions right. I used to think that asking kids things they already knew was pointless. But it’s not: it puts them in a good mood for learning new things.

Kellaway reflects on her own past: her parents and her education, as well as the way in which she brought up her own children. I found myself nodding in recognition to her experiences both as a parent:

Subsequently I discovered that size of house cuts both ways. It may have kept us safe from the world outside, but it also kept us safe from each other. As the children grew older and became teenagers an average evening at number 52 would not find the family amiably playing Scrabble or even gathering passively around the TV to watch Friends. After a quick supper cooked by me – soggy leek-and-bacon pasta or chicken nuggets and broccoli – we dispersed.

…and as someone who wants to focus on specialising and refining their performance in their current job, not focusing on promotion:

My position, and that of about two-thirds of the Now Teachers, is quite different. We have no desire to advance above the bottom rung of the ladder that we are now squarely standing on. We own our own property and don’t need to prove ourselves in the same way she does. We don’t want to be promoted, but only want to be responsible for our own classes and for becoming better at what we do. That feels quite enough. This resistance to promotion makes us both happier and harder to manage.

But the best parts are about her experiences as a teacher, and what she has come to learn — and to question — over the past few years:

For all its strictness, the school does give some latitude to teachers on how they teach. Yet this is provisional, and puts the onus on me. I need to prove that I can get good results – and I have absolutely no idea if I can. Is it possible to teach both the world and the syllabus? If not, is there a trade-off? If children get one grade lower because they have spent a lot of time thinking about broader things, how much does it matter?

I enjoy planning lessons but it strikes me as a shocking waste of time. Why aren’t there national lesson plans designed by the best teachers in the country and updated every year? I spend the next 20 minutes hastily scrabbling around for material and putting together a slap-dash PowerPoint.

Two years later, I have a clearer idea of what it is I’m trying to do. Changing lives turns out not to be about making instant transformations – it is about hard slog and tiny, incremental improvements. This realisation has changed my own life – or at least how I teach, and the sort of teacher I want to be.

Since that day the penny has dropped: the best way of helping Alicia is not to try to make economics a fun show, it is to get her to pass her exam. If it is a teacher’s job to open doors, those doors, under the present regime, are GCSEs. When I started teaching, I thought exams were a necessary evil. I still think that. I hate the way schools talk of them as if they are the purpose of education, when in fact they are merely (flawed) evidence that you’ve acquired some. I despised the government’s response to Covid in schools, where it prioritised the year groups taking exams, as if the education of the other years somehow didn’t matter. I despair at the way teachers spend as much time teaching exam technique as the subject itself. Yet despite this I, too, am teaching the exam first and economics second.

Recommended.

I love it when a book makes me think about something in a new way. I love it even more when it challenges something so fundamental that I didn’t realise that there could be a different way of seeing things.

We grow up believing that national borders have historical, profound meaning to them. But they are political lines on a map, put there long after people first started living in a place. The premise of this book is that the creation and existence of a border, particularly a political or physical border, is a violent act.

The birth of modern states

The book notes that the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the Thirty-Years’ War was when the principle of modern nation state sovereignty was established:

The treaties that ended the war, collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia, represented a break with the past in several significant ways. Historian Peter Wilson writes that “Westphalia’s significance lies not in the number of conflicts it tried to resolve, but in the methods and ideals it applied.” The resolution of the conflict set in motion the enclosure of the majority of the surface of the earth as state territories within borders. (p105)

Fast forward to today. The United Nations is an organisation that “remains the one place on Earth where all the world’s nations can gather together, discuss common problems, and find shared solutions that benefit all of humanity.” However, despite having the word ‘nations’ in its title, is actually concerned with states¹:

Although nation and state are often used interchangeably, they refer to different entities. A state is a political institution with a bureaucracy, territory, borders, and the sovereign right to create and enforce laws. A nation is a group of people who perceive that they have a shared connection to each other and to a land that entitles them to political control over that territory. There are many examples of groups such as the Kurds that consider themselves to be nations but do not control an independent state. The UN serves to institutionalize existing states as the legitimate sovereign authorities in bounded territories.
[…]
States have to be recognized by other states to join the UN; by joining, a state agrees to recognize the boundaries and sovereignty of all the other member states. (p155)

This creates a number of problems. For example, climate change isn’t something that can be dealt with by each state alone — the actions of one state has an impact on all of the others. States such as Somaliland are not recognised by the majority of other states and therefore have no ‘seat at the table’ at the UN. And there are various people who find themselves trapped, divided or disenfranchised by the states they find themselves in. The Kurds are a persecuted minority group spanning Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, and the Rohingya people are a stateless ethnic group who are not recognised in Myanmar, where they reside. Neither are directly represented at the UN.

Separating people by drawing lines on a map

The partition of India in 1947 into India and Pakistan eventually led to East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh.

Bangladesh literally means “the country of the Bengalis,” but its independence created an odd situation in which more than a third of all Bengali speakers live across the border in India, in the state of West Bengal. Furthermore, Kolkata, the cultural, economic, and political heart of Bengal for centuries, is located outside the country of the Bengalis, which is something akin to Paris not being in France. (p58)

The initial partition in 1947 by Cyril Radcliffe saw Bengal sliced in two with little regard for the people who I lived there. From Wikipedia:

Radcliffe, a man who had never been east of Paris, was given the chairmanship of the two boundary committees set up with the passing of the Indian Independence Act. Radcliffe was faced with the colonial duty (goreyaan de kamm) of drawing the borders for the new nations of Pakistan and India in a way that would leave as many Sikhs and Hindus in India and Muslims in Pakistan as possible. He was given only 5 weeks to complete the job. Radcliffe submitted his partition map on 9 August 1947, which tore apart Punjab and Bengal almost in half. The new boundaries were formally announced on 17 August 1947 – three days after Pakistan’s independence and two days after India became independent of the United Kingdom

Although the cultural links between the two political nations are strong, travel between the areas now known as Bangladesh and West Bengal can be perilous due to the militarisation of the border:

While the borders of the European Union and the United States have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in the past decade as migrants are funneled to more dangerous crossing points, the India-Bangladesh border has the highest number of deaths at the hands of a state security service, India’s Border Security Force (BSF). From 2000 to 2015, the BSF killed more than a thousand Bangladeshi civilians along the border. (p56)

The book goes into detail about the killing of Felani Khatun, a 15-year-old girl who attempted to cross the border using a ladder. She had been travelling from West Bengal to Bangladesh with her father. He had made it across, but she was shot by the BSF and left hanging on the fence for hours.

Erecting borders between nation states and policing people who pass through them is a relatively new invention. From Wikipedia:

In the later part of the nineteenth century and up to World War I, passports were not required, on the whole, for travel within Europe, and crossing a border was a relatively straightforward procedure. Consequently, comparatively few people held passports.

During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure.

From the book:

The International Organization for Migration suggests that “the relatively low number of migrant deaths before 1990 may be related to the fact that it used to be much easier to reach Europe by regular means, even in the absence of official government authorization to immigrate.” Prior to 1974, for example, France allowed migrants to come and go freely. Spain allowed North Africans to enter freely until 1991. (p26)

Over time, borders have become increasingly militarised. The barriers themselves are violent, either directly through barbed wire and armed patrols, or indirectly due to people finding ways to avoid them through other, more perilous routes.

The boundaries that enclosed land into private property and established state sovereignty within territories and seas are treated as if they have always existed eternally, but even the oldest political borders are only a few hundred years old; most are only a few decades old. They are not the result of a transparent sorting of historical peoples into their own territories. Instead, borders are an efficient system for maintaining political control of an area through agreements and documents that are backed up with the threat of violence. (p117)

The concept of land ownership

Many years ago I spent a week visiting the Infosys office campus in Pune, India. The site was as lush and beautiful as a pristine golf course, and this extended out to the vivid green grass that covered the roundabout at the entrance to the complex. One day we pulled up outside and saw an array of people and grazing animals on the roundabout. My driver explained that these were nomadic people. It got me thinking that their concept of sharing the land that they have lived on for hundreds of years had run up against the privatisation of the space all around them.

My wife and I own the land that our house sits on. We paid for it, and a title deed exists that says it is ours. But this concept is bizarre — why should this particular chunk of land be any more mine than it is for any other person that is born anywhere else on the planet? The concept of land ownership helps to keep things orderly and organised, but it is an illusion.

The concept of private land ownership is relatively new, enabled by modern cartography:

During the Middle Ages, the modern idea of private property did not exist. A wide range of different relationships between kings, vassals, peasants, and the church regulated land use. In medieval England, the king claimed sovereignty over all of the land and leased it out to vassals, or lords, who pledged military aid to the king and provided a small portion of their harvests as a tax. All of the land was ultimately the king’s. (p94)
[…]
The significance of these changes cannot be overstated. Up until the sixteenth century in England, land was conceived of as a space that might be controlled by someone but did not necessarily belong to anyone besides the king. But once surveyors and mapmakers codified the rural agricultural land of England, it became less a vast space people knew through local experience and more a disciplined commodity, captured on paper and administered from a distance. It was no longer necessary to have local knowledge; land was legible to anyone who could see the map—an elite group that was often limited to the monarchy, the lords, and their agents. (p97)

Differentiating between refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants

Refugees move from one place to another to escape oppression and war. The current invasion of Ukraine by Russia has already displaced millions of people who are fleeing the conflict.

Some people move to seek asylum. It may be that they come from places in the world that do not accept them. For example, ILGA World’s map of sexual orientation laws shows a spectrum of policies across the globe, from acceptance of same-sex marriages to the death penalty for being homosexual. It is clear why some people may wish to move to a more accepting society and escape the danger in the place that they live.

Migrants may also move for economic reasons. Why should someone be forced to be trapped in poverty based on where they happened to be born? The book makes a very good point that we don’t do this within a nation. It’s complicated, but we can look to challenge why do this between nations.

Consider this example. The US state of Maryland has the highest median household income at approximately $70,000 per year, double the rate of the neighboring state of West Virginia. Furthermore, West Virginia is often stereotyped as having a “country” culture that does not match the progressive Northeast. Maryland and West Virginia share a border, so imagine if the governor of Maryland decided to build a wall, set up internal checkpoints, and begin to deport the poorer and culturally different people of West Virginia. This sounds ludicrous-mostly because, within countries, the right to move trumps the rights of local political communities to limit access. No matter how much Maryland might want to protect its economic wealth, jobs, and culture from the poor, unemployed, and culturally different residents of West Virginia, it cannot. Nevertheless, it seems normal that countries can do the exact same thing for the same reasons—to protect jobs, wealth, and culture. That sense of normalcy needs to be disrupted. (p172)

I know that I am incredibly lucky to have been born in the UK. This good fortune means that my potential economic prosperity is substantially better than the majority of people in the world. But it was an accident of birth.

Reading about this reminded me of How To be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. In his book, Kendi puts forward his view that someone is either racist or antiracist. Being ‘not racist’ — opting out of engaging with racism or ignoring it — is actually racist, as it perpetuates the imbalances that are already present. Borders have a similar effect to racism in that they keep the economic imbalances going. Allowing migrants to come and go freely would do something to rebalance wealth and prosperity:

The true source of the crisis is that movement restrictions at borders continue to allow states to contain the poor and protect the wealth and privilege of their populations. (p28)

It boils down to this:

The borders do not just exist on the land. The lack of a safe, legitimate way to enter a country means that people will take the alternative. It is estimated that one out of every four people that attempts to enter the EU by boat dies on route, giving the EU the deadliest border in the world. People do not consider make this perilous journey lightly.

This reality is captured in the powerful poem “Home” by British Somali poet Warsan Shire:

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
…
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying—
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.
(p25)

Things that we think will never change, can change

The book strikes a hopeful note for the future, putting our current system of borders in context of other things that have dramatically changed in the recent past:

The system of states, borders, and resource enclosures is embedded in our culture and our way of life and permeates many aspects of our existence, to the point that it is difficult to imagine life outside of it. But the past two hundred years have included major social changes that were previously unthinkable as people have collectively resisted injustices in the world, including slavery, colonialism, lack of universal suffrage, and South Africa’s apartheid system. Today we take it for granted that these practices were unjust and it was only a matter of time before they collapsed, although at one point change seemed impossible. The current system of borders is no different. (p163)

This book is fascinating and well-written. Thoroughly recommended.

This is a wonderful companion to the East of Eden novel. I am so glad I read it straight after, as I could still recall exactly the chapters and characters that Steinbeck refers to in his notes.

All of the notes are addressed to Pascal Covici, Steinbeck’s editor. The author uses them in order to warm up for the day’s writing:

You must think I waste an awful lot of time on these notes to you but actually it is the warm-up period. It is the time of drawing thoughts together and I don’t resent it one bit. I apparently have to dawdle a certain amount before I go to work. Also if I keep the dawdling in this form I never leave my story. If I wrote my dawdles some other way I would be thinking all over the map.

It’s so interesting to see ‘behind the curtain’ and read the mental struggles that he went through in the process of creating his book. Over the past two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and working from home I have noticed how some days feel great and others awful, for no discernible reason whatsoever. It seems that this is a shared experience:

This is not a morning of great joy for some reason or other. I don’t understand why some days are wide open and others closed off, some days smile and others have thin slitted eyes and others still are days which worry. And it does not seem to be me but the day itself. It has a nature of its own quite separate from all other days.

Today is a dawdly day. They seem to alternate. I do a whole of a day’s work and then the next day, flushed with triumph, I dawdle. That’s today.

Went to bed early last night, read happily, slept happily. Got up early and suddenly felt terrible—just terrible. Fought that off and was drained dry. Then I forced the work and it was as false and labored and foolish as anything I have ever seen. I tried to kid myself that it only seemed bad but it really was bad. So out it goes. And what do you suppose could have caused it? I just don’t know.

He also procrastinates when he has a particularly difficult piece of writing coming up:

I wish I knew how people do good and long-sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lives going—social, economic, etc. I can’t. I seem to have to waste time, so much dawdling to so much work. I am frightened by this week before it even happens.

I feel just worthless today. I have to drive myself. I have used every physical excuse not to work except fake illness. I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water. Really childish. I know that one of the reasons is that I dread the next scene, dread it like hell.

It was interesting to read his thoughts on the structure and content of the book which ended up being quite different in the finished novel. It boggles the mind how this was achieved during a time before word processors and the Internet, with precious handwritten pages being couriered from the author’s home to the publisher, and typed manuscript being reviewed and edited by hand.

East of Eden is long and it seems that Steinbeck knew this would be the case from the start. He has a theory about the impact of long versus short books on the reader:

Now—we must think of a book as a wedge driven into a man’s personal life. A short book would be in and out quickly. And it is possible for such a wedge to open the mind and do its work before it is withdrawn leaving quivering nerves and cut tissue. A long book, on the other hand, drives in very slowly and if only in point of time remains for a while. Instead of cutting and leaving, it allows the mind to rearrange itself to fit around the wedge. Let’s carry the analogy a little farther. When the quick wedge is withdrawn, the tendency of the mind is quickly to heal itself exactly as it was before the attack. With the long book perhaps the healing has been warped around the shape of the wedge so that when the wedge is finally withdrawn and the book set down, the mind cannot ever be quite what it was before. This is my theory and it may explain the greater importance of a long book.

If you read East of Eden and enjoyed the work, this additional book is well worth your time.