Brexit: The Monday After The Vote

This is written on the first Monday following the Brexit vote in which the “Leave” side garnered 52% to the 48% of the “Remain” supporters.

All of us who are reading the material of the pundits are being given one of two major themes: the first is the great loss to Britain because it will have serious financial and scientific decline in its future. This theme continues by pointing out that the UK (which may not be “United” much longer) is now in the hands of  the “Leave” voters who are mostly racist, xenophobic, inadequately educated, and nostalgic for the days of Empire,

The second main theme is the punishment the EU is preparing to inflict on the UK for this referendum result. Even though the result is not legally binding — and Nicola Sturgeon has reminded us all that Holyrood could simply refuse to allow Brexit to happen which would present yet another opportunity for the UK to show it really does adhere to the “Rule of Law” despite suggestions to the contrary – some of the EU administrators are demanding the removal of the UK from the EU be done as quickly as possible and with as much damage to the UK as possible to make an object lesson to any of the other ‘Exiteers” out there. The Auxit, Frexit, Nexit, all come to mind.

A theme which is not appearing in the mainstream media is a discussion of why people who are themselves deeply committed to a “United Europe” may not like this particular incarnation of this objective.

No discussion at all appears to be given to the question of whether the EU itself  is too bound up with needless rules, if it is too insensitive to the unique and historically ancient cultures which define “Europe”, and if it has actually lived up to all of its promises.

The idea of ‘subsidiarity’ is enshrined in the EU Constitution but it seems as if ‘uniformity’ is more important.

When we look at the question of national borders we normally put them into two categories. The first kind of border is designed to keep invaders out. The second kind is designed to keep prisoners in.

Israel’s borders, generally, fall into the first category. North Korea’s are in the second.

The EU has failed rather miserably to protect its continental borders from the “migrants” who appear in growing numbers every day. When people complain that this influx is going to bankrupt the welfare system, almost certainly lead to higher crime rates, and displace the traditional (dare I say “Aboriginal”?) European cultures with an alien one, the response is not a reasoned and rational dialogue on these matters but vituperation.

Instead of any attempt to examine objective evidence these questions are denounced as evidence of selfishness, racism, cultural insensitivity, and xenophobia.

Those doing the denouncing are usually if not always able to return to their very safe homes which have adequate police protection. Often they can return their in vehicles driver by chauffeurs.

Angela Merkel, whose policies have displaced many of her fellow Germans, has bodyguards and servants and will have a generous state pension waiting for her when she is defeated next year in the general elections.

She, and many like her, demand sacrifices from others. Sacrifices they themselves will never have to make.

After the New Year’s Eve string of sexual assaults all over Europe (Cologne was just the most widely known) the general reaction of many of the leaders – including the female mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker – was to tell German women they would have to adapt to the new realities of living in a multicultural society.

The phrase “blaming the victim” recommends itself here.

When the migrant influx to Sweden is now predicted to bankrupt that country in the next five years – a country which now has the highest rape-rate in Europe – is mentioned, the standard response is to call those who bring this up “bigots”.

The European Elites seem to be describable with a number of shared traits: They know they are morally correct in what they do, they know there is no better approach to achieving their objectives than the ones they have enunciated, and they know that any alternative set of social arrangements will lead to some kind of major social disaster. The EU was created, let us remember, in large part not only to make trade and business more efficient but to prevent the ruinous wars between France and Germany which began after the French Revolution blessed the world with Napoleon.

The Elites – if it is permissible to treat them as a homogeneous whole as if they were as undifferentiated as the “Euroskeptics” they so routinely ridicule – are much more able to remove themselves from those parts of the world which are less safe or less prosperous.  They are in the country but not of the country. They are not going to share the fate of those who are less affluent should their policies and utopian dreams go sour.

Such a group of people was first directly described in the 1995 book by Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites. While Lasch was drawing most of his evidence from the USA he was describing a group of people who were increasingly “global” in their networks and their lifestyles.

One feature such elites seem to have is an unwillingness to see themselves as being in error. In a way which is now reflected in the youth coming out of education systems dedicated to political correctness, we no longer debate. We “share”.  Then we return to our individual bubbles.

In a world where young people are told that “self-identification” can form the basis for a coherent and integrated society it is little wonder that our immediate feelings are all we really need to know in order to make appropriate decisions.

In this world, anyone who disagrees with our sincere feelings is a “hater” or some other kind of enemy.

Dialogue is gone. Only monologues remain.

So. What should we hope for?

We should hope that Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish Parliament veto the Brexit bill.

Why?

That way the “Leave” campaign will be able to retain its “moral victory” and demonstrate it is fully committed to living within the legitimate constraints of the Rule of Law in a Europe which represents to legitimate homeland of Western Culture, the European Parliament will not be able to purge itself of the inconvenience of a full-throated democratically elected opposition, and many failures of the EU to live up to its earlier promises can be fully and honestly addressed in public and the other “national parties” in Europe will be empowered to move towards a meaningful set of reforms.

From the ashes of this system a phoenix can rise. EUv1 can give rise to EUv2, a new union which pays scrupulous attention to the realities of the Indigenous European Cultures, protects its common borders, and goes into the future not with a grand plan drawn up by elites who are on the right side of history, but by honest if flawed citizens who are muddling through.

Why not?

Artificial Apologies and Partial Rationalities

Not long ago someone use the Google “Photos” app to use artificial intelligence to go through a large number of photos and classify them automatically. Anyone who has taken hundreds of photos can appreciate the temptation to let someone (or something) else look after the sorting-out.

Most of the classifications were fairly predictable. One of them caused Google to issue a sincere apology for the unintended racism of the category applied to one photo.

“We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened”

Google apologises for Photos app’s racist blunder – BBC News

Elsewhere in the story we learn the app sometimes classified dogs as horses. No doubt other errors also appear on a regular basis.

Anyone familiar with writing computer programs or the idea of fuzzy logic can appreciate the general problem.

Consider this example. On a scale of “1” to “4” for “birdness” (i.e. how good an example of a bird is this creature?) rate: chickens, bats, eagles, puffins, emus, ….

Bats?

Bats are not birds but a significant number of people will rank them with a “5”. Just outside the “bird” boundary. Why? Since they fly with wings and so do most birds the ranking illustrates the proximity of “bats” to the general category of “birds” along the crucial dimension of being able to fly.

The dimensions used in the classification process plus the precision with which each dimension is represented is the basis of being “correct” or “incorrect”.

In this case the software got the “primate” part correct but after that it did not get the type of primate correct.

What is really interesting here is not whether the person who wrote the software should get at least a B+ (but obviously not an A+) for the effort.

It’s the apology. It’s about “being sorry” for something which neither involves any kind of intentionality on the part of the person making the statement nor even any realistic chance the person offering the apology had any way of averting the event. It’s even about how to classify something as “racism” — a socially constructed term with ethical connotations — instead of a “classification error” as it relates to image processing software. In other words: “causality”.

It’s also about identity, individuality, group membership, and collective guilt.

And luck.

Everyone presently alive exists because their ancestors survived. Some of those ancestors were possibly saints while others were possibly psychopathic monsters. Each of the ancestors shaped the trajectory of history in such a way as to allow all of us to be here today. In legal doctrine there is a concept known as “the fruit of a poisoned tree”. It means evidence which is collected illegally cannot be used in court.

But what about the seeds of the fruit of the seeds of the fruit of the poisoned tree?

Are the children of war criminals guilty of war crimes? The grandchildren? Do we have to wait for ten generations?

And what about the rest of the people: those whose psychopathic monster ancestors have not yet been identified by the descendants of their victims?

It’s very difficult to discuss these ideas with examples which directly relate to present-day allegations of collective guilt, collective entitlement, collective identity, and each individual’s sense of self.

These matters often arise in the discussion of matters concerning preferential policies for hiring, promotion, and other forms of “restorative justice” when various social engineering devices are introduced in order to correct in the present injustices which happened in the past.

The counter-arguments normally involve claiming that those who get the benefits did not suffer the original injustice while those paying the price did not commit the original misdeeds. Victimhood gets inherited by one individual through the means of cultural transmission while guilt is inherited by others. In these cases it is clear that the concept of “culture” is assumed to be very real indeed.

It is interesting to notice how “cultural inheritance” arguments are considered gauche or invalid when discussing jihadis.

Which brings up the underlying feature of this episode. It yields yet more examples for “locally rational” or “partially rational” worldviews.

The major aspects of the worldviews will be the point of view of the individual who holds it, the dimensions and boundaries for the worldview, and the various statuses and classifications for those entities and processes which make the worldview function.

The narrator of the worldview may be speaking for individual or collective advantage, the general purpose of the narrative is either to enhance or diminish an idea or the identity of another, and the means for doing this can be emotional, logical, or the introduction of things purporting to be historical facts.

Recalling Aristotle’s categories for Rhetoric, these are appeals to emotion, appeals to tribal or ethnic values or advantage, and appeals to the more objective ideals of “logic and evidence”.

Thus we can have a Google executive classify a software glitch as “racism”.

Or we can have 25-year-old members of Culture A demanding apologies from 25-year-old members of Culture B for events which took place 75 years ago. And maybe they need to do this in order to maintain the respective traditions of both of their cultures.

Maybe it’s not “rational” for some cultures to mingle with others.

Maybe it’s easier for us to discuss these topics when the substantive details are furnished by software errors and science fiction stories.