1. Blowing out the Light

Sense that makes Sense

We are fashioned by our upbringing. Mine was lower-middle class, pre-television, English Christian within a local community. Within it, even if people did not “go to church”, Christian values predominated, and people pulled together.

There were exceptions and there were “bad people”, but they existed outside that norm. The norm itself was defined by the values that Christianity preached. They included kindness, honesty, helping each other, sharing, caring and pulling cooperatively together.

People’s acceptance of that ethos was not dependent upon them “going to church” or believing in the Christian creed. In this sense the ethos seemed more communal than Christian. For myself I perceived it as the pervasive norm expected within all communities all over the world, irrespective of religious belief.

Subsequently, in my working life, I have worked with people across a very broad spectrum, from highly paid, highly motivated corporate entrepreneurs to callous, dangerous, recidivist offenders. The values the ethos prescribed, nevertheless, continued to hold true.

Yes, all people violated those values, but the vast majority needed to justify their digressions by the “exceptional” situations they found themselves in. This was no less true for those in disadvantaged communities committing relatively small scale offences, than it was at the corporate level where violations commonly had far greater deleterious effect.

Effectively the ethos continued to be the standard against which people’s justification for digression from it, at both levels, was sought. It was the standard that could not be ignored.

This had the outcome for me that, for the first fifty six years of my life, despite the growing power of neoliberal dogma, the ethos of my upbringing was unquestioned. It explained people’s general peacefulness, honesty and goodwill, while circumstance and justification could explain people’s deviations from its norms.

The ethos in my mind was, as such, secure. In setting the standard to which we all needed to aspire if the world was to be a better place in which to live, it provided the sense that made sense to me. I was, as a result, a very late starter in seeking to find new sense and new meaning in the world.

Extinguishing Hope

The event that set me on this path was the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, on 9/11 2001. Witnessing the second aeroplane hitting the second of the twin towers on television in England in real time, the shock for me was visceral.

It was as if, in that moment, I awoke from the dream world in which I had previously been living. My mind in that instant, became sharp, inquisitive, and intense.

The unexpected outcome was that, in the days that followed, for the first time in my life, it felt as if the world was united. It was united in its condemnation of the attacks, it was united in its sympathy and support for the people of the U.S., and it was united in its support for the U.S. administration bringing those responsible to justice.

That unity included the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It offered to capture Osama bin Laden and bring him to face trial in a neutral country.

Following twelve years of relative stability following the end of the Cold War, here, it seemed, was a wholly unexpected opportunity for U.S. moral leadership, calling the world together to build the cause of common peace.

The Taliban’s offer, however, was not even acknowledged, and the opportunity was ignored. The administration in the U.S. was intent upon war.

This, for me, was a light bulb moment. The light bulb blew and the light went out. All the understanding and received wisdom on which my life had up to that time been lived, was dismissed. The people of wisdom making the major decisions in our world, had very different understandings to me.

New Glimmers

With sense having evaporated, I was left in a vacuum, in the dark, and so I waited and I watched.

In Afghanistan the Taliban was defeated, albeit superficially, and bin Laden escaped. Inexplicably the U.S. turned its attention rapidly to Iraq that had played no part at all in the 9/11 attacks.

This met with huge protests all over the world. In London one and a half million people, representing one person in every forty of the UK population, took to the streets.

Those protesting had commonly travelled hundreds miles, had spent a day or more of their time and had spent significant amounts of money to do so. Many brought children and many came with elderly and disabled people in wheelchairs.

As became clear, each of these people knew in their heart, that what was about to happen was wrong. They knew this so strongly that they made significant effort, at not insignificant cost, to make their view known. The war, however, had legs of its own.

In continuing to watch these developments I was not entirely idle. Two documents I discovered, both published in 2000 a year before 9/11, were insightful. One was Joint Vision 20202 from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the other was Rebuilding America’s Defenses4 from the think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Many signatories to the latter would subsequently be appointed to key positions in the new Bush administration of 2001. The PNAC was, in effect, the new administration in waiting.

The first of these documents identified the objective of the US military as “full spectrum” military dominance across all domains. The second identified how this vision was to be achieved. A key element was by fighting and decisively winning “multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” that would compel adversaries to “act in ways that protect America’s interests”.

The subsequent identification of an “axis of evil” by the Bush administration, provided the list of those against whom such wars would be fought. Iraq was at the top.

These documents would later provide the context for making sense of the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the tragedy that took place that day. Particularly damning, was its statement that, despite widespread, highly informed and insistent warnings of spectacular and catastrophic attacks, it had found:

“little evidence that the progress of the plot was disturbed by any government action, …… domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction, and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled (sic) to augment the FBI’s efforts. The public was not warned”.3

Bush himself was reported to have said “I’m tired of swatting at flies. I’m tired of playing defense. I want to play offense. I want to take the fight to the terrorists.” The attacks of 9/11 enabled this to happen.

The outcome was an ever-spreading disaster. Those making the decisions, it transpired, had been neither clever nor super-intelligent. They and their highly-educated, highly-paid expert advisors had no superior powers. Rather, the millions upon millions of people around the world who protested against the wars, had far greater insight and understanding, and were wiser by far.

For me, these observation provided three significant insights:

• in our world of opportunities and threats, if all we ever see are the threats, the world can and will only get worse, not better.
• the Bush administration was intent on war long before it was elected. This, as a realisation, was also a question – why? And how prevalent might this tendency be?
• and, in our deeply hierarchical world of insane inequality, it was ordinary people who were wise and those with wealth and with power who were not. But how could this be? Where does such wisdom come from?

Eventually, after many years of waiting and watching, my venture for new understanding began. It built upon these three insights and upon the otherwise absence of meaningful thoughts in my brain. In retrospect, I wish I had read Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue before I started.1

MacIntyre’s Moral Conundrum

In that book, written in 1981, MacIntyre identified the presence of a seemingly unresolvable conflict in the sphere of moral philosophy. On the one hand, and somewhat simplified, he observed that common morality grounded upon the common good was the strongly embedded morality of very many people. On the other, he observed that the arguments put forward in support of it, had no rationally valid foundation. They were irrational.

For explaining it, MacIntyre speculated that the values of common morality must have been prevalent in human communities of the past, but that, with the disappearance of those communities, the context in which they had arisen and flourished had been lost.

He perceived the philosophers of the Enlightenment to have sought a reasoned and rational foundation for such morality, but failed. The consequence of having no such base on which to ground moral values was, according to MacIntyre, the inevitable decline in the morality of modern society.

Reminiscent of the Hebrew prophets, the pessimistic conclusion he came to in 1981 was that we are advancing towards a coming age of barbarianism and darkness.

What his insights also offer, however, is the understandings that common morality founded upon the common good did, in the past make sense, and, in looking to understand why, the most productive place to look, will be in that human past.

This, if I had known it, would have been good advice to take!