This article is part of the 16/2019 Eurozine review. Click here to subscribe to our reviews, and you also can subscribe to our newsletter and get the bi-weekly updates about latest publications and news on partner journals.
New Humanist warns against denialism over Northern Ireland;
La Revue Nouvelle analyses political disenchantment in Belgium;
Revista Crítica exposes the redundancies of mainstream economics; Arche plots the coordinates of a new Belarusian historiography; and
O’r Pedwar Gwynt asks ‘what is language?’
New Humanist
3/2019
(United Kingdom)
New Humanist warns against denialism over Northern Ireland
Brexiters downplay the volatility of the national question in Northern Ireland, claiming it is exaggerated by remain suporters and used by the Republic of Ireland and the EU for political leverage. But, as the murder of journalist Lyra McKee showed, the potential for renewed violence is real and, if not a direct result of Brexit, then certainly precipitated by it.
Calls for a South Africa-style ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission fail to grasp the central problem, writes Peter Geoghegan in New Humanist: that ‘every side believes that they won their war’. Even today, callers to daytime radio ‘argue for hours about who is to blame for what’, while old IRA men ‘prop up bars across border counties, bemoaning former comrades who “sold out to the Brits”’. No less responsible for the backsliding is the British government’s ‘denialism’, particularly over collaboration between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Hope, however, lies in younger generations, who ‘reject the tribal identities of “Orange and Green” and look enviously at the more relaxed social mores south of the border’.
Religion: According to a new study, only fifty per cent of the British population identify as religious: an all-time low, writes Jeremy Rodell. And of those that do, the mix of faiths is greater than ever. As Anglicanism atrophies, and as Pentecostal and New Churches flourish, Protestantism is becoming increasingly evangelical. And among the five per cent of British people identifying as Muslims, diversity is high — although half of all Muslims continue to be ultra-conservative on questions of social morality.
What about the other, non-religious half of the population? Just over a quarter of atheists and agnostics say they believed in ‘underlying forces of good and evil’, while only thirty per cent have a ‘completely naturalistic’ worldview. ‘In this complex, multi-dimensional and dynamic landscape,’ writes Rodell, ‘the idea of a simple division between religious and non-religious is looking increasingly untenable.’
Tech: The ability of the far-right to thrive on social media relies on the logic of escalating extremism and the micro-politics of identity, writes Richard Seymour in a drastic vision of the ‘social industry’. ‘There is always a new enemy to berate, a new outrage to gyrate over. Through these outrages, communities are formed, usually in antagonism to others. Cultural differences become ossified, more like borders than weather fronts.’
Feminism: Vron Ware writes on the elision of radical feminism in official commemoration of the suffragette movement. Forgotten amidst the tributes to the recently memorialized Millicent Fawcett was her fierce militarism, which at the time led to bitter disagreement with the pacifist Emily Hobhouse over Britain’s brutal conduct during the South African (Anglo-Boer) War.
More articles from New Humanist in Eurozine; New Humanist’s website
La Revue Nouvelle
6/2019
(Belgium)
La Revue Nouvelle analyses political disenchantment in Belgium
According to a recent survey, only 35.6 per cent of the Belgian population has confidence in politicians, while 74 cent say the political system makes them feel powerless. ‘If the [major] political parties don’t want to find themselves side-lined,’ warns La Revue Nouvelle editor editor Renaud Maes, ‘then it is high time they had a radical rethink.’
Decline: The erosion of support for the traditional political parties in the May 2019 elections in Belgium cannot be solely attributed to the rise of far-right Flemish parties such as Vlaams Belang, writes Michel Molitor. Large numbers of voters are also either abstaining or casting blank ballots. ‘The historic power of socialist parties in Europe was inspired by a radical project that creates a space for the poor … [Their] decline today is a result of the disconnect between this underlying inspiration and their actions.’
Traditional parties can combat voter apathy only if they are able to define and convey their vision of the world with sufficient clarity to set them apart from political competitors. ‘There is no viable democracy or political life without clear polarization. In the context of contemporary uncertainty, adopting a clear position requires a strong dose of courage.’
Realignments: New ideological rifts dominated this election, ‘pitting economic interests against environmental interests’ (productivity/ecology) and nation versus immigration (identity/cosmopolitanism), write Robin Lebrun, Thomas Legein and David Talukder. These rifts are embodied not by the traditional parties, but by two smaller ones: Écolo, Belgium’s French-speaking green party, and the liberal-conservative Mouvement Réformateur. As Christophe Mincke points out, ‘environmental concerns became predominant to the extent that almost the entire political spectrum claimed to address them’. This was a problem for Écolo, because it meant that other parties could claim parity with only a vaguely ‘eco-positive’ message.
Language: Laurence Rosier conducts a sociolinguistic analysis of campaign slogans during the elections. The predominance of action verbs, banal adverbs and epithets from everyday speech represents an ‘impoverished semantics’ whose ideological vacuity expresses lack of faith in ‘the power of words to transform the world’.
More articles from La Revue Nouvelle in Eurozine; La Revue Nouvelle’s website
Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais
119 (2019)
(Portugal)
Revista Crítica exposes the redundancies of mainstream economics
The new issue of ‘Revista Crítica’ runs a dossier on the economy as a ‘substantive reality’, beyond the limitations of mainstream economics. Since the 1970s, write the editors, mainstream economics has assumed that people look at themselves as if their lives worked like perfectly functioning markets. It has refused to accept criticism, encouraged us to exploit ourselves, and turned ‘innovation’ into a commodity in its own right.
Mainstream economics: Ben Fine charts three stages of ‘economics imperialism’. First, the application of laws of supply and demand to non-market areas (e.g. education, politics, family life, crime). Second, the treatment of the non-market as if it responded to market imperfections. Third, emerging prior to — but accelerated by — the global financial crisis: ‘suspension’. The ‘technical apparatus’ of mainstream economics is now ‘so strongly and unquestioningly deployed’ that the assumption of ‘optimized individuals’ stays put even when abandoned (for example, when economists assume how people would act in a hypothetically perfect world).
Fine proposes that economics learn from the ‘realist turn’ taken in the other social sciences, embracing critical alternatives and pluralistic methods. This may have adverse effects, however, as the mainstream can ‘selectively plunder heterodox economics in a marginal way’, and heterodoxy might develop its own mainstream defensiveness.
Work: Drawing on Marx and Arendt’s contrasting views of labour, Helena Lopes lays bare the tensions of the modern workplace. Employees should, ideally, cooperate for a common enterprise. Mainstream economics’ ‘agency theory’, however, treats firms as financial assets with no social duties beyond making profit, and workers as competitors who must meet strictly quantified targets to maximize shareholder value.
The result, Lopes writes, is ‘the progressive disappearance of empathic concern from workplaces, replaced by feelings of isolation, suspicion and anomie — which are, unsurprisingly, the ontological basis of mainstream economics’. Lopes’s solution is to ‘repoliticize’ work, restoring its collective character by ensuring firms are run in the common interest of shareholders, institutions, and workers, who must play a role in corporate governance.
Innovation: Once a natural consequence of general human progress, innovation has now become tied to a self-regulated market, to a form of value creation through ‘creative destruction’, ‘dis-embedded from society’, writes José Luís Garcia. We are now surrounded by the ‘pseudo-innovation’ of marketing and advertising as the main sources of ‘aesthetic value-creation’. The solution is for innovation to be guided not by commercial ends alone, but the achievement of ‘socially equitable and ecologically sustainable goals’.
More articles from Revista Crítica in Eurozine; Revista Crítica’s website
Arche
1/2019
(Belarus)
Arche plots the coordinates of a new Belarusian historiography
The Belarusian People’s Republic, which existed for around nine months in 1918, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, to which the Belarusian cultural space belonged until the end of the eighteenth century, continue to serve as points of reference for those wishing to emphasise contemporary Belarus’s historical orientation towards the West. This tendency can be seen in the new issue of Arche, as contributions plot the coordinates of a new national historiography.
Press and publishing: Historians Uladzimir Lyachouski and Andrey Charniakevich study the history of publishing in the short-lived People’s Republic. As they say themselves, this is pioneering work, since this history has ‘until now not emerged as a special topic of research’. They show how a rich publishing sector developed during the period, including official publications, numerous newspapers of various political colours, printing presses and publishing houses. After the end of the Republic, many of its supporters emigrated to Prague or Kaunas, where they continued publishing. ‘Although their political initiatives were not always successful, the cultural value of their self-sacrificing work in the publishing sector cannot be underestimated, nor can its importance for the national movement.’
Nobility: Lithuanian historian Gianutse Kirkene traces the roots of the Chodkiewicz noble family, who in the sixteenth century became magnates of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Family members, who served as warlords, were based in the territories of what today is Hrodna, Navahrudak, Orsha and the region of Podlachia. Kirkene tries to shed light on the prehistory of the family and its founder Chodko Jurewicz, who as nobleman with Ruthenian roots and Orthodox faith acted as witness to the union between Poland and Lithuania in 1434.
More articles from Arche in Eurozine; Arche’s website
O’r Pedwar Gwynt
2/2019
(Wales)
O’r Pedwar Gwynt asks ‘What is language?’
Margaret Thatcher’s reign as British prime minister coincided with one of the most creative periods in Welsh-language pop music. Unemployment and creativity worked hand in hand, writes Dafydd Rhys, as new bands pushed the boundaries geographically, socially and musically. Ironically, Thatcher’s U-turn on supporting a Welsh-language television channel in 1982 was one factor in this pop boom. Was marrying unemployment and creativity easier in the dole culture of 1980s Wales than in the neo-conservative Britain of today, Rhys enquires, given the increasing stigma attached to unemployment?
Language and identity: As the Welsh government announces its aim to increase the number of Welsh speakers to one million by 2050, the question ‘What is language?’ remains pressing. Reading philosopher J. R. Jones, historian and educationalist O. M. Edwards, and Quebecois linguist Denis Bouchard, Mererid Hopwood asks how we are formed by the languages we speak. Have we too easily assumed an instrumental view of language, ignoring the wisdom it accumulates over centuries, which is accessible to all who learn it? Recalling Derrida’s assertion ‘Je n’ai qu’une langue — ce n’est pas la mienne’, Hopwood asks how linguistic identity affects collective thinking, uniting speakers and non-speakers alike.
Existentialism and mindfulness: Llion Wigley, author of a new study on ‘the Welsh unconscious’, asks whether there are aspects of existentialism and psychoanalysis that are worth revisiting today. ‘Existentialism is, in essence, the philosophy of crisis,’ he writes, ‘and it is clear that we are facing in our age a number of unprecedented existential crises’. In a related essay, Angharad Penrhyn Jones explores the dark side of mindfulness, critiquing the increasing emphasis on individual responsibility in public mental health. We should be wary of appropriating Buddhist practices, which in their oversimplified form fail to allow for the darker side of true mindfulness.
Also: Mererid Puw Davies re-reads the late east German author Irmtraud Morgner, inventor of ‘pneumatic writing’; and thirty years on from Tiananmen Square, a republication of Yu Hua on the cult of the leader.
More articles from O’r Pedwar Gwynt in Eurozine; O’r Pedwar Gwynt’s website
