Libraries.

On the one hand they need to justify their existence beyond merely a source of free books for the unemployed, underemployed, pensioners, and children or people who simply think books don’t justify spending any money on at all. They represent the dream of universal access to literature and information, and in doing so, it is hoped, act as a civilising influence, making people better. They’re a badge that say, “Look at us! We’re enlightened!”

On the other hand, libraries also have to be a bit crap. A limited selection, grubby tattered books, rationing. They need to leave enough people willing to buy their own books so that publishers continue to publish books and writers continue to write. If everyone used the library exclusively, they would quickly become little more than museums commemorating a long dead publishing industry.

If I were the sort of person that didn’t care about taxing the arse off people or the consequences of doing so, and wanted to reinvent the whole concept of “free” access to information for the 21st Century, I’d close all the libraries down and hand out a free e-Reader and simply invoice the taxpayer for every single book downloaded. Luckily I’m not, yet even with this, even with all of publishing at their fingertips, I would be amazed if there wasn’t at least 20% of people that didn’t download even one single book.

I would also expect that, despite giving every person in the country free access to pretty much all of ‘publishing’ people would still complain about closing the libraries, as if it’s not the knowledge or literature that matters but the actual physical books themselves, or the ‘social’ effect of simply having such churches to the written word being public spaces.

The point is that books are very slowly, and reluctantly, heading towards obsolescence. It’s inevitable. The economics of digital distribution are too overwhelmingly against dead tree publishing, the environmental argument too compelling. In terms of accessibility, electronic book readers allow readers to set their own font sizes, their own colour scheme. Electronically stored books have the power to be read aloud or reproduced as Braille for the blind. Books out of copyright can be downloaded for free, current books can be downloaded for a few pounds. This is the future! Rejoice!

Sure, we fetishise the book – the act of turning pages, the feel of the paper, the smell of the pages, but books – as mode of data transport – have had their day. I’m a die-hard technophile and even I still understand the appeal of real books, but I feel my resolve on this fading. What about people ten years younger? Twenty years? Those who’ve just been born?

It stands to reason that the fate of libraries is tied up with that of books and, likewise, are going to fade in cultural importance. With every decade that passes, as more and more of us expect to get our literature and information from or via the Internet, the political question of “universal access to the tools of one’s own liberation” is going to be less about making sure there’s a pile of free books for people to borrow, but identifying what barriers, if any, stand in the way of getting everyone access to the incomprehensibly large source of information that we call “The Internet”.

I see non-fiction, reference libraries becoming something you’ll find only in Schools and Universities where they’ve got a practical use which morphs into historical interest, but increasingly this will be replaced with digital technology for the most up to date information and publications. I see most Public libraries closing or consolidating into regional museums, being replaced with ‘children’s libraries’ at first that are managed by education authorities and serve more as a free childcare service than being the primary source of reading material for kids. Eventually these too will close.

I see travelling libraries, in lorries, continuing to run for another few decades by councils until eventually they’re taken over by charities run by and for those with a sentimental attachment to books as a physical thing.

But I still think, even if laptops cost £20 and the internet was free (as in beer), you’d still get people who didn’t bother, who’d think even £20 is far too much money for access to all human knowledge and the ability to communicate with everyone else. Waste of good beer money. Give it to them for free and it’ll sit, unused, languishing in a cupboard, just some more rubbish from the Nanny State to ignore.

In a free society, people can – and do – choose ignorance. Libraries don’t even begin to address this problem (if you regard being able to decide for yourself a problem, of course), so when people demand I help save the libraries I say, “Do I have to?”.

It feels like a sentimental obligation towards tradition and the pretence of what a post-enlightenment society should be like than any considered answer to the very real questions posed by declining collective (or average) education levels (or, put less tactfully, intelligence) compared with other nations, and the devastating consequences that will have on Britain economically.

If we’re not the best, we need to be cheap. We’re neither.

Public libraries are the answer to one problem: “How do we guarantee that people who want to read books, but don’t have enough money to buy books, get access to books?” How long, really, will this be a pressing concern in a society where books cease to be the primary means of communicating information and literature?

Face it: The call to “save the libraries” may not be the right answer. Perhaps, really, we should start thinking about what the question is.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to be well reasoned and rational when the reasoned, rational argument happens to fit your own prejudices. It’s quite another thing to use reason to support an argument that you personally find uncomfortable.

The last few days have been very uncomfortable.

A man in Arizona (I won’t name him) shot a congresswoman, a judge, a kid and others. It’s a horrible, unspeakable tragedy.

And, like all other horrible, unspeakable tragedies like this, people rush to find the cause, the explanation, the reason. Depending on the circumstances blame is invariably placed on whatever pop culture the shooter might have enjoyed – Grand Theft Auto III, Marilyn Manson, The Beatles. Sometimes the blame is placed on The Media for their morbid glamorisation of other such killers. Sometimes it’s blamed on Gun Control, or lack of.

This time it is “The Toxic Violent Rhetoric of Politics” that’s to blame. Glenn Beck. Sarah Palin. They’ve created this culture. They’re to blame.

Except, of course, that’s unsupportable as a basic fact: All other Americans have been exposed to the exact same ‘violent rhetoric’ without literally taking up arms against their local politicians. And, we should remember, the shooter didn’t just kill political targets. He went on a killing spree at a town hall meeting, indiscriminately killing Democrats, Republicans, Swing voters and children.

The question we normally ask, “What makes people go on killing sprees?” has been replaced, this time, with, “what can we do about the ‘violent rhetoric’ in America?” and I despair, wondering how it came to be that this comfortable, easy explanation has been swallowed as fact so easily. We literally know nothing. Nothing. Anyone who tries to tell you what caused this tragedy not shrugging their shoulders and saying, “I don’t know” is making stuff up or echoing the opinions of others. It’s possibly only one guy that really knows – and even that’s not certain. “It was an act of Terrorism” explains what it was, but not the why.

As a nod to more rational thinking, some asking this question freely admit that Sarah Palin “didn’t actually pull the trigger” and then follow it up with a smug sounding “but”.

Yet, behind this story, there’s the seed of something else that is genuinely alarming. The rush to blame Palin and Beck for this travesty is not, in my opinion, the result of political opportunism or an organised effort to attack Sarah Palin, even if it looks like that. Even I’m not that cynical. I also think that many otherwise liberal minded and rational people are incapable of telling the difference between a mass murderer and a stereotype of a gun toting Tea Party member.

And herein lies the problem. A lot of people, quite understandably, are scared by the implications of someone being murdered for their political beliefs (even if the other victims of the shooter were murdered for simply being in proximity to someone with known political beliefs). There are real people who are genuinely scared that the bitter, twisted rhetoric that passes for political discourse in the States is turning into something that means people are going to end up dead.

They, themselves, are restrained. They understand that it’s just words, that it’s all part of the stupid game of politics. There’s no way they’d be talked into shooting a Republican, or committing some other atrocity by violent rhetoric.

But that’s the Democrats, the Liberals. They’re sensible and mature, right? But the Republicans, the Tea Party lot? They’re kind of backwards. Stupid. Possibly inbred. Poor hicks with nothing but guns and hate. You can’t trust them to understand it’s just words, that they’re not meant to literally put Democrats to death.

For Democratic politicians, the fear must be so much worse. What if they’re next? What if, in every decision they take, they’re constantly thinking about the possibility of violent reprisals from republican voters? What if they have to shut themselves away from the public behind fortress walls, afraid of facing the very people they’re supposed to represent?

But the fact that people can actually believe that Palin and Beck’s rhetoric could have turned an ordinary GOP voter into a killer is a sign that the dehumanisation of rival tribes is not limited exclusively to Republicans. The hate, the fear, the distrust – the feeling, it seems, is mutual. This sense of desperation to tone down the rhetoric has not sprung out of no-where. This idea that the rhetoric is to blame is feeding on pre-existing fears.

It’s somewhat comforting to imagine that if everyone decides that the rhetoric was to blame and things change as a result then, perhaps, something good might come out of a senseless act of terrorism. Instead what’s happening is that normal, rational people who’d laugh at any suggestion that Grand Theft Auto causes killing sprees are quite willing to accept, without any real evidence at all, that the guy went on a killing spree because of a tasteless-in-hindsight website, or brain-numbing slogans like, “Don’t retreat! Reload!”?

A collective knee jerks, and a finger points squarely in exactly the same direction it always points: The Enemy. Them.

John Prescott was the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister from the years 1997 to 2007. His name has been changed, by the Queen, to “Baron Prescott, of Kingston Upon Hull, in the County of East Yorkshire” but is, in fact, more commonly referred to by those for whom respect for authority and tradition allows as Lord Prescott.

I raise this matter because John has expressed discomfort with his new Lordly name.

“I don’t like the word Lord. It’s got a Lordly meaning to it.”

Well, yes. In many respects, that’s very much the point. The Torygraph continues:

“I’d prefer to be called a senator than a Lord. It has all these kind [sic] of implications and I get a bit embarrassed about them but it gives me a political platform. But for God’s sake let’s get rid of the word Lord and become a senator.”

Let’s see: To be a Senator would imply that the person in question had achieved their post democratically, that they were a representative of the people in some way. To be a Lord is to have done a favour for someone, or perhaps to have an ancestor who did a favour for the King or the Queen of their time.

To call John Prescott – who received his current title as thanks for his service to the previous Government – a Senator would be a lie, a fraud. John is a Lord, because that reflects the truth of the current undemocratic, favours based system that we use to fill the House of Lords.

But all is not lost, John. I share your discomfort. I’ll never call you Lord. Oh, no, please: Don’t mention it. I’m happy to help.

[Source]

I haven’t thought much about politics recently. Instead I’ve been focused on work, and for that I don’t apologise. Running a blog is a luxury for the time rich, and running a political blog with such a profoundly dull Government in charge is something of a tedious bore.

Some, of course, think differently. They protest to embarrass or intimidate the Government – those Lib Dems have to be a weak link, right? – into ramping up taxes to keep the public sector in the manner to which they’ve grown accustomed, to continue redistributing jobs from the private sector to the public sector and turn Britain into the giant Day Care Centre for adult babies that seems to be the only future it really has.

Still, despite the silence I have been thinking about my own libertarianism and wondering whether my utter contempt for even the concept of a ‘class’ has blinded me to certain realities. I despise and loathe the British class system, and consider the only reasonable response to be to ignore it, to wilfully refuse to acknowledge the damn thing exists. But, what if the lefties have a point? What if a country’s very culture is a primary economic factor? Opposition to Libertarianism comes from those who look at this country with very different eyes to my own and see disaster in trusting people to look after their own self interest, see ruin in looking to the private sector and see nothing but evil at the mere mention of the ‘profit motive’. What is it they see that I don’t?

Few libertarians are interested in class. We think of people as individuals, not members of collectives whether that be race, gender or class, so we rarely think or talk about it. Why should we? As far as I’m concerned the issue of someone’s class is a matter of extreme triviality, as tedious and irrelevant to anything worth thinking about as the colour of someone’s eyes or their shoe size. “I am working class!” says you. “So?” says I.

But for all the pointlessness of the class system, I do live in a society that has a list of people it calls the “Upper Class”, which you are born or marry into and this particular class seems to hold a certain glamour and fascination. I can’t claim to be an authority on the reality of life for the aristocracy, nor do I much care. Perhaps I am not middle class enough, or perhaps it’s simply that the only people I regard as my “betters” are those with greater skills, knowledge and achievements.

I don’t measure people by the amount of land or property they own, or who their friends might be and what parties they are invited to, or where they were educated or how much money they have.

This exposes me, I suspect, of having a rather “working class” mindset, to value what one can accomplish with one’s hands and mind. And, perhaps, deep down, this is the true British sickness, the source of our malaise.

See, as a society, utter morons that we are, have placed work at the very bottom of our social hierarchy, and not working at the top. To succeed in British society is to be able to not work and we wonder why people are perfectly satisfied to live on handouts. Deep down, they’re living the British dream: To do absolutely nothing at all.

You can see, I’m sure, how this sort of thinking, profoundly and deeply ingrained into the British psyche, dooms us all? In the world of business, the person who turns up once every month and watches cash rolling in has a higher prestige and social status than the person who actually runs the organisation’s operations, as if the operations are a vulgarity. Superior still is the person who gives to another a pile of cash and delegates to them the task of turning that money into more money. In popular culture our most popular folk heroes are those who’ve managed to make of career of absolute, cretinous uselessness, famous for being famous, a new democratised, bastardised and perverted echo of Britain’s aristocracy.

We have it all backwards. We’ve got it all wrong. We seem to admire those who do the least for the most, not those who do the most* and then we’re surprised when this country doesn’t seem capable of producing a Honda, or an Apple Computers, or a Google. To produce such a company requires more than a desire to make money. It requires a desire to work, to produce something new and wonderful for its own sake.

As long as we regard work as vulgar, as something to be escaped, as nothing more than a tiresome drain on our valuable time then, frankly, Day Care Centre Britain is our future.

* … and those who think we should be looking to up those who do the most for the least are a whole other problem for another day…