Monthly Archives: June 2016

June 24, 2016 · 3:57 pm

Reflections on the British Referendum

The British referendum campaign to decide whether Britain should leave or remain within the European Union has been in some ways a strange and rather depressing experience, not helped by our weather during June: monsoon-style rainfall and flash flooding in many places. Opinion polls in the weeks leading up to the vote on 23rd June wavered between a slight lead for Remain to a slight lead for Leave. There was then a truly tragic event: the murder of Jo Cox, the member of parliament for Batley & Spen in West Yorkshire. She was shot and stabbed by a man who reportedly called out “Britain First”, the name of an extremist right wing party. Jo Cox had been an MP for only one year but she had already made a mark across party lines with her humanitarian campaign for Syria. She was 41 years old, married, with two young children. By all accounts, she was a kind of secular saint, the kind of politician that any country should cherish in an age when so many people regard their elected representatives with contempt and cynicism. Jo Cox had been a fervent advocate for Remain and her death seems to have coincided with opinion polling showing increasing support for Remain and the tide turning against Leave. It was distasteful to see some of the leaders of the Remain campaign try to suggest that her death was in some way the fault of those who want to leave the EU.

It was also depressing to see both sides trying to scare voters with increasingly apocalyptic pictures of the disasters that would occur if we didn’t vote their way. As an advocate for ending our membership of the EU, I particularly disliked the way in which, instead of making the principled and reasoned case for leaving the EU, many of those politicians campaigning on the Leave side stoked up fears about immigration. The nadir was reached with a poster from the UK Independence Party, which showed a snaking queue of refugees from Syria together with the slogan “Breaking Point”.

Yet there is also something very stirring about what has just happened. I’m writing this on the day that the referendum results have shown, against all the expectations of the London-based commentariat, that Britain has voted to leave the EU. We have listened to the warnings of experts, the pleas of the vast majority of MPs, the threats of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Governor of the Bank of England and the President of the USA; and still a majority of British people have said No to the EU. We’ve done the thing almost everyone with power and influence said that we shouldn’t and have taken a leap into the dark, trusting in our own judgement that the EU was not right for us. We have expressed a vote of no confidence in the establishment. Such independence of spirit, such freedom of thought, is the essence of democracy and it is very stirring.

This is one of the very few ballots I’ve experienced in which my vote has counted for anything; in Britain’s “first past the post” electoral system, my votes over many elections are usually wasted. But in a referendum, every vote has an equal weight, and it is a pleasant change to experience a ballot which is truly democratic. One result of all this will surely be a demand in the future for reforms to Britain’s current electoral system.

The outcome of the referendum has revealed a divided Britain, in which many young people voted Remain and many older people voted Leave; London was pitched against the rest of England and Wales; Scotland was in opposition to England; the prosperous were versus the poor; and the political parties were out of step with their supporters. Does Britain, as a homogeneous society, still exist?

This result will be a salutary shock to London, which voted overwhelmingly for Remain. It is revealed as an arrogant and centralising city state, out of touch with the rest of England. London has for years been like a kind of black hole, sucking in capital and resources that should have been spread much more widely. Brexit will begin to redress the balance.

This result is also a profound shock to the mainstream political parties. Prime Minister David Cameron, who had pledged to call the referendum as a device to unite his Conservative Party against the UK Independence Party just ahead of the 2015 general election, an election which he had not expected to win, was then forced after his party’s surprise victory to implement his pledge. By nailing his colours so firmly to the Remain mast, he has now ensured his own political demise and has announced that he will step down by October this year. The Parliamentary Labour Party too, is showing poor judgment: instead of examining how the party has become so divorced from its core voters, some of its MPs are now planning a coup against their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for being insufficiently enthusiastic about staying in the EU.

There are other questions which will come to the fore in the weeks and months ahead. What will this result mean for Northern Ireland, which voted to Remain, and which has a land border with another EU country, Ireland? It has already led to renewed calls from Sinn Fein for a United Ireland. What will it mean for Gibraltar, which also voted to Remain, and is now likely to come under an increasingly aggressive campaign of harassment and non-co-operation from Spain? Above all, will the Scottish National Party now seek to hold a second referendum on Scottish independence?

But there are perhaps even bigger questions for the European Union itself. When David Cameron came back from the EU after his failed negotiations for meaningful reform, I thought at the time that European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and his colleagues had made a serious misjudgment by treating Cameron with contempt – and so it has proved. The EU has been judged by this referendum and found wanting. Other member-states will now be lining up to tell it so. Fundamentally, this is about the right of people across Europe to elect the people who make key decisions in their lives. Polls have shown between a quarter and third of people across Europe are now deeply hostile to the European project. The economies of southern Europe are immobilised by a straitjacket strapped on to them by Brussels and Frau Merkel.

As I said in my previous post about the EU, it was set up not only to be deliberately anti-democratic but also to be a vehicle for the banks and big multi-national corporations. It is also extremely difficult to reform the EU, because this would require changes to the treaties, which in turn require unanimous agreement from all member-countries. Britain was taken by its leaders into the EU in 1973 on the basis of a deliberate deception and as a result our governing elites are now reaping in the referendum result what Rudolf Steiner called “the karma of untruthfulness”.

I do not want what now follows after Brexit to be business as usual. We need to reassure Europe that we’ll be good neighbours, reassure migrants here that they are welcome, and reassure the 48 per cent who voted for Remain that they are not strangers in their own country. Both Conservative and Labour parties have failed in their own ways and we now need to find new ways and a new story. Future British governments need to be true one-nation governments, working towards a situation in which towns like Sunderland and Swansea no longer feel cut off from the politics of a metropolitan elite.

Internationally, Brexit has given an opportunity to Britain (whether it survives as the United Kingdom or whether it splits into its constituent nations), to start a debate about forming a new organisation of nation states that can offer a more hopeful vision of the future than that provided by the corporate plutocrats of the EU. There is an alternative to corporate domination and the environmental destruction and massive inequality it brings. Real social change begins, like Brexit, with non-cooperation with the existing system. Once we make the choice to stop co-operating with a system we find immoral, we can begin to build an alternative. By discussing these ideas with other countries around the world, we can start to build a new global economy in which every community has food and water security and locally produced renewable energy. This then creates the foundations for a more peaceful world.

Just over a week ago, my wife and I paid a visit to Lewes Castle, a Norman castle which stands at the highest point of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex. It was built in around 1069 by William de Warenne, the son-in-law of William the Conqueror. While I was there, it struck me that the Norman domination and ruthless suppression of the Anglo Saxon inhabitants of England and the Celts of Wales has cast a kind of shadow over the British Isles for nearly 1,000 years. In one of the castle rooms, I came across this quotation about the Normans in an exhibition display:

 “…and they filled the land full of castles. They cruelly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle works. And when the castles were made they filled them with devils and evil men.”

(Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1137)

This energy of domination, cruelty and adversarial politics has shaped the British nation in the centuries since then and echoes of it still survive today in Westminster. What is Brexit really about, I wonder? Is it possible that it marks the beginning of something that will lead to the decline and fall of this Norman model of dealing with other people and other countries? Could we be about to find our way towards a new and more heart-centred approach to what it means to be British and European citizens of the world? I feel that it really could be so.

 

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Filed under Brexit, European Union, Norman Conquest, Rudolf Steiner

June 2, 2016 · 4:46 pm

The School of Unselfishness

I’ve just been reading one of Rudolf Steiner’s more esoteric lectures, The Four Sacrifices of Christ, which he gave in Basle, Switzerland, on 1st June 1914. It’s a remarkable lecture, in which Steiner says that in earlier ages the Christ intervened three times in human affairs before he was incarnated in the human body of Jesus of Nazareth and underwent the crucifixion. Steiner has some mind-stretching things to say about unselfishness, extending the concept to our eyes, the natural world, our vital organs, and our thinking, feeling and willing. For reasons of concision, I don’t want to say anything more here but would recommend that you read the lecture for yourself.

What I do want to focus on in this post, however, is the importance of Steiner’s overall message from the lecture, which is how very much the quality of unselfishness is needed today:

“It must come to be realised that a school of unselfishness is needed in our present culture. A renewing of responsibility, a deepening of man’s moral life, can only come through a training in unselfishness, and under the conditions of the present age only those can go through this school who have won for themselves an understanding of real, all-pervading selflessness.”

Well, our present age certainly provides us with a schooling in the consequences of selfishness, which we see every day in its personal, national and international manifestations. Our current paradigm, which stems from the model of Anglo-American capitalism, was started in Britain on the basis of self-interest, greed, fear, exploitation of natural resources and dominion over others and has now become our most successful export. It’s sad to see that this has been taken up with enthusiasm in countries such as India and China. It is this model that has brought us to our present pass in which, if everyone on the planet consumed as much as the average US citizen, four Earths would be needed to sustain us. It is this fundamental selfishness which has led us to the crazy position that now threatens the entire planet.

So we need to pay urgent attention to Steiner’s message that “under the influence of materialism the natural unselfishness of mankind was lost to an extent that will be fully realised only in the distant future. But by contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, by permeating our knowledge of it with all our feeling, we may acquire again, with our whole soul-being, an education in selflessness. We may say that what Christ did for earthly evolution was included in the fundamental impulse of selflessness, and what He may become for the conscious development of the human soul is the school of unselfishness.”

But unselfishness is so rare these days, such an unexpected phenomenon in human culture, that I had to rack my brain to find some current examples that might inspire us. Thinking about it for a while, I came across some instances close to home – literally so in my first example.

About a year ago we moved to a new house and just lately I’ve been enjoying myself by planning a small orchard in our garden. While considering which varieties of apple, pear, plum, etc to grow, I’ve had to think about rootstocks. Many fruit trees do not grow on their own roots but instead skilled nurserymen and women graft scions of desirable varieties onto special rootstocks. These rootstocks control factors such as rate of growth, size of tree and the age at which trees come into bearing. Many of these rootstocks were developed at the East Malling Research Station in Kent during the early decades of the 20th century. The breakthroughs made there were so successful that today 80% of the world’s apple orchards grow on rootstocks pioneered in East Malling. Very many home gardeners (soon to include me) have also benefited from these discoveries. The point about this is that these rootstocks were never patented but simply released into the world as a self-evident good that should not be exploited for profit. As such, they spread rapidly around the globe and are now to be found in many countries.

Evelyn Dunbar A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling 1944 (3′ x 4′: 91 x 121cm) Manchester City Art Gallery

My second example of unselfishness is also close to home, or rather, to work. I have a part-time job at Tablehurst Community Farm in Forest Row, East Sussex. Both Tablehurst and its sister farm, Plaw Hatch, farm on land which is owned by St Anthony’s Trust, a local charity whose charitable objectives include the training of biodynamic farmers and growers. The Tablehurst land was given – yes, given – to the Trust in a magnificent altruistic gesture by Emerson College in 2004. St Anthony’s Trust, in turn, has carried out a truly revolutionary act when seen against today’s society norms. It has refused to use the land as an asset to be borrowed against or mortgaged. Instead, it says to the farms: you can farm this land and use the buildings on the land, as long as you undertake to farm biodynamically. The farms pay very reasonable rents to the Trust, which in turn invests in the training of tomorrow’s farmers and growers. These acts of unselfishness have enabled two flourishing community farm enterprises to grow and develop and to employ between them nearly sixty people who produce superb food for their local communities, while looking after the land, the plants and the animals to the highest standards of husbandry. Capital to support new farm infrastructure and machinery is raised through the financial support of the community rather than through taking out loans.

Cows-and-kids-442x590

Future farmers leading the cows to a new field at Tablehurst Community Farm

This could never have happened in that situation which is so common today, where land is treated as a fast-appreciating capital asset either to be sold to enrich the owner or to be used as security against loans, and which then saddles the farmer with huge debts to be serviced, which is rather like having a noose around your neck. Imagine what could be the effect on agriculture if a similar model were to be taken up by communities around the world and if we were to say to farmers: “Farms today need the active support of their neighbouring communities. We believe that local farms supplying local customers is the best way of ensuring food security, wholesome food for us and our families, and kindness toward land and animals; and therefore as a community we are going to provide you with land so that you can farm on our behalf and with our support, without the need to get into debt.” Such collective acts of unselfishness would transform our world – the Monsanto model of farming would wither as if under a drenching of glyphosate.

The third example of unselfishness will be known to most of us; the pharmacist Sir Alexander Fleming is revered not just because of his discovery of penicillin – the antibiotic that has saved millions of lives – but also due to his efforts to ensure that it was freely available to as much of the world’s population as possible. Fleming could have become a hugely wealthy man if he had decided to control and license the substance, but he understood that penicillin’s potential to overcome diseases such as syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis meant it had to be released into the world to serve the greater good. Fleming chose not to patent his discovery of penicillin, stating, “I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident.” Fleming’s goal was to develop a cheap and effective drug that would be available to all the world. It has saved millions of lives since.

Alexander Fleming

Sir Alexander Fleming – photo via http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk

This story doesn’t end quite so happily, however, since selfishness and greed crept back in. In 1939, Dr. Howard Florey, a future Nobel Laureate, and three colleagues at Oxford University began intensive research and were able to demonstrate penicillin’s ability to kill infectious bacteria. As the war with Germany continued to drain industrial and government resources, the British scientists could not produce the quantities of penicillin needed for clinical trials on humans and turned to the United States for help. They were quickly referred to a laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, where scientists were already working on fermentation methods to increase the growth rate of fungal cultures. On July 9, 1941, Howard Florey and other scientists from Oxford University came to the US with a valuable package containing a small amount of penicillin and began work at Peoria.

By November 26, 1941, Dr Andrew J. Moyer, the lab’s expert on the nutrition of moulds, had succeeded, with the assistance of one of the Oxford scientists, in increasing the yields of penicillin 10 times. In 1943, the required clinical trials were performed and penicillin was shown to be the most effective antibacterial agent to date. Penicillin production was quickly scaled up and became available in quantity to treat Allied soldiers wounded on D-Day.

As a result of their work, Fleming and two members of the British group were awarded the Nobel Prize. Dr. Moyer from the Peoria laboratory was inducted into the Inventors’ Hall of Fame and both the British and Peoria laboratories were designated as International Historic Chemical Landmarks. However, on May 25, 1948, Dr Moyer was granted a patent for a method of the mass production of penicillin and thus became a very rich man.

Until this day the British regret that, for ethical reasons, they had asked Florey not to file for a patent on penicillin. The University of Oxford never got its share from the fabulous profits made from penicillin in the US and, to add insult to injury, the UK had to pay licensing fees to US companies.

We could say that Big Pharma has carried on in exactly the same way ever since; and today, despite the mounting evidence of increasing germ resistance to existing antibiotics, the giant pharmaceutical corporations are not researching new antibiotics because they don’t think there will be enough money in it for them. “Without urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” warned Dr Keiji Fukuda, who is the World Health Organisation’s assistant director general for health security.

Antibiotics are usually only prescribed for a week or so, meaning that they are less lucrative than treatments for conditions – like high cholesterol – which have to be taken daily over a long period. So we can see that the selfishness of these big corporations is likely to lead directly to the post-antibiotic era and the return of deaths caused by common infections and minor injuries warned of by the WHO. It seems relevant to quote again from Steiner’s lecture:

 “…In relation to our moral life, our understanding of the world, and in relation to all the activities of our consciousness soul, we must first become selfless. This is a duty of our present culture to the future. Mankind must become more and more selfless; therein lies the future of right living, and of all the deeds of love possible to earthly humanity. Our conscious life is and must be on its way to unselfishness. In a certain connection, essential unselfishness already exists in us, and it would be the greatest misfortune for earthly man if certain sections of his being were as self-seeking as he still is in his moral, intellectual and emotional life”

One final example of unselfishness and what it can mean for the world, so as to end on a more cheerful note. Beyond the fact that you are using it to read these words, the Web has undeniably had a major impact on a large part of the world’s population. It’s certainly one of the most significant inventions of recent times, and one of the reasons it has taken off in such a spectacular way, and led to so many further innovations, was because Sir Tim Berners-Lee decided not to patent it. No patent, so no royalty cheques for Sir Tim; but this farsighted act of unselfishness allowed the Web to spread around the world.

 

 

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Filed under Biodynamic farming, Emerson College UK, Rudolf Steiner

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