I strongly suspect that I will not be alone in waking this morning more shocked than I was last night at the death of Jo Cox MP. Yesterday there was disbelief, and today a real shock that is numbing.
There is a Brexit post waiting to go on this blog. It won't be appearing today. It would be inappropriate.
But that said Jo Cox's death cannot create a vacuum; it should instead result in action. I sincerely hope her family receive all the help and support they will need. Beyond that though, even today, there is a wider issue to consider and act upon.
Jo Cox was unusual in being a local MP. She died in the community she served, where she had also grown up. It is that word community I want to dwell in.
It does, of course, imply communication. It does suggest sharing. It implies commonality. More than that, it embraces reconciliation within a space.
Jo Cox's death should, I think, make us ask what those things really mean and how we achieve them. I stress, that is not a quest for agreement, similarity or the elimination of identity. Community does none of those things. Instead it lets difference thrive tolerantly within a location that is inhabited in common, whether that be local, regional, national and beyond.
Jo Cox clearly sought to understand all of this from what we have learned of her. Maybe the action required of us is to try a bit harder to do the same.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I was campaigning for remain last weekend in the constituency where I live. Being interested in economics I said to one of the Vote Leave campaigners that people from both sides had economic concerns, and was about to ask her what her own thoughts on that were when she screamed ‘B*llocks!’ and thrust her placard in my face. Another gentleman told me my Swiss friend should ‘F*** off back to where he came from’. I’m genuinely interested in all the arguments, and have had interesting discussions with people who are in favour of Brexit, but I worry that the Vote Leave campaign is legitimising racism and emboldening those who are racist to shout things in the street, and act aggressively towards people, who might have thought twice about doing so before.
I live in a very small community; 6 household; 5 owner occupied and one rented house. About a month ago we had new neighbours in the rented house. We went over with a bottle of wing and were welcomed. We discussed what we did. They had a 14 year old son who was a high flyer and very interested in Physics and Astronomy. I explained that I was an Astrophysics Professor and would be very happy to speak to the son and that he was probably very similar to me at that age. The neighbour said he was a former Daily Mail Journalist. Towards the end of the conversation he said to my wife “You married an Irishman?” – not sure if the tone was mild disbelief, or much worse. The neighbours have not invited us back and look in the opposite direction when I attempt to say hello. They have a girl the same age as my son, 11, (the nearest other child near my son’s age is about a mile away) and I was very hopefully initially that they could be friends as he is an only child and is very sociable.
Not sure if this is related but it is the first time I have come across racism for many years -It simply does not seem to happen in an Academic environment.
This referendum has been very ugly on both sides and the incident can be totally unrelated to anything; bigots have and always will exist. I think appalling as the Yes campaign has been the No campaign has been vile. Some of the press; the Daily Mail in particular has been even more obnoxious than usual so much so that “Incitement to Hatred” and “treason – a deliberate attempt to destabilize the state” come to mind.
Th UK is becoming an increasingly ugly place. It is my fervent hope that things improve after the referendum.
I agree with you whole heartedly Richard but I feel moved to say this:
If reports about what the assailant said are true all I see behind this woman’s death is the summation of a long lineage of violence and hate mongering that is firmly rooted in the political right wing of politics the world over.
Only politicians themselves can change this. The Tory party has ‘rode the lightening’ by using rhetoric that sets person against person (the blame game). Certain newspapers are being allowed to use language that is just not acceptable never mind the lies being told.
As for the lies, Gove is at it again in i today painting the picture that we could afford to fund the NHS if only we didn’t have to give money to the EU – omitting to mention his Government’s own sovereign created austerity policies and NHS underfunding.
Here we are being told about the grooming of vulnerable Muslims by ISIS members in the UK and seeing the results; but are not our politicians and newspapers grooming our society for conflict and intolerance too?
Yes – this was a very personal attack that was so vicious as to be exceptional (the details of it are horrific) – far from normal behaviour for the majority of human beings.
But it is also telling us that there is something deeply, deeply wrong within our society at this moment in time.
For me, David Cameron should take responsibility for not only the disgusting rhetoric used by his party but the way he conducts himself in Parliament and resign. If he had a conscience he would.
Lynton Crosby should be dismissed immediately and sent back to Australia where I am told by family members there that the fruits of his ‘labour’ malignantly manifest itself on a daily basis.
We now need totally independent regulation of the press – led by Judges of outstanding character.
I’m sick of living a nation that is simply set up to be manipulated by vested interests that do not care about any of us at all. AT ALL.
I totally agree with your rightly impassioned words, PSR. What we have seen from Government over that last few years has not only impacted me personally but shocked me to the core that we can:
1) Have Government that uses emotional manipulation to ‘groom the public’ for idoelogical purposes.
2) Use a rhetoric of divisiveness
3) Dehumanise certain sectors of society
4) A Prime Minister so amateurish and inarticulate that he can accuse the leader of the opposition of being a ‘terrorist sympathiser’ and yet survive such abusive behaviour.
5) A chancellor who has sneered at the poor/vulnerable/weak/ill and continues to show an utter absence of reasonable self-reflection
6) An anti-intellectualism that has been growing over the last 30 years.
7) To top t all, a referendum debate that has treated the public like morons and refused to talk about real world issues.
8) A press that is univocal in its dumbed down, tendentious representation of reality and is culturally vapid and vacuous.
Surely, surely it has now reached its nadir.
Simon I am resistant to conspiracy theories but I do see a sort of strategy . I think we now live with, not Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, but a financial -media complex with the latter acting as a servant to the former.
Political energy now seems generated by what one is against, rather than promoting ideals. The media now often take a scornful, sneer and smear approach to those. This makes it easier to run a campaign based on fear or hate and not reason.
Denigration of collective political action and ideals make it easier to privatise. If we look at the 2012 Health and Social Care law, there was little analysis in the media. With this debate, we have little information about how the EU works or how ‘most favoured nation’ clauses affect international trade. I am sure you can think of other examples. This is the real threat to our sovereignty and freedoms. It is ironic, if not sickening, how the language of democracy is used to promote the opposite.
Community – a good theme to be reminded of. The difference between closed communities, resentful and suspicious of others different to or from outside those communities and of any kind of change; and those communities that are open to, interested in and welcoming to others, and accepting of change.
The demographic maps that consistently show that the areas most likely to vote for UKIP and to attribute their problems to migration are those that have the lowest levels of migration in practice. Whilst cities like London, Bristol, Birmingham, despite their problems, show much less interest in buying the UKIP pitch. I grew up in Cumberland and lived for years in South London (Brixton, Greenwich, Battersea) so Ive seen both sides.
The Leave campaign has run a campaign that has been overwhelmingly relied on stoking the fear and resentment of other, attributing the cause of real problems (housing, health, low wages) to people who are not from ‘our community’. Even when those arguments do not stand up to any kind of rigorous analysis.
We have been here before many times in history and its is as Sean says a very ugly place. I thought that the UK had become much better than that – it seems like I was wrong. Whatever the result, the healing process will take a long time
I strongly suspect that this all goes to prove that in shrinking the state you are also shrinking the community.
It’s not ‘l’état c’est moi’. But the state is us. Enfeebling it is not good for belonging.
MayP, what a wise comment and conclusion to be drawn from the murder of Jo Cox – “the state is us”, which must surely be the four-word precis of Richard’s “The Courageous State”.
We’ve allowed the neo-liberal doomsters and snake oil merchants to debase “the state”, and defame it as a tyrant, when, properly understood “the state is us”, and it is the snake oil merchants who are the real tyrants.
Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, they bade us eat of the Tree of Ignorance and False Freedom, which had led to our being expelled from the creaky and rickety but basically functioning post-war consensus, not a Garden of Eden, by any means, but a damned sight better place than Thatcher’s false nirvana, in which we are now trapped, where, as Adam is told:
[17] […] cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; [18] thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.
[19] In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
In simpler terms, we know live in YOYOland – “You’re On Your Own” chum – the state is withdrawn from all except from the new feudal overlords, who continue to syphon off the fruits of everyone else’s labour.
Worrying information about the possible motives of the assassin in the Guardian today. I’m sure there will be much speculation and developments over the coming days, but the “lack of community” in spirit, mind, economics and politics is a worrying trend in this country which I have seen far too much of in many others.
Add into this toxic mix of extremism, mental health issues, lethal weapons and hatred – the current heightened tensions created within all our communities over a matter important to all of us, and I can only be thankful that we still live in a country where this type of mindless violence is a very rare occurrence.
But great effort needs to be taken that it stays this way and improves, rather than allowing it to slip towards a much more uncaring and violent form of society.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/17/jo-cox-suspect-thomas-mair-bought-gun-manuals-from-us-neo-nazis-group-claims
when I feel low I find reading this helpful,
http://www.thoughtfortheday.com.au/images/Desiderata%20-%20Thank%20You.pdf
Along with MayP I’d like to comment on the sources of insane hate, in whatever form it manifests itself in societies whose social provisions degenerate. I’ve culled a couple of quotes from Wiki because they seem to encapsulate at least some of what I feel.
In chapter XIII of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, the great materialist philosopher of the rise of capitalism, explains the concept of “War Of All Against All” with these words:
“Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man. […] In such condition there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual Fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” So we need a state to regulate our interactions or we’ll remain in a “State of Nature”. It seems that we’re actually regressing to various forms of such a condition, given neoliberal philosophy’s actual outcomes.
However, Marx and Engels have it right, I think, Engels most well put, when they identify the epistemological error involved here, and assert the freedom of humans to overcome definition by their past:
In a letter from Marx to Engels (18 June 1862):
“It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes.”
In 1875 Engels expresses clearly against any attempt to legitimize the trend of anthropomorphizing human nature to the distorted view of natural selection:
“The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbe’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’s theory of population. When this conjurer’s trick has been performed…the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved.”
In other words, it’s capitalist society that raises up again the filthy ideas that “time forgot”. It must be transformed into something more acceptable to coming generations, and it will not, however, be the task of the politicians of capital to undertake this. They have shown no interest in anything other than preventing such an undertaking. So darkness treads ever more ominously into our futures with every day that passes.
But hope springs from darkness. In Shelley’s words, from his “Ode to the West Wind” – he is speaking to the wind –
Make me thy lyre, ev’n as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Today I mourn the future that we may lose.
I think the media should take this sad event as an opportunity to review the way they practice their profession.
I remember years ago the hungerford shooting and being convinced that exposure to violent films can influence people’s behaviour. At the time the film industry refused to admit this connection. Latterly they gave admitted the connection.
In the same way, think about the way this referendum campaign has been conducted by both sides and reported by an ever sensationalist, headline seeking media.
Is it possible that this influences people’s behaviour, especially those of lower IQ and the mentally ill?
Gareth
I feel quite guilty. My elder lad often has shared “Britain First” tweets, posts & videos. They’re enormously popular at his school, not with the White students who cover their eyes in embarrassment, but with the non-white who always saw them as hilarious. They’re fronted by a woman who my dad would’ve called “not quite right in the head” but who’d be described, in this more tolerant age, as having “issues:.
She regularly attacks Muslim gatherings & famously screamed abuse at a Halal Butcher for “having blood on his hands”. Many people pointed out, of course, that that rather goes with being a butcher,
Anyway, my lad & I, & many people that I know, loved ‘Britain first’ & thought them the next best thing to the Marx Bros.
Thinking of Jo Cox’ little children, family, husband, friends I’m obviously not laughing now & am surprised & disappointed that I was so shallow.
I’ve watched some of those videos with my son and we have discussed their mistaken notions about Christianity and European identity.
There is a deeper issue, that we have been talking about on this blog for the last few days: that is, the failure of politics infuse a sense of meaning and purpose into society and how it has become a ‘thinking-free-zone’ and an utterly trashy, amateurish profession.
People need hope, help and understanding, if they do not get that then we get emanations like ‘Britain First’ and this needs to be taken seriously and certainly not mocked. If society is reduced to ‘I’m-alright’Jackist’ideology then this is not meeting basic human needs for fellowship/co-operative endeavour and a sense of the collegiate. After all, that’s what those ‘Britain First’ people are wanting but doing it through a destructive Chanel.
We are a high-tech society whose understanding of human needs has not got much beyond the invention of the wheel.
Richard, what wonderful, powerful and compassionate words from you.
Comments here and on my twitter timeline suggest not all agree
That does not surprise me Richard. When putting a Communitarian argument forward in other forums, particularly those with a large American contingent, I always experience the neolib backlash. Traditional Libertarians seem to have disappeared, they at least argued that individual natural rights are universal and therefore bestow a duty to grant rights to others. The neolibs see no such duty. Any Communitarian theory that entails a principle of responsibility to others is dismissed as Communism dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. Such views cannot exist in some economic bubble they carry an inherent threat to any form of society. Anyone espousing principles that include concern for others is seen as an enemy in a continuation of some perceived cold war. As ideologues that see things in terms of absolutes they do not recognise nuanced or neutral positions. There is only ‘them and us’ and your views place you firmly with ‘them’ (aka the majority).