The Clockwork Scorpion

Oliver Burkeman recently asked "Is free will an illusion?" in a Guardian long read. I've framed it that way round (i.e. ambiguously) because what I'm interested in is the freedom he was exercising in writing the piece. His subject is philosophical determinism, the idea that everything that happens is determined by a prior cause, which leads him to employ the clockwork metaphor of Newtonian physics in the article's full title. But that means winding the clock back and marginalising more modern developments, most obviously quantum mechanics. That famously introduces a probabilistic dimension to the universe by which the possibility of free will might be maintained (at least in the view of some physicists and philosophers). Though it underpins our current understanding of reality, it earns only a brief mention in the online version of the article and was wholly missing from the print version (to the confusion of some readers). Perhaps just as oddly, Burkeman doesn't bother to marshall other established philosophical arguments that support the notion that free will is illusory, preferring to rely solely on determinism. 

For example, the simulation hypothesis provides an elegant explanation as to why the universe may be largely deterministic but it also explains why the belief in free will exists. Essentially our choices are simply the product of a random variable, much as the behaviour of an individual "sim" is in a video game. In other words, we rationalise chance as choice (it's worth contrasting this to the idea that we can release ourselves from the burden of free will by relying on chance, as in Luke Rhinehart's counterculture classic, The Dice Man). This probabilistic wrinkle is also the element of quantum mechanics that gets round the obvious problem of determinism, namely that there must be a first mover at the beginning of the chain of causation. While this doesn't necessitate a supreme deity, the argument that the universe randomly popped into existence but then inexorably followed a rigid process in which nothing was truly random is obviously unsatisfactory.

Another, older example is the principle of parsimony (aka Occam's Razor) - i.e. do we actually need free will to explain the operation of the universe? Though he describes determinism as "a longstanding position in an ancient debate", Burkeman is curiously reluctant to excavate this lineage, at least prior to the Enlightenment, preferring to present determinism as an awful truth that has only recently come to public prominence. On Twitter, he has pleaded journalistic necessity for some of these omissions, which if nothing else highlights the limitations of the newspaper "long read". Perhaps the biggest omission is any reference to religion and its grappling with the problem of human agency, from the pre-Christian notions of nemesis and doom - i.e. the idea that we are fated to carry out certain actions - to the free will paradox of Christian theology: that if God is omniscient, then we are compelled to act as he knew we would. There is no mention of predestination or antinomianism and what these imply about our freedom to choose, nor of their persistence in the history of thought. 

This ignoring of religion is all the more strange because Burkeman's essay opens with an anecdote about the philosopher Galen Strawson receiving hate mail for having advanced a deterministic position. Apparently this view constitutes an "existential catastrophe" for many people. But a handful of green-ink missives is hardly representative and once you acknowledge that determinism in various forms is central to most religious traditions then you struggle to present it as surprising let alone shocking. A hint of what is going on here is provided by another philosopher, Saul Smilansky: "On the deepest level, if people really understood what's going on – and I don’t think I’ve fully internalised the implications myself, even after all these years – it’s just too frightening and difficult. ... For anyone who's morally and emotionally deep, it's really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here". In other words, most people are blissfully ignorant - and should be left that way - while a moral elite must grapple with the burden of knowledge.

This is an example of the rational occult: the idea that there are hard truths that must remain hidden from the mass if we are to maintain social order. The corollary is Plato's "noble lie": the public myth that provides social cohesion. Ironically, this is much the same as the utilitarian arguments made for religion, such as the famous parable of the return of Jesus in Dostoevsky's poem The Grand Inquisitor that appears in the novel The Brothers Karamazov. It should come as no surprise that such a patronising attitude should appear in the pages of the Guardian, but why now and why is the topic so unmoored from its historical context? As ever with newspaper attempts to grapple with fundamental principles, there is more ideology at work here than actual philosophy. I am going to argue that the contemporary prominence of free will scepticism is an epiphenomenon of the broader reaction to political populism. I think the timing reflects a belief that the tide has been turned with the "return to normal" under Joe Biden in the US, while the lack of historical context reflects a determination to obscure the anti-democratic impulse of that scepticism.

In the Republic, Plato distinguishes between the people and the philosopher at two levels. In the allegory of the cave, the people are chained prisoners who imagine reality as the shadows cast on a wall by the light of a fire. The philosopher is a released prsioner who exits the cave to discover the true reality of the world outside. So challenging is this truth that when he returns to the cave to enlighten the other prisoners, he is rejected. The parallel here with Strawson and Smalinsky in Burkeman's telling is obvious. This is the level concerned with the perception of reality. The other level is concerned with political practice and centres on the allegory of the ship of fools. Here, the philosopher is the skilled pilot of the ship of state, the quarelling crew are demagogues, and the people are the ignorant ship owner who must rely on the philosopher's wisdom if the ship is not to come to grief. Together with the simile of the people as a beast whose appetites are satisfied by the unscrupulous, this metaphor is central to Plato's argument against democracy. 

While we pay lip-service to popular democracy now, the assumptions that underpin its form and practice (e.g. parliamentary representation and hierarchical parties) are still those of Plato: that only the skilled elite should manage the affairs of the state, that some aspects of reality should be kept confidential to that elite, and that qualification for the elite is a matter of virtue. The latter does not mean some innate personal quality but a learned behaviour - in the same way that philosophy was a practice for the Greeks that required rigorous training. In this worldview, any form of populism is essentially illegitimate, hence the willingness to bracket such otherwise incompatible outsiders as Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. Where this elitist view intersects with free will scepticism is in the idea that the mass of the people are incapable of exercising true free will because they are in a state of ignorance and incapable of judging the good from the bad. In other words, what is being denied is the universality of free will. The value of determinism is that it provides a blanket excuse for being sceptical about the ability of the mass of people to exercise choice without recourse to the more overt class discrimination of Plato.

Having established that determinism is a credible proposition, Burkeman proceeds to the ethical implications, specifically "that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces". But this is just a rhetorical device to make us step back from the vertiginous brink and seek a middle way. The synthesis that Burkeman offers is the idea that free will and a deterministic universe are compatible, so long as we modify our understanding of the former. In the compatibilist view our choices are constrained by prior cause but we are free to a degree, and it is relative freedom that matters. We can all distinguish between making a choice and having a choice forced upon us, and it is in the space between the two that we can locate free will, even if we also accept that our choice is the product of many prior causes. Ultimately Burkeman remains sceptical about free will scepticism ("it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life") but he sees its benefit as "an antidote to that bleak individualist philosophy which holds that a person’s accomplishments truly belong to them alone". 

So what is the point of this essay? If I'm right, the unspoken subtext is the collective "errors" of the people, rather than anything to do with personal responsibility, and particularly the election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit in 2016. Where determinism plays a part in this is the idea that the demos might have been subject to forces beyond its control for which it can't be held responsible, such as foreign interference, irresponsible newspapers and TV channels, and toxic social media. You can see why the Guardian might choose to run such a piece, touching as it does (albeit in a more sophisticated way than usual) on such hobby horses as democracy's failings, the conspiracy against rational liberalism, and the malign ignorance of the mob. As for the timing, this appears to reflect not just the victors' magnanimity consequent on Biden's election, but also an attempt to let bygones be bygones over Brexit and, in the words of Keir Starmer, "move on". Oliver Burkeman was fated to write this article and the Guardian, like the scorpion that drowned both itself and the frog, could do no other than publish it.

We The People

One of the more entertaining spin-offs of the short-lived European Super League has been the attempt to draw parallels with Brexit. For some rightwing leavers, remainers are hypocritical for refusing to join a project that would deepen European integration. Of course, this has brought the retort from liberals that what they're defending is competition in a free market. The left has been a little more realistic in focusing on the limited agency of fans and players, with many calling for the general application of the 50+1 "fan ownership" rule common in Germany (the reality isn't quite as democratic as this sounds - some clubs, like Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, are majority-controlled by companies, while RB Leipzig has restricted its membership to placemen). Where the left has been on-point is the focus on owners, who in the case of the English "big six" - all private companies - are mostly tone-deaf American capitalists or else oligarchs, sportswashing states and tax-exiles. Whether the UK government will have the gumption to legislate on club ownership is another matter. What I want to focus on here is not the prospects of a "fan-led review of the game" but the parallel between Brexit and the aborted league in terms of how we imagine "the people".

According to the Guardian this week, "The notion that the typical Brexit supporter was a working-class voter 'left behind' in a red-wall constituency or dilapidated seaside town has been upended by research that shows half of leave voters were comfortably well off". The idea that this "notion" has finally been "upended" is as risible as the claim that the Super League is an adjunct of the European superstate. It was obvious long before the referendum that the core leave vote comprised the middle classes of the non-metropolitan South and Midlands. Nigel Farage was popular with this constituency because he was representative. The focus on ex-miners and steelworkers in run-down Northern towns was always a distraction, which the vote distribution simply confirmed. For example, leave got 52% in the populous South East, mirroring the national split. Yet the discourse didn't change. Instead we got more safaris to interview grumpy pensioners in "hollowed-out" towns. This was partly due to the utility of this narrative in the emerging Labour civil war, but it also reflected a persistent failure to address the immediate causes of the growth of euroscepticism in favour of competing historical fictions. 

For the eurosceptic press, Brexit was presented as a matter of sovereignty. This both elevated it to the supra-political realm of patriotism and provided a historical justification based on freedoms that had supposedly been "lost" since 1973. For the europhile press, the dominant issue was the false consciousness of those "left behind" since 1979, misled in equal parts by lies about NHS funding and their own atavistic xenophobia. In both cases, Brexit was seen as the product of a secular trend that had been building for almost 40 years. This focus on the past occluded the more recent ratcheting-up of class hatred by those who had supported austerity after 2010. It also ignored the weaponisation of anti-asylum-seeker sentiment by both main parties, which started in the 1990s and peaked in the years leading up to 2016 with the fear of Syrian refugees. This was always a more emotive driver for leave than Poles picking potatoes outside Peterborough. As subsequent events have shown, from the government's points-based immigration system to the theatre of the "Channel Threat", gastarbeiter are welcome, but we refuse to accept any moral responsibility for the victims of conflict elsewhere (or, indeed, for the legacy of empire). This is not the attitude of the economically-stressed but of the entitled and unreformed.

The rightwing press had long established a link between the EU and a "metropolitan liberal" political culture that restrained the return of a more punitive approach to welfare, a more exclusionary ideal of citizenship and a more conservative social policy (much the same process can be seen today in Hungary, where the European Union serves as a proxy for this threatening other). With the UK now outside of the EU, this reactionary impetus has been diverted into a more generalised "culture war" in which the integrity of the nation is threatened by a miscellaneous cast of deviants, from truculent ethnic minorities through the disrespectful "woke" young to the ungrateful Scots. This cultural dichotomy is often correlated with educational attainment by political scientists and journalists, but that in turn reinforces the idea of a class division in which not having a degree is characteristic of a working class background as much as socially conservative values. In fact, the significant gradient is simply age. 

Today's middle-aged social conservatives came to maturity before the expansion of higher education in the 1990s. What determines their values is not the lack of a degree but their class position. Many are self-consciously middle-class, but perhaps more significantly many are now (or will shortly be) dependent on private pension schemes and so believe their comfort is associated with the continuing health of capitalism. To add to this picture, the last 40 years have seen a significant internal migration of the young away from smaller towns to the metropolitan cities, in particular London. This is usually held up as evidence of sorting: the liberal young head to the cities and add to left-of-centre vote-banks while the small towns become more conservative and inclined to vote right. But this obscures that the generation that quit declining towns in the 1980s are now approaching retirement. Many are confirmed Tory voters who believe they followed Norman Tebbit's advice to get on their bikes. In short, the Brexit division is more temporal than geographical or cultural, and outlets like the Guardian have been as guilty in misrepresenting this as the Daily Mail.

The farcically abrupt end of the European Super League has generated a lot of noise about what is wrong with the modern game, though most of the ills highlighted are precisely the features that the Premier League and UEFA are defending, so there's a sense that the revolutionary backlash against the ESL might well take the ancien regime with it too (but it probably won't). Chief among these ills is the dominance of billionaires and Gulf states among the club owners. This has made the issue intensely political, leading to the bizarre sight of Boris Johnson offering a "legislative bomb" to halt the project in its tracks, though whether this was motivated by a desire to appeal to "red wall" voters (notorious munchers of lower league pies), or to deflect the accusation of "greed" onto someone not associated with the government, is not entirely clear. But as with Brexit, there has been an attempt to identify a "true people": the real fans. Unfortunately, this has quickly taken on a xenophobic hue in which the global fanbase, whose engagement is necessarily limited to TV and online, are seen as somehow less authentic that those who can turn up outside a stadium with a homemade sign.

To be fair, this turn was less the work of parochial UK fans and more the consequence of the ill-chosen language of the ESL's masterminds. Early reports of their rationale spoke of a division between "legacy fans" and "fans of the future who want superstar names", while Florentino Pérez, the President of Real Madrid, went so far as to claim that the 16-24 year old demographic is being lost due to the current lack of spectacle in the Champions League. This was at least open about the temporal nature of the fanbase: that what matters is less your proximity to the home ground and more your interest in mediated galaticos and classicos, and that clearly has a generational dimension in an era when live attendance is financially or logistically prohibitive for most young people. Critics of the ESL project fear that commercialisation simultaneously "seeks to sever the game from its base in the community" and poses "an existential threat, not only to local leagues, clubs, players and communities, but to the very future of the game as a potentially unifying global force". The desire is to reconcile the national and the global, but there's a distinct air of "soft Brexit" about this. Ultimately, the question remains: who will be sovereign? 

If it's not to be emotionally remote owners whose only interest is profit or the political benefits that association with the brand brings, and if we're not to follow the German example of clubs as wholly-owned subsidiaries of multinationals (albeit ones with demonstrable community ties), then some form of fan-ownership will be necessary. But what would this look like? Barcelona is perhaps the most famous fan-owned club in the world. It has over 140,000 socis, but these have to prove a familial connection to an existing member (or wait, and pay a fee, for three years) and annual membership fees are quite steep at €185. As a result, it's mostly those who attend a lot of games who become members, so it's very much the Catalan middle class who are in charge. But this presents a problem when it comes to raising equity: even if every member punted in €1,000, this would barely dent the club's current debts of over €1 billion, hence the attraction of the ESL. The largest club membership is Bayern Munich at 290,000, which includes many who don't regularly attend games at the Allianz Arena (unlike most German clubs, FC Bayern has a nationwide following), reflecting the more modest annual fee of €60.

The ESL proposal may have been cack-handed, but it is going with the grain of history. Football is now predominantly a streaming product, and that presents opportunities for clubs to take a larger slice of the game's income away from the TV companies and to reserve more of the pie for the clubs that generate the largest audiences. This isn't going to change, so the imperatives driving the Super League proposal will only get stronger. But it also means that the fanbase is increasingly international, if harder to pin down. For example, Arsenal's total "membership" is 1.6 million, but this includes "digital-only" members with no ticket rights (probably at least 90% of that total). Manchester United have around 200,000 UK-based members but claim a global following of up to 659 million. In terms of having a vote over the management of the club, it is likely that any moves towards greater fan control will be geared towards the smallest constituency: those likely to attend home games. But that population has already changed considerably since the introduction of all-seater stadia and the steady rise in ticket prices. As with Brexit, this "populist" revolt is likely to be driven by, and largely benefit, the middle classes. And that probably explains Boris Johnson's interest as much as how his opposition to the ESL has played with the voters of Hartlepool.

A Life of Service

The death of Philippos Andreou Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (as he was christened) has proved to be something less than significant. The state's reaction, embodied in the shallow excess of the BBC, has been predictably oleaginous, while the popular reaction has been an equally predictable mixture of the sentimental and the indifferent. Perhaps the most noteworthy response was the liberal press proving that if you can't say something nice you can always say something stupid. Despite eight days of official mourning, most of us are now more concerned with pints and haircuts. Part of the reason for the indifference was the man's age, which meant his death was long-expected. Even the most ardent royalists regard it as simply a dress rehearsal for the big one. The days of the freelance, peripatetic monarchy, of which Prince Philip's family were such notable examples, ended with the abolition of the Greek throne in 1973. That was the termination of an era of national and monarchical formation that stretched back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Since the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, monarchy has been little more than a branch of the light entertainment industry. 

This serves as a useful contrast to another death this week, that of Shirley Williams. As the daughter of a famour writer, Vera Brittain, and an academic, George Catlin, she was arguably bound for glory, but her long career in politics and higher education was also seen as a pyschological reckoning with her parents. For example, Williams' adult diffidence - her failure to challenge Roy Jenkins or David Owen for the leadership of the SDP - was traced back to her mother's preference for Shirley's older sibling, who supposedly resembled the brother whose wartime death was central to Vera's A Testament to Youth. More prosaically, Williams' notorious timekeeping and dishevelment were seen as reactions to her famous parent's punctuality and tidiness. This is typical of a strain of twentieth century British political biography in which the key to adult behaviour is thought to be found more in childhood than in mature experience let alone an exposure to political philosophy (see Tom Bower's book on Boris Johnson for a recent example, or recall the supposedly formative role of Alderman Roberts in Margaret Thatcher's Hayekian worldview). 

A notable feature of Williams' career was her tendency to advance policies that not only caused friction with her ostensible allies but which often lacked internal coherence. For example, she pushed comprehensivisation as Education Secretary between 1976 and 1979 yet was one of the first to question the financial sustainability of the expansion of further education, which was an inevitable consequence of abandoning the old tripartite system, and even advocated tuition fee loans as a possible solution, which managed to alienate most of academia. This tendency was interpreted by sympathisers as "free-thinking" or a lack of "predictability", though much of it seemed easy enough to predict at the time, such as her religiously-informed opposition to abortion. She gained liberal kudos by pushing for the abolition of the death penalty in the 60s, but alienated the same constituency by later opposing easier divorce and gay adoption. She earned the grudging admiration of socialists for being an advocate of comprehensive schools, but alienated them by her enthusiasm for the Common Market in the run-up to the 1975 EEC referendum.

Rather than being "the patron saint of lost causes", as some have claimed, her progression from the Labour Party through the SDP to her willing support for the Liberal Democrat coalition with the Conservatives in the House of Lords was a trajectory of establishment success. But it also suggests someone with a fundamentally deracinated approach to politics. Her beliefs may have been sincerely and passionately held - she was no dilletante - but there was little that grounded her views beyond her Catholicism, and that was clearly of a different nature to the organic fealty found among the Irish-heritage MPs of the old Labour right. This lack of rootedness was not simply a product of her upper middle class upbringing and her parents' easy familiarity with the inner circles of Westminster, it also reflected her peripatetic life and engagement with academia. She was not merely a metropolitan liberal, she was an example of the cosmopolitan neoliberal of the late twentieth century, advocating market solutions and European integration from a berth in Harvard.

Though lamented as the great lost leader by many centrists, Williams was never a remotely credible candidate for the top job in either the Labour Party or the SDP. This wasn't due to her lack of ambition or the intractable misogyny of others. It was because, though popular, her deracination meant that she lacked any natural organisational base and her contradictory policies prevented her from developing one. Despite their caricatures as conceited solipsists, both Jenkins and Owen cultivated their own factions and placed themselves in clear political traditions, the Asquithian liberalism of the one and the Atlanticist social market liberalism of the other. Williams not only lacked a consistent enough worldview to convert admirers into supporters, she seemed in later life to have little respect for the traditions of the party that had given her a political career. The claim this week by former SDP luminaries that "Williams was Labour through and through" is meaningless if your definition of Labour includes supporting the 2010-15 coalition and voting through the 2012 NHS reforms.

Some on the left have insisted that Williams should be judged on the damage she caused Labour in the 1980s, rather than her occasional legislative triumphs and performance as a minister, but even this tends to over-emphasise her impact. While the SDP-Liberal Alliance clearly undermined Labour in the 1983 general election, it was the Falklands that rescued Thatcher from what looked like certain defeat (the Conservative vote still managed to decline slightly on 1979), and this despite the Labour leader, Michael Foot, being thunderingly pro-war (proving once again that there simply aren't enough flags you can wave). The postwar social democratic consensus was being dismantled from the early-70s, but Williams wasn't particularly prominent in the economic discussions. The pivotal moment was not the election of Margaret Thatcher (that was a consequence, not a cause) but Jim Callaghan's famous "I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists" speech to Labour's party conference in 1976. The rise of the Bennite left was a consequence of that steady dismantling, and the SDP split was in turn a consequence of that resistance.

1976 was the year of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK, which would be followed by God Save The Queen in 1977, neatly encapsulating the themes of social and political breakdown on the one hand and the detournement of monarchy as a commodity on the other. This is the point at which Shirley Williams and that other rootless cosmopolitan, Prince Philip, exhibit a strange parallel. Both were essentially redundant by the late 1970s. For all the novelty of the SDP, her politics were increasingly a nostalgia for the mixed economy and social progressivism of the 1960s. His attempts to humanise the monarchy, notably through the 1969 BBC film Royal Family (last broadcast in 1977), had come to naught. Yet the needs of political discourse and the management of the state required their continuing participation. Williams became a beacon of virtue in the campaign against the left, while "the firm" became ever more important as an icon of social order during the neoliberal revolution. Both would spend another forty years being excused their past and continuing misjudgements and "gaffes", and held up as objects of respect for their symbolic utility rather than their actual contribution. It was national service of a sort.

Man Down

Leaving aside the zither, the initial theme of the 1949 film The Third Man, which is currently available in a 4K restoration on BBC iPlayer until the end of the month, is denial: I didn't see anything; I know nothing; I don't want to get mixed up with the authorities. This has an obvious resonance in the immediate postwar era when so many were insisting "I was never a Nazi" and the Austrian state was attempting, with the connivance of the occupying powers, to recast itself as the Third Reich's first victim rather than the country that birthed Adolf Hitler and welcomed the Anschluss. As the film progresses, denial gives way to confession and threat, and finally to betrayal. Many have seen the film as another expression of Graham Greene's overwrought Catholicism, with Harry Lime playing both Jesus and Satan: a man who rises from the dead and tempts Holly Martins while showing him the world from on high ("If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped - would you  really, old man, tell me to keep my money?") But that is to ignore what gives the film its unique stature: the central role played by Vienna itself - something that owes more to the direction of Carol Reed and his adjustments to the screenplay than it does to Greene's original story.

As a review of the Third Man Museum, an institution that reflects the Austrian ambivalence about the film, noted: "Beneath its modern polish, Vienna is still grand, absurd and slightly sinister: an imperial capital without an empire". The Viennese disregard for a film that exhibited the city's postwar embarrassment contrasted with its popularity in Britain. It might well have been less popular if the screen version hadn't cast Americans in the central roles of the charming sociopath and his old schoolfriend, and had instead stuck with the British characters of Graham Greene's novella. Instead, the British in the film - Major Calloway and Sergeant Paine representing hard power and the cultural attaché Mr Crabbin representing soft power - are portrayed as both honourable and useful. Despite Indian independence in 1947 and the early stages of the Malayan "Emergency", imperial decline did not yet obtrude for a British public still celebrating victory and focused on the domestic promise of the Attlee years. 

The post-imperial melancholia of the film would become more poignant as the UK retreated from empire and the administrative heart of London came to resemble Vienna in its faded grandeur (as a London Film production, the first thing you see on screen is a sooty Big Ben). The very title of the film would become shorthand for Cold War betrayal and the moral decadence of the British ruling class. This aesthetic resonance, together with the avoidance of romantic delusion, helps explain why the film continued to pack a punch and is still today regularly voted as one of the best films of all time (it topped the BFI's poll of the greatest Britsh films of the twentieth century in 1999). Though they represent an occupying power, Trevor Howard's Major Calloway and Bernard Lee's Sergeant Paine gradually come to seem like organic products of the city: cynically familiar with local mores and in tune with the wry humour of a people fallen on hard times. It is Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins and Orson Welles's Harry Lime who are most obviously alien, not only in their manners and respective ignorance and disregard but in their New World optimism, whether that of the crook who spies opportunity or the blundering naif who won't give up on either his friend or the girl. 

The ruins of the Austrain capital reflect more than the aftermath of World War Two. They evoke the trauma of World War One: the collapse of the "old Vienna" referenced by the opening narration (voiced by Reed) rather than just another Central European city flattened by carpet bombing. It is hardly coincidental that Lime's apparent death occurs in front of the statue of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the accident is witnessed by a Baron and a Romanian and then attended by a passing doctor, representatives of the artistocracy, multi-national polity and haute bourgeosie of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though The Third Man's ruined landscape shares a superficial similarity with the Trümmerfilm of the late-40s, it is concerned with what lies preserved beneath the rubble, not just with what has survived on the surface. Holly Martins doesn't just metaphorically dig deeper into the mystery of his erstwhile friend's death, he literally descends into the underworld of the sewers. But the parallel here is not with Orpheus or The Divine Comedy but with archaeology: the uncovering of layers of history and meaning compressed on top of each other. 

This sense of compressed history is famously articulated in Harry Lime's speech on the Prater Ferris wheel, the Wiener Riesenrad: an aperçu that collapses 500 years between the Renaissance and the cuckoo clock. The theme of compression is also seen in the constant focus on time and urgency: the need for Martins to catch the next plane out, his late arrival at the book club, Anna missing her train, the final delay at the cemetery that risks Martins missing another flight. A counterpoint to the theme of compression is that of collapse: visually the physical destruction of the cityscape and more profoundly the moral compromises occasioned by wartime and after. As Baron Kurtz admits, "I've done things that would have seemed unthinkable before the war". Again, this sense of collapse and compromise carries echoes of the past. Anna Schmidt, played by Alida Valli, is not just a contemporary displaced person facing the threat of repatriation to Czechoslovakia, she is also a remnant of the shattered Austro-Hungarian empire and a rebuke to Britain for the Munich Agreement of 1938 (Calloway holding up her "papers" in his hand and sharing them with the Russians evokes Chamberlain).

Another reason why the film has stayed relevant was that it presented Americans as both naive in the face of Old World sophistication (Martins' profession as a pulp novelist can be read as a parody of Henry James) and callously indifferent to the suffering they inflict, a combination that would become a leitmotif of US foreign policy up to and beyond Vietnam. Though one of the occupying powers, the US military is invisible in the film's Vienna. In the opening narration, Reed oddly says of the four-man international patrols (American, British, Russian and French) that "None of them could speak the same language". This suggests a reluctance to recognise the US's role as the global hegemon and the inevitable subordination of the UK. If we track the evolution of Greene's thinking from the burden of the British empire represented in The Heart of the Matter to the delusion of the emerging American empire in The Quiet American, then The Third Man can be seen as transitional: the morally jaded bureaucracy of Calloway and Crabbin giving way to the fast-buck opportunism and blundering indiscretion of Lime and Martins.

Visually, the film betrays multiple influences, from prewar German expressionism to contemporary Italian neorealism. The acting is a goulash of styles, from Welles's bravura theatricality to Howard's reticence. Though Harry Lime appears relatively briefly on-screen, his presence is felt for most of the film in the ironic amusement of Anton Karas's eponymous zither theme. When Lime finally loses his self-assurance in the sewer chase, the music stops to be replaced by a diegetic soundtrack of running water, shouts and footseps, only to return with the inevitability of the terminal gunshot. Despite the tragic storyline and sombre style, and Greene's religious imagery, it's also a surpisingly comic film, from the running joke about people forgetting or mispronouncing each other's names to Wilfred Hyde-White's Ealingesque cameo as Crabbin. Though it clearly wasn't conscious design on Reed's part, the absurdist policing and camp subtext of the criminal gang, together with Calloway's leather coat and Paine's cheerful brutality, seem to prefigure Joe Orton.

What finally distinguishes the film is its complexity, which in turn reflects its messy realism. The characters are both believable and unpredictable. Motivations seem uncertain throughout and there is no sense of just deserts, despite the criminal enterprise foiled. The blameless Sergeant Paine is dead, and both Holly and Anna are adrift, facing uncertain futures. Harry Lime is finally brought to rough justice, but he clearly invites his own death at the end, further embroiling Holly in moral compromise and guilt. Anna literally walks out of the film in the closing shots, calling into question both the temporal and spatial limits of the story. Holly originally introduced himself to Calloway as the author of "Death at the Double X Ranch" (another satirical touch), but it is the British Major who is clearly the expert on the subject of mortality: "Death is at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals". That both our first and last sightings of Calloway are at the cemetery is not insignificant. He isn't an angel of death, but he is a connoiseur of the passing of old orders.

The Great Unger

The renowned Brazilian social philosopher and sometime politician, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, recently staged an interesting intervention in the UK's progressive discourse. In an essay in the New Statesman, he  combined the need to improve our poor productivity with a strategy of constitutional reform to preserve the Union: "The best reason for Brexit was always the desire for the United Kingdom to do something outside the European Union that would be harder to do inside it. ... The mounting restlessness of nations and regions within the UK suggests that the Union can be preserved only if these regions and nations begin to envision together a future that they cannot achieve apart. ... These apparently unconnected facts point in the same direction: to the need for a national project." His rationale for the linkage is that: "Without reforming the distribution of power between Britain’s central government and its nations and regions, any progressive agenda to reshape the economy is likely to lack the guidance that only decentralised trial and error can provide, and to be overwhelmed by the forces that are pulling the UK apart." 

This is a persuasive argument, though it's worth noting that the most credible route to such a national project - reforming the economy post-Brexit and preserving the union - would have been through the election of a Labour government in 2019. However, realistically this would have been undermined by its own MPs from day one. Even if Corbyn had been gently replaced by a more assertive and less divisive figure, the mild socialism of the manifesto would have been unacceptable to many of the PLP and their antagonistic attitude towards Scottish independence would have simply entrenched the constitutional stand-off. The SNP might have been persuaded to offset those defections in Parliament, but only by the promise of another independence referendum in a short enough timeframe to jeopardise the UK-wide project. In making his case, Unger is both outlining a programme of activist government that has little chance of coming about and hinting at what the failure of many British progressives to support Labour in 2019 has cost. Not surprisingly, those progressives have tended to react either grumpily or by suggesting that Unger's diagnosis merely confirms the rightness of their own beliefs.

The essay is accompanied by a number of responses from Britain's liberal (and liberal conservative) luminaries, which is notable for the mix of pessimism and platitudes. You'd expect the former from John Gray ("an overarching national project is unfeasible"), but it is also evident in the opinion of the Helen Thompson ("There are ... no alternative constitutional arrangements that are likely to keep Britain from breaking apart"). Andy Haldane, Jonathan Powell and Linda Colley respectively muster various arguments about the importance of the little platoons of civic and economic organisation, the need for bipartisanship to overcome political short-termism and promote common values, and the necessity of electoral reform to "forge the effective coalitions of the righteous and the reforming" (Colley even takes a swipe at party democracy, which she accuses of producing leaders who appeal to the membership's comfort zone, "rather than seeking out candidates possessed of high and proven competence and broad, potentially UK-wide appeal" - I wonder if she's seen the latest opinion polls). The overall tenor is one of polite derision for Unger's enthusiasm and scepticism that the UK might have anything to learn from Brazil.

Unger isn't arguing for federalism, which would encourage divergence for its own sake, but for regions to bid for bespoke powers from the centre: "one part of a country can bargain for much wider rights of divergence from the established rules and policies than other parts". This would be focused on building "a set of institutions and policies that create a basis for a rise in productivity and give the majority of ordinary Britons, especially the young, access to good jobs". I think his point about trial and error is a good one - we don't know for certain how best to increase productivity so experimentation makes sense - but I think regional devolution is the wrong way to go about doing this. The minor divergence of Scotland and Wales since devolution, which is as much the product of caution as constraint, also calls the value of a regional approach into question. Local government, where "best practice" tends to be more ideological (e.g. Barnet and Preston), might be a better level. That said, resource constraints mean there is a structural bias towards financial engineering (e.g. Northamptonshire and Croydon) and property  speculation (e.g. Liverpool). Any UK national project would have to start with the empowerment of local government, which in practice means that experimentation would be led by the left-leaning metropolitan cities, a good enough reason for the Tories to oppose it and another reminder of the missed opportunity of 2019.

His sensitivity to a more fine-grained empowerment is clear, even if it runs through the agency of the state: "The alternative order must seek both to protect and to empower ordinary people. It must provide a haven to the individual worker and citizen – a haven of safeguards against governmental and private oppression as well as of capability-assuring economic and educational endowments. But the individual should be safe and equipped in that haven so that all around him there can rage a storm of experiment and innovation". This haven has a number of aspects, from civil rights to educational access, but the core of it - the safeguard against "private oppression" - sounds a lot like a universal basic income. His reticence in using the term UBI probably owes something to the New Statesman audience's prejudices, but it perhaps also reflects a reluctance to draw parallels with Brazil's Fome Zero and Bolsa Familia programs, which have been framed by British media (when mentioned at all) as poverty relief rather than social security. There's a current willingness to consider the productivity benefits of partial homeworking, but the more radical idea that national productivity depends on generous social security is some way beyond the Overton Window.

Unger sees plenty of innovation in the UK economy, but largely confined to the margins. What distinguishes these "vanguards of production are practices – new ways of working and producing – rather than cutting-edge technologies". This is correct. Advanced technology is now ubiquitous, and new breakthroughs are quickly disseminated globally. The old idea of a technological monopoly, or at least first-mover advantage, no longer applies. This is why every major economy talks about native AI investment and why developing economies like India have space programmes. High valued-added economies are typically characterised by experimentation in working practices. China, for example, has invested heavily in technology and education over the last quarter of a century and seen rapid growth as a result, but it remains some way short of leading economies in terms of productivity because its working practices are still relatively underdeveloped. In the UK, one reason we have low productivity growth is the heavy bias to services in which poor working practices are offset by overtime and low wages. A true knowledge economy would have a larger manufacturing base.

Unger gets this, even if he does subscribe to a simplistic history: "Its once vaunted strengths in making things – cars, motorbikes, trains, planes and ships – have largely wasted away. ... The vast majority of activity in the UK’s service economy, meanwhile, remains confined to personal care, bricks-and-mortar retail, or 19th-century-style professions and trades, such as the plumbing, electrical, and building trades, disconnected from the front line of production." In fact, the UK has been predominantly a service economy since the late-19th century, and the preceding period of high industrialisation was historically unique: a combination of first-mover advantage and extensive empire. Calling plumbing and electrics "19th-century-style" is also bit odd, as both only really developed as significant employment sectors in the 20th century. He also subscribes to some popular myths: "Enhancing Britain’s productive apparatus requires dealing with two distinct realities: the uplift of the small and medium-size businesses that generate most of the country’s output and the majority of its jobs, and the reskilling of the part of the labour force that is precariously employed or self-employed, with tenuous or temporary links to companies". 

SMEs generate slightly more than half of the ouput and jobs in the economy, but this obscures that the bulk of that contribution comes from medium-sized firms (50-249 employees). It should also be recognised that many of those small businesses are really just auxiliaries to the medium-sized and large. Policy aimed at small employers and the self-employed is largely a waste of time. It is the success of medium and large businesses that fuels the prosperity of smaller ones (this is where trickle-down actually works). Small businesses are extremely inefficient in aggregate, so their growth as a sector (absent expansion elsewhere in the economy) leads to worsening productivity, and those with zero employees significantly overlap with the precariously-employed and self-employed. It's also not true to characterise the precariously-employed as lacking in skills. Many of them are poorly-paid graduates (and not because they studied the "wrong" subject or went to the "wrong" university). The more fundamental issue is that in a flexible labour market, employers are less likely to invest in apprenticeships, while outsourcing has led to a reliance on skilled temps in the wider gig economy (the point where these two realities intersect is the poorly-paid graduate tutor helping the children of the rich prepare for Oxbridge entrance). 

In his desire to encourage a more systematic approach, while avoiding too many direct parallels with Brazil, Unger uses the example of the state direction of agriculture, but in a more acceptable setting than Soviet-style collectivisation: "To raise up backward business and bring it closer to the frontier of the knowledge economy, the UK needs a 21st-century equivalent to 19th-century agricultural extension, as it evolved, for instance, in the United States. That system created family-scale farming with entrepreneurial characteristics – the most efficient agriculture that the world had ever seen." This ignores the dustbowl of the 1930s, caused by more intensive ploughing, not to mention the eventual decline of family-scale farming in favour of the large factory farms of today, with all their associated issues of poor product standards and animal welfare. You can see the relevance of this to Brazil, where agricultural extension has been a successful policy (if you ignore burning down the Amazon to plant soya) but it has little relevance to the UK, even as a metaphor.

For all his sometimes odd digressions, Unger does keep the larger economic picture in view and particularly its revolutionary reconfiguration of labour markets: "We cannot abolish by decree the arrangements that have emerged in the aftermath of the decline of industrial mass production: a system of outsourcing and subcontracting on a global scale. But we must not allow ­labour-market flexibility to serve as a pretext for the abandonment of the labour force to economic insecurity." But it's at this point that politics should intervene in the form of the question, Why can't we abolish it by decree? Those "arrangements" didn't arise spontaneously. They were the consequence of actual policy: the creation of institutions and regulations as well as deregulation. Unger pitches his prescription as "an approach to the supply side of the economy that will significantly moderate inequality in the distribution of economic advantage and opportunity. Without such supply-side reforms, the demand-oriented policies that have monopolised the attention of progressives – fairer taxation and generous social spending – fail to reach their goals." 

Given the history of neoliberalism in Europe, it is obviously incorrect to claim that progressives (including ostensible social democrats) have lacked a supply side agenda. New Labour was always stronger on this than the demand side, even in areas where public spending was the dominant issue, such as the NHS and education. Ultimately, Unger's prescription fails not just because the window of opportunity has been firmly shut by a Conservative government that will pay only lip-service to improved productivity and parity between the UK's nations, but because what he is proposing has too many uncomfortable echoes of the ambition (and hubris) of New Labour, notably the sacrifice of local government and public services to the interests of the City and the misguided academisation and focus on league tables in education. Unger may come from a more socialist-oriented background, and his focus on supply-side reform may make more sense in the context of Brazil's current stage of development, but in the jaundiced view of too many British progressives, he is merely reminding them of the roads not taken over the last 25 years.