Climate scientists against democracy

One of the arguably most progressive movements of our times – environmentalists fighting global warming and climate change – shows signs of turning anti-democratic in the wake of the perceived failure of the climate summit in Copenhagen.

Before Copenhagen, hardly anyone took notice of anti-democratic thought arising out of environmental science, one of the most fashionable fields of research at this time. Let me highlight some of the recent developments.

Two years ago, Australians David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith published a book called "The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy" (Praeger, 2007):

www.praeger.com/catalog/C34504.aspx

From the publisher's description: "Climate change threatens the future of civilization, but humanity is impotent in effecting solutions. Even in those nations with a commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions, they continue to rise. This failure mirrors those in many other spheres that deplete the fish of the sea, erode fertile land, destroy native forests, pollute rivers and streams, and utilize the world's natural resources beyond their replacement rate.

"In this provocative book, Shearman and Smith present evidence that the fundamental problem causing environmental destruction – and climate change in particular – is the operation of liberal democracy. Its flaws and contradictions bestow upon government – and its institutions, laws, and the markets and corporations that provide its sustenance – an inability to make decisions that could provide a sustainable society.

"Having argued that democracy has failed humanity, the authors go even further and demonstrate that this failure can easily lead to authoritarianism without our even noticing. Even more provocatively, they assert that there is merit in preparing for this eventuality if we want to survive climate change. They are not suggesting that existing authoritarian regimes are more successful in mitigating greenhouse emissions, for to be successful economically they have adopted the market system with alacrity. Nevertheless, the authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power.

"There are in existence highly successful authoritarian structures – for example, in medicine and in corporate empires – that are capable of implementing urgent decisions impossible under liberal democracy. Society is verging on a philosophical choice between liberty or life."

It is certainly noteworthy that both authors did not work at universities at the time this book was published – and haven't done so since. After holding faculty positions at Edinburgh and Yale, Shearman now works as a practicing physician. Smith is described as a lawyer, philosopher, and book author. Predictably, just like my own book, "Anti-Democratic Thought" (Imprint Academic, 2008), they received largely negative and even hostile reader reviews, simply for opposing democracy – along the lines of "Superficial Diatribe" and "Genocide, anyone? Sure would cut the ol' carbon footprint if you could just feed all those consumers and wrong-thinkers into the shredders ..."

Few academics showed themselves supportive: "For those wanting to think outside the square on climate change issues, this book is indispensable" (Bob Birrell, Monash); "This is an argument-moving book, a fresh and audacious contribution to the climate change debate" (Otis L. Graham, University of California, Santa Barbara); "If political thinking at its best makes the pressing questions of the day an occasion to revisit cherished fundamentals, then this book qualifies" (Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary – a fellow Imprint Academic author and critic of democracy).

However, since then a number of climate scientists have adopted positions akin to those advanced by Shearman and Smith. James Hansen, for example, a renowned climate modeller with NASA (and billed as "[t]he scientist who convinced the world to take notice [...] of global warming"), is quoted in the Guardian as saying "that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. 'The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working,'" for "money is talking louder than the votes". "In Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics."

90-year-old British scientist James Lovelock (also a former NASA consultant and named one of the world's top-100 global public intellectuals by Prospect magazine in 2005), in "The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning" (Allen Lane, 2009), may be appalling his readers, according to Publishers Weekly, with "his contention that democracy may need to be abandoned to appropriately confront the challenge [of climate change]":

www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781846141850,00.html?/The_Vanishing_Face_of_Gaia_James_Lovelock

Hansen and Lovelock, too, have gained the freedom to say what they really think about democracy (and its dangers) by not standing in the (sole) employ of a university. While Hansen only holds an adjunct professorship at Columbia, Lovelock, though having been an honorary visiting fellow at an Oxford college since 1994, works independently out of his private laboratory.

Much more in this vein can be found in the fora and on message boards of the environmental science community.

It remains to be seen whether such sentiments uttered more frequently by climate scientists will be able to turn public opinion against democracy, and if the protesters that got themselves beat up and arrested on the streets of Copenhagen will turn away from the anti-authoritarian and decentralized grassroots democracy that is still the preferred mode of operation of most anti- and alter-globalization and environmental activism.

Also, Shearman and Smith are correct to stress that the environmental record of today's authoritarian regimes is by no means better than that of democratic governments. From what we heard last week, it appears that China with her obstruction policy is largely responsible for the apparent failure of the Copenhagen summit – for which the western democracies took the blame. China is not interested in curtailing her economic and industrial growth and the burgeoning capitalism (which, in time, will lead to democratic reforms).

Rule by experts, as proposed by climate scientists, is not a new idea either, though. It is as old as Plato's philosopher kings, H.G. Wells' liberal fascism, communist planning, and the EU bureaucracy. Let's just say, it hasn't worked.

We need new alternatives.

Phillip Blond's "ResPublica" think tank and Radical Orthodoxy

One of the hundreds of people who participated in events organized by the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) is Phillip Blond.

Those living in the UK may by now be familiar with that name. In 2007, when Phillip gave a presentation in the Section "Political Theology as Political Theory" that I organized and chaired at the Fourth General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), he was but a lowly Senior Lecturer in theology and philosophy at what had only just become the University of Cumbria.

Phillip also participated in the Second Annual International Symposium of SCIS on "The Resurgence of Political Theology". Both events took place in September 2007 in Pisa, Italy.

Then, Phillip worried about how he was going to continue paying his mortgage on a meagre academic salary and he and his frequent collaborator and journalistic co-author, Adrian Pabst, talked about starting an online newspaper. This year, Phillip has been hailed as Tory leader (and possible prime minister come May 2010) David Cameron's "philosopher king", and been able to raise 1.5 million pounds to launch his own think tank, called (rather unimaginatively) "ResPublica":

www.respublica.org.uk

ResPublica was launched on 26 November in the presence of Cameron, but the financial backers behind it remain anonymous. It stands to reason, though, that they are in support of the ideas associated with what Phillip calls "Red Toryism". Already in Pisa, if memory serves correctly, he carried notes toward the manuscript of a book on this subject in his bag, but only in February 2009 he published an article outlining his ideas in the magazine "Prospect".

The book, "Red Tory", will not be published until April 2010 – and I should not be surprised if it won't be published at all before the UK general elections likely to take place in May 2010. (After all, Phillip's only previous monograph, "Eyes of Faith", was scheduled for publication in 2006 and has still not been released.)

Faber and Faber, who are to publish "Red Tory", have meanwhile issued a book description: "Conventional politics is at crossroads. Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, our current politics is exhausted and inadequate.

"In 'Red Tory', Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle the problems we face. Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market. Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a genuinely progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration [of] the nuclear family.

"'Red Tory' offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. No political thinker has aroused more passionate debate in recent times. Phillip Blond's ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal. Challenging, stimulating and exhilarating, this is a book for our times."

There is a lot of hype. And that alone should give reason to be wary. As an academic, in Pisa, I found Phillip both unimpressive and unprepared. In fact, I am still waiting to receive the full text of the paper he was accepted to be giving and which I should have got prior to the conference. Phillip turned up with nothing but notes and extrapolated from those. Of the two, I always found Adrian Pabst, also a participant in Pisa (and in 2008 in a panel on "Comparative Political Theology" I organized at the Second Global International Studies Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia), intellectually sounder and more stimulating.

Of course, David Cameron, on becoming leader of the Tories, had as little to offer in terms of his CV as Phillip has now. It all seems to be more about connections and being at the right place at the right moment with the right set of vague ideas and attitudes. Does anyone know what Cameron stands for after having been Tory leader for four years? It is hard to believe – though of course entirely in the nature of democracy – that the UK electorate would fall for a David Cameron after having rid themselves of the vacuum that was Tony Blair.

"Red Toryism" may be in 2010 what "New Labour" was in the late 1990s. Red Toryism is an ideology that came to bloom in the financial crisis, when all former boundaries between left and right, economy and state became finally blurred, and it was helped by the blurring that economy-friendly New Labour had done earlier. In fact, Red Toryism is not imaginable without New Labour preceding it.

Both Adrian Pabst (University of Nottingham) and Phillip Blond, along with Graham Ward (University of Manchester), represented the Anglican Radical Orthodoxy movement in Pisa. Radical Orthodoxy set out, hardly ten years ago, from Cambridge's Peterhouse College to renew the Church of England. Already the current Archbishop of Canterbury, and head of the Anglican community, Rowan Williams, is said to be an adherent of Radical Orthodoxy. And now the movement has gained influence over Tory policy and the likely next prime minister.

Of course, the ResPublica website does not openly refer to Radical Orthodoxy, and Phillip is not saying much about it in his interviews. The only clear reference to it is that John Milbank (University of Nottingham), "founder of the Radical Orthodoxy Movement" and Phillip's PhD supervisor (and himself a student of Williams), is listed as a Fellow of ResPublica. Radical-orthodox political theology has a chance to become for the UK what black liberation theology arguably has become under Barack Obama in the US.

One reason why the influence of Radical Orthodoxy on Red Toryism may be downplayed is the confusion of religious identity that embroils Radical Orthodoxy. While Phillip converted as an adult from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism, one gets the impression that the Radical Orthodox consider themselves to be Catholics within the Church of England (in the "High Church" or "Anglo-Catholic" tradition). They are the very people, it would seem, the Vatican now wants to attract into its fold by offering them a separate structure within the Roman Catholic Church. Radical Orthodoxy, however, rather aims at "taking over" the Church of England. Either way, such Catholic sympathies remain suspicious in the UK, as Tony Blair demonstrated when converting to Catholicism only after having left public office.

Papers not written, books not published ... Philipp continues to work from notes. While there are many introductions to Radical Orthodoxy, all anyone knows about Red Toryism is still schematic, a fragment. It may remain so until after the UK general elections, and afterwards Phillip may be too busy to actually write the book. On the other hand, his think tank now provides him with people who may well write it for him. Very little about Tory policy is worked out and now Cameron got Phillip to work it out for him. Very little about Red Toryism is worked out and now Phillip got others to work it out for him ...

May we hope that the book (maybe helped by others) will clarify at least some of the confusion ResPublica and Phillip's writings still show? For instance, is he now against capitalism, or for capitalism – as his "mutualism" concept seems to be an extension of capitalism to the public sector (much as "New Public Management" extended New Labour's economy-friendliness to the public sector with public-private partnerships, etc.): as I understand it, public sector employees are to get shares in mutually-owned public service-providing companies, giving employees more control. But will that not mean that managers of such entities will be under less control from above and from the public?

Phillip's stepbrother is the current incarnation of James Bond, the actor Daniel Craig – already in Her Majesty's (Secret) Service. As Phillip may turn out to be soon.

Or then, his fall may be as quick as his unlikely rise.

Tadzio Müller arrested at climate summit protests

Being a "global warming sceptic" myself, I didn't plan on writing about the climate summit in Copenhagen. One more futile exercise owed to the hubris of man who basks in the sham glory of being the only species able to "destroy Earth". Really, though, it is only mankind and/or our way of life that we might be destroying. And would that be all bad?

It is not in our hands to destroy Earth. Unlike us, Earth has been around for billions of years, and – albeit changing incessantly – existed through warmer and colder periods much the same. That's one of the things Alex Higgins and I didn't see eye to eye on when founding the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) back in 2006.

Enough is being said about this. No point in adding to it.

However, I just learned that in Copenhagen again someone associated with SCIS has been arrested – and remains imprisoned – for his political stance.

Among the many graduate students and doctoral candidates at the fringes of SCIS when it was founded at the University of Sussex, and a repeat guest in the original centre when it was still on campus, was one Tadzio Müller, a German alter-globalization activist who did his DPhil in International Relations at Sussex.

Obviously, with his left-leaning ideas, he fitted the Sussex profile much better than I ever did. That didn't save him from being arrested, though.

As the media and various blogs report, Tadzio – who is now a spokesperson for an organization called Climate Justice Action (CJA) – was selectively arrested on 15 December by plainclothes police officers following a press conference he gave at the summit venue. He stands accused of preparing for violence against the police and incitement to riot.

A charge that seems only the more ludicrous if one has seen the violence with which the Danish police are trying to contain protesters on the streets of Copenhagen, freely employing dogs, batons, and pepper spray (check out videos on Youtube). No chance that they will be held responsible for their actions.

More interestingly even, it has been revealed that Tadzio's arrest was only possible because of covert surveillance measures. The Danish police not only infiltrated protesters' preparatory meetings on a broad scale, but also tapped their mobile phones (calls and SMS), and intercepted the e-mails of known activists.

"People have to break the rules", Tadzio is reported as saying. Protesters should not allow themselves to be stopped by fences or other physical barriers. Or police intimidation, one might add.

Even if one does not believe in the great climate myth, one may be sympathetic with the activists who try to turn the climate debate into a debate against global capitalism. "Climate" merely seems a catchword for many of the protesters in Copenhagen.

Book: Hong Kong's informal rooftop communities

A book from China's capitalist and democratic outpost, Hong Kong:

Stefan Canham (photographs) and Rufina Wu (architectural drawings) collaborated on "Portraits from above: Hong Kong's informal rooftop communities" (Peperoni Books, 2009).

http://peperoni-books.de/portraits_from_above0.html

Publisher's description: "Self-built, informal settlements on the roofs of high-rise buildings are an integral part of Hong Kong's urban landscape. The rise of rooftop communities is closely linked to the migration history from Chinese Mainland to Hong Kong. With each of China's tumultuous political movements in the 20th century, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, there was a corresponding wave of Mainland Chinese migrating to Hong Kong."

From the preface: "The roof is a maze of corridors, narrow passageways between huts built of sheet metal, wood, brick and plastics. There are steps and ladders leading up to a second level of huts. [...] Later, we look down at the building from a higher one across the street. The roof is huge, like a village. There must be thirty or forty households on it. [...] Rooftop structures range from basic shelters for the disadvantaged to intricate multi-storey constructions equipped with the amenities of modern life.

"Text records of the residents' stories, measured drawings of each distinct rooftop structure, and high-resolution images of the domestic interiors of more than twenty households offer an unprecedented insight into the everyday life on Hong Kong's rooftops."

The book is bilingual, German and English.

Olivier Rubin refutes the merits of democracy in famine protection

For the 30th Anniversary Conference of the Development Studies Association (DSA), taking place in London in November 2008 on the theme of hidden forces in social and economic development – "Development's Invisible Hands" –, I convened a panel "Anti-Democratic Development".

One of the participants in that highly selective panel was Olivier Rubin (a recent PhD graduate and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen) who ended up winning the prize awarded by the European Journal of Development Research (EJDR) to the best conference paper for his essay, "The Merits of Democracy in Famine Protection – Fact or Fallacy?" – an ambitious attempt to refute (or at least draw into question) an influential theory of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen (Harvard and Cambridge).

Rubin's paper has now been published in the November 2009 issue of EJDR (vol. 21/5: 699-717), as part of a Symposium of articles based on papers given in various panels of the 2008 conference. They treat forces as different as religion and conflict, political institutions, non-governmental action, the securitization of aid, and migration.

While I helped shape Rubin's paper both with extensive feedback after the conference and as peer reviewer for EJDR, I only provided input on fine-tuning an already impressive piece of work and all credit goes to him. That said, I greatly appreciate his public acknowledgement: "I wish to extend my gratitude to Erich Kofmel, Managing Director at the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS), for convening the DSA 2008 Panel on Anti-Democratic Development. This article is highly inspired by his somewhat provocative idea of an anti-democratic bias in much of the Development Studies discipline." Thank you.

The EJDR is now making Rubin's article accessible free of charge until the end of the year:

www.palgrave-journals.com/ejdr/journal/v21/n5/full/ejdr200937a.html

Here's the abstract of the paper: "Amartya Sen's assertion that democratic institutions together with a free press provide effective protection from famine is one of the most cited and broadly accepted contributions in modern famine theory. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence, this article critically examines whether indeed democracies do provide protection from famine. The qualitative research builds on analyses of democratic political dynamics in famine situations (in Bihar 1966, Malawi 2002 and Niger 2005), whereas the quantitative research looks for cross-country correlations between political systems and famine incidents. The article calls into question the strength of the link between democracy and famine protection. Famines have indeed occurred in electoral democracies where the political dynamics at times were counterproductive in providing protection from famine. The article concludes that to fully grasp the complexities of famine, one should replace monocausal political explanations (such as democracy protects against famine) with general tools for context-specific political analysis."

Rubin finds that, "[r]egrettably, the discipline of Development Studies has often had a tendency of displaying less interest in critically testing assertions about the merits of democratic institutions than it has in exposing the adverse consequences of more authoritarian political structures. [...]

"Pointing to democratic mechanisms with a positive effect on famine protection does not exclude the possibility that others, even more effective, can be identified under authoritarian rule. The argument about the merits of democracy in famine protection has clear roots in cost-effectiveness reasoning (given the assumed superiority of the democratic political system, what are the processes that could account for effective famine protection?) when one really ought to rely on cost-benefit reasoning (under different political rules, which political processes foster the most effective famine protection?).

"From the perspective of short-term famine relief, it is not difficult to present arguments that could favor a more authoritarian political system. Some of the counterproductive mechanisms described [for democracies] (log rolling, vote trading, pork barrel politics, not in my backyard and the political blame game) would be largely absent or assume a different form under authoritarian regimes. [...] It is also possible that authoritarian regimes could manage a much prompter and more extensive mobilization of resources for famine prevention when needed. An elected government might have to engage in compromises and negotiations with other political parties, which might not only slow down the process, but also avert resources to other political purposes through log rolling.

"Theoretically, therefore, the democracy hypothesis is not convincing."

In his article, Rubin refers to a Malawian saying: "Sungadye demokalase, which loosely translated means that you cannot eat democracy."

EJDR is a prestigious and well-regarded publication of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).

Sex and the army (in Israel)

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"Political theology" equals terrorism?

Point of interest: We are all terrorists.

The keyword "political theology" now triggers the following paid-for Google Ad (at least on Google's UK site):

Report terrorism
Independent charity, not the police
Report terrorism anonymously
www.Crimestoppers-uk.org

Should anyone reading this be engaged in terrorist actitivies (rather than search "political theology" on Google for religious or academic and research purposes), please denounce yourself.

Cheers,
Erich Kofmel
Editor, "Anti-Liberalism and Political Theology" (forthcoming)
www.political-theology-agenda.blogspot.com

(Update: As of 6 November, the above ad does not seem to show up on Google anymore.)

Experimental "competitive government" instead of democracy

Until recently, the term "competitive government" has been used to refer to competing policies with regard to democratic institutional arrangements and to the (neo-liberal) introduction of (market-)competitive elements to public administration, such as the privatization and outsourcing of public services (provision of water and electricity, waste disposal, public transportation, health care, etc.), public-private partnerships, and so on.

The term now is about to receive a new meaning thanks to the work of Patri Friedman and others. For them, "competitive government" describes the competition between the political arrangements of entire (future) nation states, be they democratic or otherwise. It is about the freedom of people to decide themselves in what political system they prefer to live and the freedom for every individual to move to a "nation" state/country of his or her choosing. It is about diversity in the forms of government worldwide rather than the uniformity of international "democracy promotion".

For a number of reasons the term "competitive government" may not be ideal, though, for what Friedman and others envisage. After all, unlike today there would be no real competition between such (new) nation states/countries. (Traditionally, competition between national governments and nations too often ends in war.) It's not about dominance, but rather about co-existence and tolerance for other, alternative, diverse forms of government, even "niche" government (political systems that only a minority of people would volunteer to live in). In a competition-theoretical sense, "competitive government" means, however: no monopoly for democracy.

At the same time, the "nation" would have to lose any connotation of blood, ethnicity, and nationalism and come to stand for communities of politically like-minded people instead.

It is safe to say that Friedman is stuck in the terminology of Economics ("competition" rather than accommodation or tolerance, "nation" as the basic entity of political-economic discourse – western democracy promotion suffers from the same competitive misapprehension, inherent in its linkage to capitalist market philosophy and mechanisms).

In Patri Friedman's case this is owed to his family heritage and background. His grandfather, Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel Prize laureate in Economics, was one of the professors who turned the University of Chicago into a centre of so-called neo-liberal thought. The author of books such as "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962), Milton Friedman was a stout defender of the view that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked.

Albeit deeply critical of the (welfare) state and pleading for a government that refrains from interventions in the economy, limits its activities to the bare minimum, and leaves the individual as much as possible alone, he still charged the state with the promotion of competition and the provision of a legal and monetary framework for individual and corporate action, primarily in the market place.

Political power should be dispersed as widely as possible, though, so as to avoid coercion of the individual by his fellow men. Dismissing "welfare" and "equality" as the "catchwords" of paternalistic politics against which classical liberalism fought, Milton Friedman held democracy to be merely a means guaranteeing individual freedom.

Now his grandson, Patri Friedman, declares his opposition to democracy.

Taking his clues from his grandfather and father (David D. Friedman) as much as from the libertarian and anarcho-capitalist traditions, Patri Friedman goes further when claiming – on the most elaborate of his many fragmentary websites and blogs – that he is "deeply dissatisfied with current forms of social organization (western democracy)".

http://patrifriedman.com/aboutme/politics.html

He finds "[s]ocial organization (aka government) [...] is being done really badly right now (democracy is better than previous forms, but still awful), and it can be done better. [...] I think most political discussion is [...] nonsensical reasoning about a useless tradition which has accumulated concentrated interests who benefit from it and have entrenched themselves [...]. By stepping up a level, we neatly avoid getting trapped in endless policy debates, debates which are almost pure intellectual masturbation because the problem is not figuring out a good policy, the problem is that the system (say, democracy) doesn't optimize for 'good'. We can argue for hours about the best tax system – but politicians don't want 'the best', they want one where they can profit by selling loopholes."

The solution Patri Friedman proposes is "competitive government" – and the creation of new spaces in which various forms of government and institutional arrangements (some of them non- or anti-democratic) can develop in their own "nation" states/countries. While people (unless they live in some form of democracy) may no longer get to elect their leaders, they would get to decide under what system of government they wish to live – and move there.

Friedman writes: "My path is not just a path to libertarianism, but to a wider variety of governments and societies. I wish to convince non-libertarians that this is an attractive vision, and that it is something they would like to see happen. I also want to help people of many different political persuasions to get along by seeing ways in which each group can have what they want, instead of arguing endlessly over what they should all have."

The way of getting there, according to him, is experimentation: "Government has stagnated. Very little experimentation. (What do you expect when it's basically impossible to start a new country or change an existing one? How do you expect to get technological advances without experimentation?) [...] Experimenting has some important benefits: It gives us empirical evidence about what rule-systems work. This is enormously more valuable than theoretical debates which depend on model assumptions; It enables people to live under a system while learning about it; It gives people a specific, real example to point to when debating the merits of various systems; They let people actually experience a society, physically and emotionally rather than as a mental abstraction. [...]

"The fewer, larger political systems we have, the less experimentation there will be. Also, the less different types of society we will have. I believe that a world with a diverse set of governments, peacefully competing for citizens, would be a much better one. We might see the technologies of social organization advancing as fast as other areas of science and technology."

Patri Friedman recognizes the difficulty of experimenting with political systems in existing nation states/countries. Much like the Zionists at the beginning of the twentieth century, he aims to solve this problem by creating new nations. (One of the blogs he writes on is entitled "Let A Thousand Nations Bloom".) He proposes to "open the new frontier of the oceans", because international waters provide "a very low barrier to entry to creating a new government, and avoid the powers-that-be". " By building cities on the ocean in a modular fashion, the ocean becomes a permanent frontier, because any dissatisfied group can go to a new, empty patch of ocean, and take their houses and offices with them!. This lets them reset at far lower cost."

"And if we build these cities out of modular platforms, so that people can vote with their house (instead of just their feet), we get a world of unprecendented mobility (ie free association). Together, these have the potential to transform the governing industry from an oligopoly into a competitive market."

Patri Friedman calls this "seasteading". He even founded his own organization, the Seadsteading Institute in Palo Alto, California, whose mission statement reads: "To further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems". It may be the first serious project in the direction of "competitive government" since it received a financial contribution of half a million US dollars from billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal.

www.seasteading.org

Questions remain, of course, like on what basis people are supposed to come together to form a new "nation"/country/community if they do not before have an abstract idea, model, conception of a future society all of them aspire to?

Like anarchist, capitalist libertarians, others too will have to find ways of conceptualizing such non- or anti-democratic societies first, and then put their ideas into practice and to the test in existing or new states, while never ceasing to experiment.

Patri's own libertarian project (which attracted the Silicon Valley start-up funding for his Seasteading Institute) suffers from his erring belief that capitalism can durably be separated from democracy. As his grandfather, Milton, knew full well a capitalist economy will (in the long run) always lead to democratic forms of government – and thus the same old problems.

New forms of government will not be democratic. They will not be capitalist either.

To build a swimming country will always require a lot of money. New non-democratic, non-capitalist societies are therefore unlikely to arise on the high seas. But arise they will.

"Political non-voters" in Germany

A new type of non-voter grabbed the attention of the German media prior to last month's federal election: the conscientious, or political, non-voter.

Non-voting as a political stance against the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy appears to have been popularized by renowned journalists and writers like Gabor Steingart and Thomas Brussig. They and others of similar thinking participated not only in many pre-election talk shows, but published books and essays calling for voter abstinence.

Steingart's book, for example, is titled "Die gestohlene Demokratie" (Stolen Democracy; Piper, September 2009):

www.piper-verlag.de/taschenbuch/buch.php?id=15942&page=buchaz

Non-voting they identify as a mode of resistance to the "political class", the "cartel", and as objection to being treated like "cattle" led to the voting booth. They feel defrauded by the party state and the interchangeability of the programmes of political parties that may have become obsolete and overextended, but cling to power. Parties, they argue, are no longer representative of the people they rule. German democracy thus has become dull and tired. It is a "democracy from above" and politics is made without the people.

In the May 2009 issue of the "magazine for political culture", Cicero, Brussig, a former inhabitant of the German Democratic Republic, wrote: "Every generation deserves its revolution. There was 1968, and there was 1989. From that timing, something is bound to happen soon". With a view to the current economic crisis: "A system that has positioned itself for eternity can collapse all of a sudden. It happens very fast and with a dreamlike ease. Moreover, it is wondrously beautiful" (my translation).

There is no shame in not voting, so their message. If you don't vote, you still set a political sign. Non-voting is the "enlightened" thing to do.

Participation in this year's German elections was indeed the lowest since the end of the Second World War.

A positive agenda for anti-democratic thought

In my book "Anti-Democratic Thought" I first laid out what I like to call "a positive agenda for anti-democratic thought":

In a historical and cross-cultural perspective the fact cannot be denied that most democracies failed. Many formerly democratic countries do not have a democratic government now. Many countries have never known democracy. Only western democracies for a short while – maybe to be dated from the fall of Soviet communism to the rise of radical Islam – believed themselves invincible. It may therefore seem expedient to think about political alternatives once more and to study threats to democracy from within and without as well as common modes of failure of democracy across times and cultures.

Will people's disillusion with democratic practices (such as the impact money has on campaigning), mass politics, and the equal inconsequence of everyone's vote ultimately terminate democracy?

I do not believe that all political systems have been tried yet. Our world is changing rapidly. Will the technological innovations of recent decades, and those to come, make possible political forms that never existed (nor could be imagined) in history – or will we have to fall back, post democracy, into the abyss of authoritarian despotism, as envisaged by Plato and Aristotle?

Oswald Spengler said that money would finally lose its value, its meaning, and politics would reclaim its rightful place.

That is the challenge of our time: reclaiming politics.

My book marks the beginning of a daring new debate. It is not satisfied with studying the historical dimensions of anti-democratic thought – as were so many of our predecessors –, but wishes to study its future too.

The (re-)introduction that opens the volume approaches anti-democratic thought from an angle different from that of earlier authors. Rather than focusing on discourse analysis and similarities in the arguments advanced by various strands of anti-democratic thought, the focus here lies on anti-egalitarianism and the underlying causes that led individuals to thinking and taking up arguments against democracy in the first place.

These reasons have not changed.

Exceptional men and women still are dissatisfied with democracy and the rule of everyone-else over the individual and unwilling to accept at face value the old tendentious and partisan adage that, despite its admitted shortcomings, no better political system is imaginable.

There are many difficulties in trying to make valid statements about anti-democratic thought. That should not stop us. We have to navigate the difficulty that anti-democratic thinkers may contradict each other. So too do democratic thinkers. Anti-democratic thought as much as democracy theory is not a coherent body of work. We need to understand the context in which anti-democratic thought arose and arises. Anti-democratic thought resulting from support for alternative political systems should be kept separate from anti-democratic thought directed against more fundamental principles of democracy, such as equality.

Anti-democratic thought can be – must be – re-invented as a positive project for the twenty-first century. In doing so, we need to avoid making claims that are obviously wrong. To distinguish ourselves from earlier polemical attacks on democracy, we need to phrase each word, each sentence, our whole argument carefully and in a manner that is simple and straightforward and cannot easily be refuted. We need to submit anti-democratic polemics, plays and novels to academic study and turn what we find into scientific knowledge and political resources.

Much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-democratic thought suffered from unfamiliarity with the practical workings of democracy. Criticism was often unsophisticated, repetitive and superficial. It will be the challenge of twenty-first-century anti-democratic thought to criticize democracy, with hindsight, in a more sophisticated manner, to develop and formulate more subtle expressions of anti-democratic thought, to move away from cheap stereotypes and become as analytical and diverse as pro-democratic thought. Different traditions and strands of anti-democratic thought must be allowed to compete freely with each other and with democracy. Intellectuals need to lose the unjustified prejudice in favour of democracy – now just as unjustified as the largely prejudicial anti-democratic thought two-hundred years ago.

We need to confront those who call "anti-democratic" everything they don't like about democracy, and whatever kind of social and political thought they do not understand or approve of, by giving anti-democratic thought clearer contours and new substance.

Anti-democratic thought is no longer to be treated as an inconsequential appendage to democracy theory. University and college courses on "Democracy and Its Critics", may their teachers be in favour or critical of democracy, will benefit from the serious discussion of anti-democratic thought on offer in my book, more than from any apology of democracy.

For more on the history and background of anti-democratic thought and why to study anti-democratic thought and think anti-democratically today, see my chapter "Re-Introducing Anti-Democratic Thought", which is available here:

books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=KkMdJtaaeOYC#PPA1,M1

Manipal University, India, promotional video

Well worth watching:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW_92tOcJfs

This video was shown to me by a graduate of Manipal University, a top-ranking private institution in India, and like most alumni (judging from the comments left on Youtube) he seems to think it captures the spirit of the place pretty well. Manipal he translates as "many pals".

The video has the charm of a Bollywood film, which to western eyes may seem naïve. I recommend viewing it two or three times to really "get it".

You will be enthralled by the Hindi remix of the Bryan Adams classic "Summer of '69".

What other university has its own theme song?

Film: The Man from Earth

Another film tip: "The Man from Earth" is the title of a 2007 film that is classified as "science fiction", but really has nothing to do with (future) science at all. Rather, it asks philosophical and theological questions about being, life and death, religion and knowledge.

The most futuristic aspect about this film is its mode of release. While France just outlawed online file sharing (and other European countries seem set to follow its example), the producers of this film publicly thanked their viewers for sharing the film through peer-to-peer networks, by which means, according to them, it gained wide recognition.

Like so many English-language films, "The Man from Earth" is available for streaming, for example, on Chinese video sharing websites, such as Tudou and Youku, that, unlike Youtube, do not enforce (western notions of) copyright or cut up films in ten-minute bits. On the downside, the display quality is often low:

www.tudou.com/programs/view/E_A04JCECSE/

The film's official website describes it thus: "An impromptu goodbye party for Professor John Oldman becomes a mysterious and intense interrogation after the retiring scholar reveals to his colleagues he is an immortal who has walked the earth for 14,000 years.

"Acclaimed science fiction writer Jerome Bixby [of Star Trek and Twilight Zone fame] originally conceived this story back in the 1960's. It would come to be his last great work, finally completing the screenplay on his deathbed in April of 1998."

Leaving friends and occupations every ten years to hide the fact that he does not age and moving on to a new identity, the man presently known as John Oldman has lived through all epochs of recorded history and seen eras of human development come and go. He finds it impossible, though, to prove his story to an audience of scientists requiring hard evidence and religious faithful fearing the loss of their most deeply held beliefs. Has he gone mad, they wonder?

The film won numerous accolades, including "Best Feature" (first place) and "Best Screenplay" (grand prize) at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, "Best Film" and "Audience Choice Award" at the Montevideo Fantastic Film Festival, and "Best Director" at the International Fantastic Film Festival in Porto Alegre.

Those who like science fiction movies may also want to check out two more recent releases, the semi-serious "Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel" and the Johannesburg, South Africa-based "District 9" (both in cinemas 2009 – and, of course, on file sharing websites).

Arundhati Roy turns on democracy

Even renowned Indian novelist and anti-globalization activist Arundhati Roy has come to perceive "The Dark Side of Democracy" – so the title of a text in her most recent collection of previously published essays, "Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy" (Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, 2009):

www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780241144626,00.html

The book is described by its publisher as looking "closely at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of a country [India] that projects itself as the world's largest democracy", but is now being turned "into a police state", threatening its "precarious democracy" and sending "shockwaves through the region and beyond".

An adapted version of her introduction to the book was published under the title "Democracy's Failing Light" in Outlook India magazine:

www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?250418

She has since used this introductory essay as her opening speech at the ninth International Literature Festival in Berlin, Germany (September 2009), thus indicating that her critical thoughts on democracy address a global rather than merely an Indian audience.

Polemically, Roy asks: "Is there life after democracy?", once it "has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that resolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? [...] Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race?"

Democracy, according to Roy, "can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would". Her collected essays, some new, some dating back to the turn of the millennium, are "not about unfortunate anomalies or aberrations in the democratic process. They're about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy; they're about the fire in the ducts".

India's parties spent two billion dollars on the 2009 general elections. "That's a lot more than the budget of the US elections. According to some media reports the actual amount spent is closer to ten billion dollars. Where, might one ask, does that kind of money come from? [...] Clearly, without sponsorship it's hard to win an election. And independent candidates cannot promise subsidised rice, free TVs and cash-for-votes, those demeaning acts of vulgar charity that elections have been reduced to".

German media reported Roy's Berlin speech (the German translation of her essay) as depicting democracy-that-is, in India and elsewhere, as a milder form of civil war.

Book: Democracy Kills

A welcome contribution to the commencing debate on anti-democratic thought: On 4 September 2009, Pan Macmillan published the new book by veteran BBC foreign correspondent, Humphrey Hawksley, bearing the suggestive title "Democracy Kills: What's So Good About Having the Vote?".

Pan Macmillan promotes the book as "[a] compelling and thought-provoking examination of the dangers of democracy":

www.panmacmillan.com/titles/displayPage.asp?PageTitle=Individual%20Title&BookID=419097

Their description: For many years western governments have insisted that the only way to achieve long-term prosperity and political stability is through a combination of free-market economics and democratic government. Yet, all evidence now indicates that this argument is both flawed and can also be the direct cause of war, disease, and poverty. From Pakistan to Zimbabwe, from the Palestinian territories to the former Yugoslavia, from Georgia to Haiti attempts to install democracy through elections have produced high levels of corruption and violence. Parliaments represent not broad constituencies but vested interests and, amid much fanfare, constitutions are written, but rarely upheld. Humphrey Hawksley has reported economic and political trends throughout the world for more than twenty years. In "Democracy Kills", he offers a vivid – and frequently devastating – analysis of our devotion to democracy.

There is of course a simple reason why Hawksley, as he writes on his blog, experienced "overwhelming support" when launching the book at the Edinburgh Literary Festival last month – and this from "a highly-intelligent, thoughtful, liberal audience". The cases he discusses in the book are far away. It is easy to agree that democratization had devastating consequences in places like Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Unlike myself, Hawksley appears still to favour democracy when it comes to the West. The argument he says "no-one disagreed with" remains thus theoretical to most people. They are not asked to take a stance.

In an early review of the book, Gerard DeGroot (Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews) concedes in this vein that

"[w]hile democracy seems in theory admirable, too often its hasty implementation brings bloodshed, poverty, disease and death". In the Ivory Coast, for example, "[a] succession of weak governments [left] the country open to free-market exploitation by rapacious chocolate producers. Adults now have the vote, but their children are often slaves", harvesting cocoa.

Only in developing countries, according to that line of thought, "the people often lack the experience to behave like full-fledged democrats. The result is either chronic political instability or, worse, elected autocracies. [...] The argument brings to mind the colonial era when self-determination was perpetually denied on grounds that the natives were not ready. Today, the politically correct attitude is to assume that all people are capable of being good democrats, or at least should be allowed to make their own mistakes. Yet democracy is much more than an ideology worthy of adoption simply because it is noble. It is, in truth, a culture – one that took centuries to take root in Europe. The idea that it can be quickly transplanted in places where the soil is rocky and the climate harsh is simply naïve".

Concluding his discussion, DeGroot relates "the experience of Usama Rehda, an Iraqi citizen for whom democratic change has meant poverty, corruption and the constant threat of car bombs. 'You know what they say [... .] Be nice to the Americans or they'll punish you with democracy.'"

Identity theft by the "Times Higher Education"

Some people still labour under the illusion that the media are objective, rather than activist, in their reporting. That is a myth that, particularly in the UK, has no bearing on reality.

I can disclose today that the weekly magazine Times Higher Education has become guilty of at least two counts of criminal identity theft in its misguided attempt to give succour to an ongoing cyberstalking campaign against me.

Over the last weekend, subscribers to the political theology mailing list (listserv) I run received two e-mails purporting to be from me, that is, they were – apparently – sent from my e-mail address ("Erich Kofmel", e.kofmel@scis-calibrate.org).

As recipients may have guessed from the content (links to articles and websites accusing me of fraudulent activities as well as outright slander and defamation), these e-mails were not sent by me. Someone stole my e-mail address (somehow "masking" their own e-mail with my sender address, much as spammers would). That is identity theft and a criminal act. The same was done earlier with my Sussex university e-mail account.

Fortunately, and for the first time, the normally hidden parts of the e-mail "header" of these two e-mails allow me to pin down the original sender. Both e-mails were sent from the same IP address: 77.73.121.5.

The server from which these e-mails were sent identifies itself as "helo=tsleducation.com" – that is the domain of the mother company of the Times Higher Education.

Much has been written recently about the journalistic practices of UK papers like the News of the World. Although the Times Higher Education – formerly the Times Higher Education Supplement – does not belong to Rupert Murdoch anymore, its journalistic practices are still as degraded as those of other UK publications (where duplicity and deception is the order of the day).

The headers of the falsified e-mails sent this weekend prove that the Times Higher Education is not only compliant in its reporting with the anonymous cyberstalker who has been pursuing me for one and a half years now (using multiple assumed and stolen identities, including my own, and repeatedly attempting to hack my e-mail accounts), but actively complicit in his or her ongoing theft of identities, that is, the magazine actively perpetrated acts of crime punishable under UK law.

Entirely unproven allegations against me have been made first on the Internet (in fora, on public mailing list, etc.). Much of this has found its way, unfiltered, into newspaper articles. There is nothing "objective" or "true" or trustworthy about them. With its criminal actions this weekend, the Times Higher Education has outed itself as entirely partisan.

There's little I can do about someone stealing my identity and e-mail address and pretending to be me. The police have so far failed to investigate in that direction. I can only urge everyone to exercise caution with regard to any e-mails you may get from the sender e.kofmel@scis-calibrate.org (or any e-mail pretending to be from me or regarding me, for that matter).

Duncan Connors and the demise of the National Postgraduate Committee of the UK

Amongst the most pointless organizations I ever belonged to must certainly be counted the National Postgraduate Committee of the United Kingdom (NPC). An organization with a noble goal (the representation of postgraduate students and doctoral researchers), but without adequate funding or staffing, dwarfed by the financial prowess of the National Union of Students (which however did not represent postgraduates until just now).

Recently, one Duncan Connors (aka Duncan-Philip Connors) commented on a UK higher education messageboard about the affairs of the soon to be defunct NPC, which is apparently to be absorbed into a newly formed National Union of Students Postgraduate Committee or Conference (NUS-PC). In passing, he made some derogatory remarks about me, a former officer on the Management Sub-Committee (board) of the NPC.

Now, Duncan Connors is well known as a self-aggrandizing pompous git, if there ever was one. In fact, I don't need to insult him myself. I can just cite comments made about him on another blog two years ago: "Duncan Connors was asked to resign [as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party in Islington] by a unanimous vote of the executive but refused to accept that his service, or lack thereof, were no longer required. He has tried to create the illusion of a huge scandal in the association by going to the press, sending unsolicited letters and blogging his heart away when in fact, all he wants is a soapbox for his bruised ego and to pursue his own political agenda at everyone else's expense.

"From what I understand he simply wasn't up to the job – [...] All mouth and no trousers.

"the association had no choice but to force him out.

"Duncan is a bit unstable and lives quite close to me I didn't want to become the focus of his obsessive behaviour. Who knows what he is capable of. [...] He is very odd. This is especially the case when he has some moon bat juice driven delusion that he is a 'Major Player' on the political stage. Have a look at the mixture of ego mania and victim syndrome in his ramblings and you will see how likely that is."

Since Duncan's remarks about me were based not on fact, but on what others had said or written about me earlier, I am sure he will agree that a reminder of what others have said publicly about him is in order.

Is there any truth to it, though? A year after I'd left NPC of my own free will (after Duncan and I and a third officer had all run unsuccessfully for Chairman), Duncan was elected General Secretary, the only (ill-)paid position in the organization. Now there are over a hundred universities in the UK and all of them have postgraduates. Usually some forty to fifty of those would affiliate to NPC each year (that is, the local students' union or postgraduate association would pay a few hundred pounds membership fees). In Duncan's year as General Secretary only thirty universities affiliated to NPC. Even worse, the next year only thirteen renewed their affiliation. That's one tenth of UK universities.

With his dismal record in office, Duncan as General Secretary prepared the ground for the imminent take over of the NPC by the NUS. Of course, true to form, he spent the past year trying to blame this on his successor in as many public places as possible.

Duncan becoming General Secretary of NPC was always going to lead to disaster. A man who in more than one e-mail to me (that I still have) boasted that only research council-funded doctoral candidates like himself were worth his attention. How could he ever represent taught postgraduates and self-funding research students (who make up the vast majority of the postgraduate student population in the UK)?

Does at least his academic record match his ego? While I published a book on "Anti-Democratic Thought" in a comparative, cross-cultural, global, and historical context, Duncan spent the last years writing an earth-shattering dissertation on (get this) "The Role of Political Decision Making in the Decline of the Shipbuilding Industries on the [river] Clyde in comparison to its international competitors, 1945-1977". Moreover, he actually got public funding to the tune of some forty or fifty thousand pounds to write such a trite that will be of no concern or interest to anyone but himself.

In his time as General Secretary, Duncan removed me from the NPC mailing list for former officers. (Although he claimed in an e-mail to me that this had not been due to him. Just another lie.) I was pleased indeed to learn that he was removed from that list by his successor in exactly the same fashion.

Ask me again why I am against democracy.

SCIS companies dissolved without objection

Slowly evidence is gathering that allows me to prove conclusively just how trumped up the accusations against me are that have been brought by an anonymous cyberstalker (who is using multiple assumed and stolen identities).

In February 2009, the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) changed its legal personality to that of an international association under Swiss law. It was decided that the original Company Limited by Guarantee and Not Having a Share Capital (that is, not for profit), founded in 2006 and registered in England and Wales, should be dissolved. Equally, our high-tech arm, SCIS Technology Ltd (a Company Limited by Shares, registered in England and Wales), was to be dissolved.

Both UK companies were dissolved in June 2009, on 2 June and 16 June respectively.

It has been alleged by the cyberstalker that SCIS, of which I am the Managing Director, was involved in fraudulent activities. The fact that both companies could be dissolved in such a short period of time proves otherwise.

UK laws provide for anyone who has a legal claim against a company to prevent such company from dissolution. To this effect the proposals to strike off the companies from the public register had to be published in the London Gazette, the official newspaper of record. The first gazette notice regarding the former Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society appeared on 3 March, the final gazette notice on 16 June 2009. In the case of SCIS Technology Ltd, the first gazette notice appeared on 17 February and the final gazette notice on 2 June 2009.

www.london-gazette.co.uk

Within the statutory three-month period, no objections to dissolution were raised by anyone (including the cyberstalker who would have had to give his or her proper name in order to stop dissolution).

This proves that SCIS did not and does not owe anyone any money whatsoever. (Accordingly, neither company was subject to liquidation or insolvency proceedings before dissolution.) SCIS was not and is not involved in any fraudulent activities.

None of the around two hundred persons who participated in SCIS-organized events since 2006 claimed any improprieties. All such claims came from an anonymous source without any proof or evidence and unwilling to sign with their own name.

The Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society continues its operations as an international association under Swiss law and remains a non-profit organization. It is now based in Geneva, Switzerland. The association's President and Managing Director is Erich Kofmel.

CONF: "What is a university for?" in South Africa

St Augustine College of South Africa, the country's Roman Catholic university, from which I graduated in 2007 with the degree of Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Theology (with distinction), this year celebrates its tenth anniversary.

www.staugustine.ac.za

Of course, the College is much smaller than the university I received my first masters degree from (which, as I did not complete an undergraduate degree, was also my first academic qualification) and that I regard as my alma mater – the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg. Wits is a British foundation of the early twentieth century that aims to be among the world's top-100 universities by 2020 and already ranks higher than most "western" universities.

www.wits.ac.za

Still, since I started my research masters at St Augustine in 2004 (completing it concurrently with my doctoral studies in England), the university, a private higher education institution under South African law, has grown significantly too.

Unlike most universities (and despite the "college" handle), St Augustine started out by offering postgraduate degrees and certificates only, besides a range of short courses, in ethics, politics, philosophy, and theology. Only in recent years has it been accredited by the National Department of Education to also offer undergraduate degrees in commerce, humanities, and theology. With the number of academic staff expanding, research capacities have also grown exponentially.

From 14-16 July 2009 the College will now be hosting a conference to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its establishment. Under the theme "Intellectual and moral leadership: what is a university for?", they have assembled an impressive array of speakers highly regarded in their respective fields. The conference thus promises to be both interesting and informative.

The lack or non-accessibility of higher education in Africa has long been identified as a serious impediment to the social and economic development of the continent. Despite this, there are few initiatives to improve the situation. National and international funding bodies alike are focussed on primary or secondary rather than tertiary education. While the situation may be better in South Africa than in other countries, much remains to be done even there. Only about two percent of young people attend university (compared to the fifty percent aimed at in the UK and around seventy percent already in Finland).

Topics to be covered by panels and talks at this conference include "Knowledge/Research: Opportunities for SA universities in the context of globalization and society in transition"; "Higher education and social challenges"; "Social engagement, consciousness and responsibility: the limits and possibilities for the university"; "South African universities and research in the 21st century"; "The idea of a university in a networked world"; "Knowledge production: private sector and higher education – roles and responsibilities"; "Private higher education and human capital for international competitiveness"; "The human capital factory: the economic rationalization of higher education"; "What is a university for? Catholic and secular models"; "Theology and the academy: mutual enrichment?"; "Academic freedom and different visions of university"; "Living well in and through the crises: the critical role of values".

Among the speakers are the Archbishops of the archdioceses of Johannesburg and Bloemfontein, Buti Tlhagale (the Grand-Chancellor of St Augustine College) and Jabulani Nxumalo; Professor Oliver Williams of the University of Notre Dame, USA; Dr Cheryl de la Ray, CEO of South Africa's Council on Higher Education (CHE); Mr Bobby Godsell, Chairman of the Board of national energy provider Eskom; numerous vice-chancellors, deputy vice-chancellors, rectors, and professors of other South African, Australian, and Nigerian universities, as well as representatives of the National Research Foundation and private enterprise.

St Augustine received a generous donation towards the cost of the conference and is therefore able to make no admission charge. The cafeteria will be providing lunches and suppers on an à la carte basis.

Those interested in attending this three-day conference may contact Denise Gordon Brown: admin@staugustine.ac.za

Cyberstalking update: legal proceedings against Eric Kofmehl

My name is Erich Kofmel. That's E-r-i-c-h-K-o-f-m-e-l. I have come into possession of court documents made out by the proper judicial authorities in Switzerland seeking to interrogate one "Eric KOFMEHL" – that's E-r-i-c-K-o-f-m-e-h-l – in connection with fraud accusations that an anonymous cyberstalker (using multiple assumed and stolen identities) has for some time sought to imply me in.

I repeat: The suspect in this alleged fraud case, according to the court (moreover referring to a request received from a foreign law enforcement agency), is "Eric KOFMEHL" – not me. A person which according to the cyberstalker does not exist. I tend to assume that the court, after one-and-a-half years of international investigation, knows better.

From the beginning of this "sordid affair" (as one person put it who found themselves harassed by the criminal perseverance of the stalker), the question remained unanswered if someone had stolen my identity or whether it was merely a case of mistaken identities due to an accidental similarity of names. The person initially accused, in various online fora, of defrauding people was said Eric Kofmehl. Until someone, anonymously, made the entirely unproven and wrongful claim that Eric Kofmehl and I, Erich Kofmel, were the same person.

The ensuing anonymous cyberstalking campaign against me hammered home to police and judicial authorities that they should focus their investigations on me. I am not aware that, until now, they have pursued any other leads, namely the anonymous cyberstalker who directed suspicion on me.

Recent events now clarify the matter. How absurd is it to assume that a court (edged on by another foreign authority) would seek to interrogate "Eric KOFMEHL", and make out judicial documents to that name, if such a person did not exist. I trust that the authorities – after one-and-a-half years – have at least (and at long last) established who exists and who does not.

I understand that law enforcement agencies do not know the whereabouts of Eric Kofmehl. They know however how to reach me. Unlike what has been suggested by the cyberstalker, I am not "on the run". I am not about to divulge my place of residence for the simple reason that I am being stalked. As far as I am aware, I have also not been charged with any crime either in Switzerland or the UK or anywhere else.

I hope that the authorities not just in Switzerland, but in other jurisdictions too, will now stop pursuing me and rather focus their energies on finding Eric Kofmehl. The mix-up of identities must stop here.

Regardless, though, I now hold prime evidence in hands that I will be able to introduce into any possible subsequent legal proceedings. The court documents in my possession prove beyond any doubt that the judiciary and relevant law enforcement agencies in Switzerland and beyond know of the existence of Eric Kofmehl – and that he is distinct from me.

These documents will help to exonerate me of all accusations, whether it ever comes to a trial or not.

Pirate parties against private property and surveillance

Every so often, political movements seem to sweep across Europe that cause people in different countries to form parties of a similar hue, pursuing programmes of an identical (or closely related) nature. The first such movement, in recent times, may have been liberalism, followed by the labour movement and the Greens, among others.

All of a sudden, we see "pirate parties" spring up all over Europe (and, indeed, the world). With the information and communication technologies at their disposal, the spread of this movement is even faster than on previous occasions.

Founded only in 2006, the Swedish Pirate Party already won a seat in the recent elections to the European Parliament – receiving 7.13% of the votes –, after having become the third largest national party in terms of membership (before the Green Party, Left Party, Liberal Party, Christian Democrats, and Centre Party). In Germany, albeit shortly before the end of term, a member of parliament last week switched allegiance from the Social Democrats to the German Pirate Party, becoming the pirates' first representative in a national legislature.

Pirate parties everywhere seek a reform of their countries' and international laws regarding copyright and patents. They fight against the surveillance state and for a strengthening of the right to privacy, on the Internet as well as in everyday life. They seek full transparency of state actions, government and administration. For now, they abstain from positioning themselves on the left-right political spectrum, in favour of forging alliances with all parties that are willing to support their goals.

There is no reason for pirate parties to remain single topic, though. Concerns with the coming (European) surveillance state encompass all spheres of life, wherever databases are kept to store information about us and infringe on our privacy. Informatics and the Internet permeate leisure and work alike and the state pries on us in private and in public. Labour – the Social Democrats – also started out as a single-topic movement, seeking the improvement of labour conditions, but swiftly transformed itself into a political force to be reckoned with more broadly.

The true significance of pirate parties is under-analyzed and under-theorized, not least due to the fact that they are run mostly by technologists (programmers, developers, IT entrepreneurs, etc.) with little background in social and political thought. Outside Sweden, they are often led by very young people (digital natives who do not remember a time before private computing) with no political experience at all. They are a reaction to real-life problems perceived first by people at the forefront of technological developments, but bound to become of ever greater importance to all of us.

The silly name, Pirate Party, proudly betrays the semi-criminal (at least, not law-abiding) background of this political movement. It has its roots in the Wild West anarchism of the early Internet and (illegal) file-sharing communities that are now being criminalized in most jurisdictions. The German member of parliament accepted into the folds of the Pirate Party is being investigated by the authorities for possession of child pornography (which, as he says, he obtained in the exercise of his duties as his former party's parliamentary spokesperson for Education and Research and New Media).

Whether known or unknown to them (and all their members), pirate parties fight the logic of capitalist market economy, and the laws protecting it, by supporting the pirating of goods (such as music and films), informational self-determination on the net, and open-access policies for scientific research findings. While pirate parties propose to abandon private property in the form of copyright and patents, it will, consequently, be necessary to abandon property at a more fundamental level, in all its forms.

Here the question arises whether the foundation of a political party is the right way – and a traditional party is the right form – to fight surveillance and property. After all – and hardly considered by the technologists behind these parties –, it is democracies that protect private property and, through security scares and fears of crime, give rise to the police or surveillance state (even though the latter may yet prove to be democracy's downfall).

I hold that it won't be possible to fight property and surveillance by democratic means. If pirate parties, in the course of time, grow less radical and become satisfied with introducing safeguards to surveillance and exceptions to property they may be accommodated within the democratic and capitalist system (just as Labour and the Greens were).

Ultimately, however, something more basic is beginning to take shape. The opposition against property and the police/surveillance state will form outside of parliaments and the fight will be fought against democracy and the indifference of the majority.

If the pirates make it their fight they will play a role of utmost historical significance. Otherwise, they will (have to) be superseded.

Special issue: Theology and Democratic Futures

Corey D. B. Walker (Brown University) has guest edited a special issue of the journal Political Theology (vol. 10, no. 2, 2009) on the theme "Theology and Democratic Futures":

www.politicaltheology.com/ojs/index.php/PT/issue/view/663

Walker's introductory essay is concerned with the "revival in scholarly attention to the question of theology across various formations in the North Atlantic academy" and a tendency that "seeks to challenge the binary and dichotomous logic that separates theological formations and non-theological formations while blurring the boundaries between the two in facilitating a critical thinking in which the theological is pressed into service for the elaboration of other radical and subversive non-theological discourses" as well as an opposite tendency "assisting in bulwarking the sui generis gloss of Christianity's theological claims and doctrines" "in contradistinction to other critical and secular theoretical discourses".

While Walker claims that "[t]o think theology is to think democracy, albeit with a more profound and humbling sense of contingency and without guarantees", other contributors to this special issue seem to view democracy more critically, for example within the discourse of "post-democracy" "as a political order of a privatized and privileged politics that is not responsive to the radical democratic aspirations or potentials of the majority", concluding that "[i]t is this post-democratic landscape that should properly coordinate and calibrate our theological imaginations". Authors in this line of thought engage the evangelical right in the US (Andrew C. Willis) as much as the Islamic Law debate in the UK (Vincent Lloyd).

(BTW: The paper by Lloyd was accepted for presentation at the Third Annual International Symposium of the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) on "Anti-Liberalism and Political Theology" that took place in July 2008 at Sciences Po/The Institute for Political Studies in Paris, France.)

Bruce Ellis Benson argues that "radical democracy is not nearly radical enough and Christianity, when it has entered the 'public square,' has likewise not been nearly radical enough", while Paul Dafyyd Jones' "close reading and dialectical analysis of Schleiermacher and Barth and the projects of liberation theology enable him to project a broader 'theopolitical imagination' that links classical and liberationist theological perspectives in animating and empowering progressive political projects". Peter Goodwin Heltzel's essay interrogates "the theoretical and political dimensions of [Martin Luther King, Jr.'s] Christian inspired project of 'Beloved Community' and Antonio Negri's Spinoza inspired project of 'Multitude' in confronting the reduced horizon for democratic politics in our contemporary conjuncture".

Further articles concern "the case of [US death-row prisoner] Mumia Abu-Jamal" in the light of the works of Giorgio Agamben and Abdul R. JanMohammed and the "state of exception" (Mark Lewis Taylor), "Hannah Arendt's [polytheistic and thus plural] Political Theology of Democratic Life" (Jane Anna Gordon), and "phenomenology as a mode of thought that welcomes the depth and complexity of existence as an analogue for rethinking radically democratic futures" (Rocco Gangle, Jason Smick). As Walker writers: "It is the plural – whether polytheism or phenomenology – that posits the possibility of theology and democracy as open-ended forms whose futures may be less clear but more hopeful than a resurrection of past practices and forms of thought".

This special issue may help to highlight too "the state of democratic politics that so often transforms the exception into the rule, specifically in the case of the marginal and dispossessed" (Mark Taylor Lewis).

Universities are the business

In a bold move designed to demonstrate just how far the marketization and commodification of higher education in the UK has gone, British prime minister Gordon Brown last week announced, as part of his cabinet reshuffle, that universities from now on would form part of the business portfolio under Peter (Lord) Mandelson.

Even more surprising and troubling, though, is the utter lack of reactions – whether positive or negative – to this rash decision. No one, it seems, can be bothered. A discussion ensued neither in the media nor on HE message boards or fora. In the current economic climate – with UK high-street chain stores closing down by the day –, few students and academics appear to mind universities being made (even more) subservient to business interests.

What is the logical consequence of all this? Increasingly, I can't help but feel that it would be more honest to "buy" a doctorate, rather than to work for it. What is the value (in a non-material sense) of a degree that comes out of such an environment?

I value my South African qualifications (both achieved with distinction in selective courses and competitive classes with up to 95% education- and knowledge-hungry black Africans) more highly than I could ever value a qualification from a sell-out UK institution.

An institution, such as the University of Sussex, talking left, but peopled mainly by the affluent middle class operating under a government that views students alternately as customers to be fleeced or (would-be) terrorists to be kept under surveillance.

Two years after leaving England, I see no reason to return.

Film: The Last Enemy

Anyone willing to acquire a better understanding of the kind of society the United Kingdom is swiftly transforming itself into, can do no better than watch the five-part TV drama "The Last Enemy", produced by the BBC in 2008 and now freely available in full-length videos on YouTube:

www.youtube.com/show/thelastenemy?feature=spotlight

Different from your usual science-fiction movie, the streets of Britain in this mini series look eerily familiar and it's only the small technological changes (spread of ID cards, iris scanning, RFID chips in basically everything, access controls, database integration, and so on) that have turned it into a totalitarian society of total surveillance – or, as the film calls it, T.I.A., Total Information Awareness.

This piece is set in the very near future and the science in it is not fictitious at all. It is all here. Tomorrow, it turns out, is after all just that – tomorrow. A few hours away. Everything shown in this picture already exists, there's nothing futuristic about it. It is just a question of scale and purpose. Even the heavily armed police troops in their protective gear that seem to pop up around every corner can be found now on the streets of London and many other cities.

It is hard to get one's head around it, but only if we understand that the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany was gradual and Germany looked by and large the same in 1930 and 1935 will we understand that the totalitarian surveillance state does not require futuristic architecture, but is at home in the picturesque and old-fashioned stone-built sceneries of the long-lost Victorian Empire as well as present-day council estates.

The synopsis of the film taken from the website of the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS): "[After just four years abroad, mathematician] Stephen Ezard [...] returns to London to mourn the loss of his brother, Michael, and enters a society now obsessed with surveillance. Searching to make sense of Michael's death, Stephen uncovers secrets about his brother's life – including a wife he never knew Michael had. Taking a government job to trace leads through a powerful new database [T.I.A.], Stephen exposes troubling revelations and soon finds himself stalked by a rogue agent [...]. But when Stephen stumbles into an international conspiracy, he realizes that the omnipresent and menacing eye of the government has turned on him".

Total Information Awareness is being introduced in this picture with the promise: "With T.I.A., there will be nowhere to hide". No one has the right to disappear or not wanting to be found.

And, as implausible as the name may sound, T.I.A. is actually based on a US-government programme of exactly that name, introduced following 9/11, but since defunded by congress. Parts of T.I.A. continue to be pursued under the responsibility of various government agencies.

SCIS Technology Ltd and the Royal Society

The Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) has adopted a multi- and transdisciplinary approach to the study of "the individual and society", which includes high-tech disciplines such as (but not limited to) Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Genetics, Ecotechnology, and Informatics.

Three years ago, we set up SCIS Technology Ltd as a commercial venture to attract private research funding in these areas along the American model and to create income and an endowment for SCIS rather than rely on state funding. SCIS Tech offered university technology spin-outs without the bureaucratic hassle of a university – proposing to commercialize intellectual property (IP) created by doctoral candidates and young researchers that (unlink research by more senior academics) does not belong to a university.

As a pre-commercialization incubator, SCIS Tech focused on high-tech ideas and very early-stage research projects with a probable significant impact on individuals and society and expected to lead to the creation of IP and commercial ventures in the future. It set out to facilitate investment from venture capitalists, private equity firms, business angels, high net-worth individuals, corporate social responsibility programmes, and management buy-ins into ideas which at that point only existed on paper or in young innovators' minds.

We explained to potential investors that they would not be able to meet these doctoral candidates and young researchers elsewhere because they were not yet at business-plan stage and often lacked basic funding for their research. SCIS Tech would provide them with financial means at the stage at which it mattered most.

A Senior Consultant instrumental in setting up SCIS Tech was Prof John Higgins, Britain's first Professor of Biotechnology (former Leverhulme Professor, Cranfield University) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the International Institute of Biotechnology.

In early March 2008, the Royal Society – the United Kingdom's national academy of science (and different from the Royal Society of Arts) – announced an investment programme and fundraising drive markedly similar to the one we had proposed with SCIS Technology Ltd earlier. With its superior resources, the Royal Society easily overtook our efforts.

As ResearchResearch.com, under the headline "Royal Society turns to venture capitalism", reported at the time: "The Royal Society says it's going into business, for the first time in its 350-year history. The society has announced that it will create an enterprise fund to support innovation and very early stage research with potential for commercial applications. However, rather than giving money in the form of grants, the Royal Society's financial input will take the form of a commercial investment. The society plans to raise £20 million for the fund, and has already taken £3 million in contributions from several venture capitalists".

As usual, misrepresentation on part of the journalist may be involved here, but note the emphasis on "very early-stage research" that distinguishes the approaches of SCIS Tech and the Royal Society from other such projects. Business incubators and venture capitalists alike normally expect to see clear evidence of research results as well as technological feasibility studies, and ideally patents and other IP, before committing to support any idea financially.

It seems that the focus of the Royal Society may have changed since the initial announcement in a more traditional direction, too (possibly due to the addition of some people with a traditional venture capital background to the fund's governing structures). However, funders of the "Royal Society Enterprise Fund" will, differently from SCIS Tech, now not receive any return on their "investments" – which are to be considered philanthropic gifts.

Rather, it is the fund that will play the part of venture capitalist and invest (donated) monies into promising ideas, primarily in the Physical Sciences and Engineering. Down the line, any profits resulting from such ventures are to replenish the fund and become available for new investments. Unlike most scientific funding opportunities, no mention is made as to what level of their academic careers potential beneficiaries should be at.

Intriguingly, no news has been published on the fund since September 2008 (before the global financial crisis), when its capital had reached £5 million, and their website is still skeletal. Stephen Cox, Executive Secretary of the Royal Society, writes in the spring 2009 issue of Inside Science, the Royal Society's magazine, though: "The Royal Society Enterprise Fund is now officially open for business and we are looking for support, both to calibrate the quality of the opportunities presented to us and for information about potential new technology companies which need financial backing":

www.royalsociety.org/downloaddoc.asp?id=6163

I invite Mr Cox to look no further than www.scis-calibrate.org for assistance in calibrating any proposals. Certainly, the Royal Society has at its disposal means and networks we did not have. But I feel vindicated that SCIS Tech wasn't a bad idea after all, just very ambitious.

SCIS has since decided to focus its core capacities on the social- and political-theoretical aspects of new technologies and on the assessment of their likely impact on the individual and society in the twenty-first century.

On the crisis of parliamentarianism in the United Kingdom

Much is being written these days on the crisis of parliamentarianism in the UK, caused by the exposure of practices apparently shared by parliamentarians across all political parties and factions of claiming unjustified allowances and expenses that had either not arisen to them (for example, for a non-existent second home in their constituency or in London) or that were not linked to their political mandate (porn films, garden manure, dog food, etc.). Some resignations from the parliamentary benches and government have already been tendered and more are expected to follow.

There is growing concern that the unfolding of events may lead to anti-democratic sentiment and action amongst the populace (such as gains for the neo-fascist British National Party in the upcoming elections to the European Parliament) and it would indeed be easy for an avowed anti-democrat to take this as an occasion to slap and slander parliamentary democracy, just as the mainstream media, led on by the newspaper Daily Telegraph, "glory" in doing.

The usual mode of anti-democratic thought and criticism of democracy would have been to take the news from Britain as a proof of the inherent weakness of every democratic system of governance. Let's be real, though, and agree that this just as easily could have happened in any corrupt authoritarian country. The real lesson to be learned here is that democracies are no better than authoritarian governments. They can claim no moral advantage or high ground – or they will do so at their own peril.

As I wrote in my paper "Fighting Capitalism and Democracy", the notion that democracy is intrinsically linked to money, and democratic power is linked to material wealth, is as old as democracy itself. In the very first democracies, in ancient Greece, as James Bryce stated,
'[t]he power of money and the greed for money appears from the prevalence of bribery and the frequent embezzlement of the public funds' (Modern Democracies: I/206). The same has held true for every democracy since.

The new mode of anti-democratic thought that I am propagating takes the recent events not as sufficient reason to doubt democracy. It rather takes them as one more reason to doubt capitalism and the fixation on money that characterizes our present time and order – and to doubt democracy because of its inherent linkage to capitalism.

Just a few years back similar "scandals" erupted in Germany and at the European Union as well as in South Africa ("Travelgate"). In all these countries, parliamentarianism survived – as it will undoubtedly, for the time being, in the UK.

The difference between now and then, other countries and the UK is however significant. What British members of parliament now experience and endure is a sort of personal and professional destruction – that will be satisfied only with complete annihilation of the man or woman targeted. Other people, less in the public spotlight, have been enduring such treatment at the hands of the UK media for a long time. Myself, I have been subjected to it by an anonymous cyberstalker and compliant media for over a year now.

It's the naming and shaming that the media laws in most other countries prohibit – people, parliamentarians and others, being called criminals and frauds by journalists and not given the chance to set the record straight and defend themselves against allegations that are either false, unproven, or rest on the worst possible interpretation of shaky evidence and questionable facts. There is no presumption of innocence here and the sentence is not to be spoken by a court of law or a body of parliamentary control, but by public opinion. The sentence is the destruction of people's reputations and existence at the hands of unaccountable forces, with no right to appeal.

That is the way the media work in the UK. As the Guardian newspaper reports: "The MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, Nadine Dorries, claimed the Telegraph's expenses campaign was proving so invasive that some MPs were on suicide watch. 'The atmosphere in Westminster is unbearable,' she wrote on her blog. 'People are constantly checking to see if others are OK. Everyone fears a suicide. If someone isn't seen, offices are called and checked.'"

In another country with similar penchant for personal destruction, South Korea, former president Roh Moo-hyun was driven to suicide only last week by corruption charges he strongly denied. Again in the Guardian, a citizen of South Korea comments: "I've never been so ashamed of being a citizen of this country, a country that kills its own president [...]. It feels like we've lost all respect in pushing each other to extremes."

The partner of a UK member of parliament, in the same newspaper, meant likewise: "The British public – not all of them, but the smug guardians of morality who are enjoying this crisis so much – say they are disgusted by the behaviour of our elected representatives. Let me say that it works both ways: for the first time in my life, I am sick of my country. I am sick of the daily undermining of democracy, and sick of the sadistic pleasure people take in humiliating decent public servants. Even so, I will go on urging my friend not to give up her seat. She is a brilliant constituency MP, and I don't believe anyone should give in to bullies."

As if to prove the fact that the victims of such mob rule and media man hunt deserve no right to defend themselves, or point to the media's agenda and consequences of their actions, lawyers acting for the Daily Telegraph swiftly got a court order against Nadine Dorries that forced her to shut down her blog:

www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/23/dorries-tory-mp-blog-taken-down

This is not about democracy or anti-democracy, or about whether someone may have bent the rules. It's not about being in favour of or against parliaments. Make no mistake, I am against them. The issue here is personal. It's a personalized smear and defamation campaign against particular parliamentarians, although numerous, not against parliament as an institution. That is why most people in the UK do not perceive what is happening as an attack on democracy. The campaign is not anti-democracy, it's anti-those-representing-democracy.

It is not aimed at democracy as an abstract principle, but at humans who are being thrown to the wolves, merciless, by corporate interests and base instincts. This campaign is the biggest thing since 9/11, with new revelations day after day after day. Self-righteously, it claims to be about the misuse of public funds. In sober truth, though, it is about selling newspapers. It is almost certain that the Daily Telegraph paid money – that is, employed corruption of public officials itself – to obtain the information they now use against MPs. Money, here as always, shapes public opinion. And no one believe for a moment that one could not uncover similar stories about each and every Daily Telegraph executive and manager – they are just not likely ever to be published.

Nothing of the scale of the public reaction in the UK has happened or could even be imagined to happen in similar cases elsewhere in Europe. The British "stiff upper lip" is an imperial upper-class myth that always hid the fact that Britain is a nation of binge-drinking chavs and the venomous media serving them. In its majority, it is a vile people full of spite and bile that enjoys wallowing in the gutter. It is a sign of the times that even the conservative and formerly serious Daily Telegraph has stooped so low.

While indeed such a "scandal" could happen under authoritarian rule too, the moralistic and moralizing nonsense, the media's double standards now so publicly exhibited in the UK, and the vilification of members of parliament lies entirely in the nature of the beast, in the nature of democracy. Already in ancient Greece, politicians who had fallen from public favour were subjected to a vote in the citizens' assembly that would decide whether they should be killed or merely sent into exile.

The sentence was as harsh as any passed by a tyrant, but a collective decision meant that no one had to feel responsible individually when fellow men were stripped of their rights as citizens.

It's the politics of anonymous total personal annihilation and character assassination.

Short, suicide or murder by proxy.