Heroes of Learning: The Master Kong (that’s “Confucius ” to you and me)

The most grievous defect of our Heroes of Learning series is that up to now, it has focussed almost entirely on subjects and thinkers from the Western Tradition. Which defect grows from our immersion in a cultural and educational system which has assumed that only Westerners ( and those being, largely, white men) have anything worthwhile to say on matters of philosophy and governance. A conceit cruelly exposed by current developments, especially in nations which have long nurtured independent traditions. Time then, with our world readership to look at other systems and thinkers. And we can think of no better place to start than The Master Kong(“Confucius” in the western tradition) who lived in the China’s Spring and Autumn Period probably between about 551 and 479 BC, making him a near predecessor of such western sages as Plato and Aristotle.[1]

Unlike those refined thinkers, Kong spent a lifetime in the dangerous hurly burly of government service, experiencing wars, coups and even a period of exile. It made him ask above all ”what is the basis for a stable social order? How can the state be made harmonious with the people?” To westerners all the way from Plato through Enlightenment philosophers to moderns such as Rawls, the answer has always been: “ reform the laws; and: institute a just constitution.” But for Master Kong, no set of laws, no constitution can long survive the actions of a venal and unstable ruler. For centuries, westerners seemed to have the answers. But recent experience of leaders who mistake authority for wisdom, bureaucracies that reward compliance over candour, and publics that lose trust when officials and private corporations behave without integrity, have shown this arrogance to be profoundly mistaken. Confucius inverts all: he insists that the State cannot exist without ethical leadership, truthful counsel and restraint. His Analects[2] [3] (actually compiled by his followers after his death exalt character, duty and wisdom as the basis for this stable State. And that these virtues must first of all be prized and cultivated by the leader and his counsel, before any other men will follow them

These teachings have been rediscovered and re-invented many times, becoming interwoven into the warp and weft of Chinese civilisation. They still inform the actions and thinking of leading statesmen to this day. The world has need of harmony and just order now. The prizes of attaining them are almost within grasp. The penalty of failing to do so will be lethal indeed. Has the world still time to learn from The Master Kong?

[1] Confucius – Wikipedia

[2]Confucio – Analectas, trad. Anne‑Hélène Suárez Girard, Editorial Trotta, Madrid, 2012.

[3]Edward Slingerland – Analects of Confucius: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries, Hackett Publishing, 2003.

#master kong #confucius #china #civilisation #order #law #governance #state #anarchy #politics

Friday Night: Canadian Cocktails

“Canada : it’s a country where scale, sanity, and scenery all conspire in the traveller’s favour. You get cities that hum without overwhelming you — Vancouver’s ocean‑and‑mountain glamour, Montréal’s café‑soaked charm, Toronto’s multicultural thrum — and then, ten minutes later, you’re in a forest so vast it feels like a thought experiment. Lakes the size of small nations, wildlife that treats humans as mildly interesting background noise, and a national temperament that is unfailingly polite without being saccharine. For the holidaymaker, it’s the rare place where you can have adventure without chaos, wilderness without hardship, and culture without crowds.”

All of the preceding has been recently confirmed by first hand reports which have just reached us. In fact, the two travellers concerned (plus wives) so very much enjoyed the place that we thought we’d salute their achievements by penning a hymn of praise to Canadian cocktails. And to save time we are going to link you directly to some brilliant experts called My Bartender [1] who have compiled a list of no less than eight (count ‘em- eight!) delicious recipes, including how to make them, how to serve them, and above all how to enjoy them, whether you are touring the Maple Leaf Land itself, or sitting somewhere altogether more cramped like these sweaty offices in Croydon. Read their outpourings now to learn more about the eponymous Canadian Cocktail, the Maple Leaf (how Canadian is that?),the Canadian Maple Leaf old fashioned(answer: even more so) The White Canadian (must be good up on the snows of Baffin Island) The French Canadian (we say “oui” to that), JP Wisers Apple Jam’n (sounds as if it could soothe the savagest sasquatch) The Strawberry Sour(ditto a bear) and finally the Canadian Caesar( not to be confused with the American Caesar-he is become so tiresome lately)

And we hope that by sipping just one of the above you you will get some taste of this glorious country which our correspondents enjoyed so very much

By the way: do not really attempt to soothe actual bears with cocktails. They have their own views on mixology and tend to become prickly and stand offish at even small frustrations

_{Thanks to P Seymour and G Herbert}

[1] 8 Best Canadian Cocktails to Drink

#cocktails #canada #travel #rocky mountains #holidays

Brexit: how two Rights made a wrong

Photo by Duu0161an Cvetanoviu0107 on Pexels.com

Brexit could have worked. Read those words slowly, from an honest Remainer. Because as some of us always knew, there were pragmatic arguments from the other side, which we feared greatly, because they were exceedingly strong. So how is that most successful political project in recent British History now seems to have fallen so flat? Why, ten years on, do the memories of Brexit feel far from triumphant? We repeat, so that no one gets us wrong: Brexit could have worked. And this is why we think it didn’t.

The overarching problem was that the Leave coalition was built from two groups who wanted entirely different futures. Both were impeccably Right Wing. Both were possessed a vision of a future that could well have worked. But both pressed the same “Brexit “ button for opposite reasons. Because they belonged to two quite different right-wing tribes. One tribe, The Free‑marketeers dreamed of a Britain unshackled from Brussels, a nimble “Singapore‑on‑Thames”: low taxes, light regulation, capital flowing freely, goods moving frictionlessly, and a labour market kept competitive by high mobility. Their model required openness — to investment, to trade, and, crucially, to people. What can be more red tape than Immigration controls? But it might have been very, very prosperous.

The other half of the coalition wanted the exact reverse. The Nationalists imagined their Brexit as a chance to pull up the drawbridge: to instigate tighter immigration rules, more insulation from global competition, to achieve a more interventionist state protecting industries and communities. Some were driven by economic insecurity, some by cultural anxiety, and yes — some by outright hostility to outsiders, seeing Brexit as a way to begin a purge of “foreigners” from public life. Their model required barriers, buffers, and a powerful State willing to police identity as much as borders. It was a vision of national retreat, not global acceleration. But it might have been very, very stable.

These two projects could not coexist beyond Brexit day. You cannot believe in the free movement of capital and goods while fleeing, like a child at bathtime, from the free movement of labour. Markets do not work that way. Block labour and capital simply moves instead; block people and goods compensate; block both and you get the stagnation we now inhabit. Brexit tried to fuse two rights — the right to globalise and the right to barricade — and produced a wrong. A decade later, the contradiction still sits at the heart of British politics, unresolved and unresolvable, because the country cannot be both fortress and freeport at the same time. Deep, deep down, the question is not about Europe, nor taxes nor even immigration rules: all are details It is What do you want to be going forwards?

‘I feel entirely vindicated’: three Guardian columnists debate Brexit and its legacy | Aditya Chakrabortty, Polly Toynbee and Simon Jenkins | The Guardian The Economic Impact of Brexit | NBER

#brexit #united kingdom #european union #economics #history #nationalism #free markets

Should we blame Alan Greenspan for everything that’s gone wrong?

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

As historians of the future pick through the rubble of America’s decline and fall after its supreme triumph in 1991, they will ask one plaintive question: “How was such a winning position thrown away so decisively — and so quickly?” There will be plenty of blame to go around, plenty of suspects against whom fingers will be pointed. But one name keeps coming up again and again: Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006.

Today, the case for the prosecution against “ol’ Al” is made loudly, cogently, and with devastating clarity by Robert Reich, US Secretary of Labor under Clinton and now a professor at Berkeley.

We really think you should read this [1] — especially if you have a home, a family, a community, and, most pertinently of all, a job where the salary has not risen significantly in twenty years or so. But for those pressed for time, Reich summarises what he sees as Greenspan’s masterpiece of misjudgement thus:

“If any single person was responsible for the financial crisis of 2008, it was Greenspan… the worst collapse since 1929… resulted from the deregulation of Wall Street that Greenspan advocated.”

“He pushed Clinton and Congress to repeal the Glass–Steagall Act, which since the 1930s had separated investment banking from commercial banking, thereby preventing banks from gambling with personal savings. He also argued vigorously against regulating derivatives — essentially financial bets on financial bets — that later proved to be weapons of mass financial destruction.”

Yet we ask: is the culprit really Greenspan? Or is it actually ourselves?

Greenspan was widely regarded by critics as an enthusiastic advocate of the ultra‑rich and the values they espouse: hierarchy, conspicuous consumption, obsessive individualism. Whether these are virtues or vices is a matter of debate — but they were adopted enthusiastically by wide sections of the population for decades, making the task of Greenspan and his Wall Street fellow‑travellers infinitely easier.

For the ultimate illusion they peddled was Common Sense: it makes sense to reduce the deficit, for what is a nation but a giant household? Well, it is a bit — but mostly it isn’t. So things like infrastructure, research, and health go into the “nice‑but‑we‑can’t‑afford‑it” ledger too many times, and slowly but surely decline acquires a momentous, unstoppable hegemony of its own.

So don’t just blame Greenspan — blame ourselves for buying into a system that puts that sort of man into that sort of job. And hope that future societies develop much more judicious HR policies.

[1] RIP Alan Greenspan: you were charming, powerful and wrong | Robert Reich | The Guardian

#business #economics #united states of America #alan greenspan #robert reich #finance #markets

Friday: Greek rosé wines corner

When we asked our team of researchers what Greece, and Greek culture, have given to the world, they came up with this:

Homer epic poetry Hesiod didactic poetry Sappho lyric poetry Pindar odes Aeschylus tragedy Sophocles tragedy Euripides tragedy Aristophanes comedy Herodotus history Thucydides history Xenophon history Plato philosophy Aristotle philosophy Socrates ethics Diogenes Cynicism Zeno Stoicism Epicurus Epicureanism Pythagoras mathematics Euclid geometry Archimedes physics engineering Eratosthenes geography Hipparchus astronomy Aristarchus heliocentrism Anaximander cosmology Democritus atomism Hippocrates medicine Galen medicine Herophilus anatomy Ptolemy astronomy geography Phidias sculpture Praxiteles sculpture Polykleitos sculpture Ictinus architecture Callicrates architecture Mnesicles architecture Parthenon architecture Athenian democracy political theory Solon lawgiver Cleisthenes reforms Pericles statesmanship Alexander the Great empire‑building Hellenistic science Alexandria library Septuagint translation Byzantine theology Cappadocian Fathers Orthodox liturgy Hagia Sophia architecture Procopius history Anna Komnene history Photios scholarship Cyril and Methodius Slavic literacy Byzantine diplomacy Greek fire military technology Cretan Renaissance literature El Greco painting Rigas Feraios nationalism Adamantios Korais Enlightenment Greek War of Independence Philhellenism modern Greek state Venizelos diplomacy Cavafy poetry Seferis poetry Elytis poetry Kazantzakis literature Theodorakis music Hadjidakis music Papandreou political thought Onassis shipping Greek diaspora scholarship modern Greek cinema modern Greek science modern Greek shipping global Greek cuisine Mediterranean diet.

“Ah,” we countered, but they never invented cocktails!” But they did have-no, do have- some fine rosé wines. So to counter this obvious aching gap in Greek culture we sent those same researchers off to create a short but very handy guide to three Greek Rosés, priced to all pockets, which could make for some delicious refreshments if it gets as hot as we think it might get hot in this El Niño summer. (See LSS 5 6 26)

£8–£10 — Kourtaki Retsina Rosé (Attica)

Often found in larger Tesco or Sainsbury’s stores, depending on region. Dry, light, herbal, very Greek, very summery. (If your local doesn’t stock it, M&S sometimes carries a Greek rosé under its “Found” range.)

£12–£14 — Mylonas Rosé (Mandilaria/Agiorgitiko, Attica)

Available from The Wine Society, Waitrose Cellar, and several independents. A proper step up: strawberry, pomegranate, a little herb; beautifully balanced.

£18–£22 — Gaia 14–18h Rosé (Agiorgitiko, Nemea)

A cult bottle. Stocked by Berry Bros. & Rudd, The Wine Society, and good Greek specialists. Serious rosé: pale Provençal style but with Greek backbone and minerality.

Sorry if they forgot Demis Roussos

With thanks to Mrs MF of Bridport, Dorset

#wine #greece #hellenic #rosé #holiday #demis roussos

Thomas Piketty thinks he has a way out of the mess: but do we know enough to take it?

Given the simultaneous polycrises we’re now immersed in, it’s always poignant to come across a report that offers possible ways out. So when another such is unearthed, this time by Jonathan Watts of the Guardian, [1]we were particularly intrigued. Partly because it covers some the same tropes we have circled around here ( Justice; LSS 24 4 23 et seq : Inequality: LSS 16 9 25 and governance; LSS 16 1 25 et seq) And partly because one of the report’s moving spirits is the great Historian and economist Thomas Piketty, whose name has also graced these pages. [2]

Living standards can rise for all, the authors asseverate. The worst of climate change may be mitigated. Political and social tensions ameliorated. The key is to tax the small group of billionaires who control most of the world’s wealth and power. While at the same time redirecting investment away from carbon heavy industries such as construction, mining and manufacturing and towards education and healthcare. The new world they envisage would have a shorter working week, be more prosperous (the lowest universal income quartile would come in around $5000 per annum) and above all be ecologically stable. Hyper capitalist consumers and green neo-puritans come in for equal criticism. Both endless consumption and austerity hair shirts are unfeasible say Piketty and co. Sufficiency is their new lodestar for their intriguing (dare we think Whiggish?) Third way. [3][4][5]

And our thoughts? We think the report’s careful scholarship and refreshing new thoughts are clear already. Its recommendations are both sanguine and rational and would undoubtedly contribute to a more tolerable world. But: they run up against what in everyday language is called human nature and in Social Identity Theory comparative advantage. Most people would rather live in a world where they had £10 and their neighbour £5 rather than one in which they had £15 and that neighbour £13, as their relative social advantage is better in the first instance than the second. That, in a nutshell is the human weakness.[6] It suggests that groups enjoying relative social advantage will fight like tom cats to maintain it against inferior groups, rather than join with them to their common benefit. Particularly if they are well funded to do so by sympathetic billionaires who thereby ensure their own supreme advantage over all. This is human instinct. In theory we could overcome it. Have we the cognitive capacity to do so?

[1]‘An equal and habitable world is possible’: academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival | Environment | The Guardian

[2]Thomas Piketty – Wikipedia

[3]World Inequality Conference 2026 – World Inequality Lab

[4]World Inequality Report 2026

[5]Global Justice Project

[6] Ernst Fehr & Klaus M. Schmidt, “A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114(3), 1999, pp. 817–868.

#economics #climate change #inequalty #social justice #tax #education #decarbonisation

Roman Coin hoard has lessons for our times

Southern Britain 297 AD. A frightened Roman official, alone in the woods, is frantically digging a hole. It is unaccustomed work for a man of his rank, and he sweats, while nervously looking over his shoulder for soldiers, secret policemen, or even hungry peasants. Why is he here? Any number of reasons could have caused his fall: civil war, a coup, a sudden change of Emperor. Hole completed, he quickly throws in his entire wealth-a bag of gold coins, jewels and silver cups, and takes one last look at them before filling the earth on top. Carefully,he notes the position of larger trees and certain other markers. For one day he hopes to return, when Fortune has turned again. But he never will. He is the last person to see these things before they are unearthed, over seventeen hundred years later into a world of AI, Space technology and jet airliners. The darkness closes-and opens.

Such are always our thoughts when ever we stand in front of a hoard of Roman treasure in a museum. Who left these things there? Why? What was in their mind when they left them? And-why did they never return? When we read this story of the latest hoard to be unearthed [1] near Ilminster in Somerset , covered in this excellent Guardian piece by Steven Morris, these thoughts and many others came back. Hoards are invaluable to historians and archaeologists, because the coins allow solid dating estimates, which are worth far more than gold to serious scholars. Their occurrence rises in direct proportion to the frequency of political and economic troubles in the Empire. And nowhere was more troubled than the provinces of the Britannias in the period 286-296AD [2] when rebel rulers tried to set up a separatist regime against the central Empire. The likely date of the finds (297) offers haunting possibilities for speculation about their likely loser, and the subsequent events of his life.

But what fascinates most are the hoards themselves. Unlike amphitheatres, churches and other remains, which decay and otherwise change in tune with the society around them, hoards are frozen in time. The last time they were seen was in a declining empire, wracked by pandemics and climate change. A melancholy time of failing trade, broken roads-and an overwhelming mood of doubt and uncertainty. Where increasingly authoritarian governments tried to hold together the remains of a failing world with ever more repression and ever more dubious promises of a return to the long remembered Golden Age. Yet the Empire had endured for so long and was still so big that people who buried the coins could imaging no other possible form of political and social organisation. And were not able to break out of the cycle of decline until they could. Perhaps there is a lesson for our times in there too.

_{note – we worked really hard to get our Roman uniforms right. We hate those films and programmes where they dress fifth century Romans in the clothes and uniforms of about AD 14}

[1]Somerset detectorist strikes gold with ‘spectacular’ Roman ring find | Roman Britain | The Guardian

[2]Carausian revolt – Wikipedia

#archaeology #roman empire #coin hoards #history

Would you visit Sussex without a porpoise?

One of the many advantages of our mighty office block is its proximity East Croydon Station. A short saunter puts the tired Senior Executive ( junior staff have work to do) on a train which will, in only a few minutes, whisk him from all the towering skyscrapers, crowded tenements and tiresome colleagues, transporting him rapidly into the beautiful county of Sussex. With all its rolling hills, lively cities, quaint villages, castles and pleasant coastal towns. For example, the sea front at Worthing has been compared to that of Nice in France-although admittedly only by people who have never been to Nice.

But the best thing of all about Sussex is its thriving ecosystem of websites, newspapers and magazines at every level: village, neighbourhood, county -which not only cover all aspects of local life but acts as a thriving hub for the forces of economics and commerce. Among the best and brightest is Sussex Local, a widely distributed website and glossy colour magazine which covers both community events plus stories of wider national potential such as science or conservation. Riffling through its pages we came across this story (alright, we wrote it, but that’s beside the point) of a a brave and erudite scientist called Thea Taylor who has devoted her working life to the care and preservation of the large cetaceans which still inhabit the English Channel That’s right, porpoises, dolphins and sometimes even larger beasts are not just hanging on, they’re trying to come back into the waters of one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world(it’s still open, folks) Dodging super tankers, evading trawlers, and jumping to the delight of excursionists and more serious yachtspersons alike. They still represent a genuine large wild megafauna in easy access of great cities like Brighton and London. But to keep them that way, Thea needs your help. You could start by reading the scintillating article we have published. [1] Or could you find a way to help Thea and the Sussex Dolphin Project directly? If you save the creatures in Sussex, you’ll help to save them everywhere.

[1]https://sussexlocal.net/back-issues-categories/2026/

[2] Sussex Dolphin Project

#dolphin #english channel #porpoise #brighton #consevation #ecology #nature #oceans

Why Adam Smith thought immigration controls were Creeping Socialism

Many people who call themselves free‑marketeers begin from a sincere fear of “creeping socialism.” They see every new regulation, planning rule, workplace standard, environmental requirement and every tax as another brick in a wall that hems in enterprise and erodes liberty. They believe that once government starts managing economic life, it rarely stops. Which creates a contradiction at the heart of a lot of modern political rhetoric. Parties, especially of the Right, describe themselves as advocates of free‑market nations, committed to open trade, open capital, open competition, lower taxes — and then insist that immigration must be tightly controlled. It sounds like a reasonable compromise, a balancing act between global economics and local sentiment. But it’s also a rejection of the classical liberal tradition we claim to inherit. Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Bastiat — none of them imagined markets as a buffet where you could pick capital and goods but decline labour. For them, the free movement of labour was not an optional extra but a structural necessity. Capital moves to where it earns the highest return; goods move to where they are most valued; labour moves to where it is most productive. These are not moral preferences but mechanical facts. Remove one gear and the machine does not slow down politely; it compensates, strains, and distorts.

Yet modern politicians try to keep the first two gears spinning while jamming a stick into the third. Where capital must be free, goods must be free, but labour must be fenced, filtered, and rationed. The economic equivalent of declaring your devotion to physics while exempting yourself from gravity on weekends. Once you restrict labour mobility, you are no longer operating a free market. You are operating a managed economy with selective liberalisation. This may be politically popular. It may even be economically defensible in certain circumstances. But it is not classical liberalism.

And the distortions appear everywhere. If labour cannot move, something else must. Capital moves instead: offshoring, outsourcing, investing abroad. Goods move instead: imports rise to fill the gap. Wages diverge between protected insiders and excluded outsiders. Productivity stagnates as firms rely on scarcity rather than innovation. Regions hollow out as young workers leave and old workers remain. Demographics collapse as fertility falls and dependency ratios rise. Ironic, really: anti‑immigration sentiment produces the very globalisation its supporters resent. Block the worker, and the factory moves, the goods arrive instead, the demographic pyramid inverts. You can restrain labour, but you cannot restrain arithmetic.

Adam Smith warned that restrictions on labour mobility were a violation of natural liberty — an eighteenth‑century way of saying that such rules protect incumbents at the expense of everyone else. Immigration controls raise domestic wages artificially, raise prices for consumers, reduce competition, entrench inefficiency, and subsidise native labour at the expense of the global poor. This is protectionism by another name. And once you accept protectionism in labour, you have accepted the principle that economic policy must be directed by the Government for the public good. And that free markets do not deliver the optimum national outcomes. A country can choose many things — a managed economy, a protectionist economy, a high‑skill selective system, a low‑migration demographic strategy. All of these are legitimate political choices. But what a country cannot choose is to restrict labour while claiming to champion free markets. That is not a philosophy; it is a branding exercise.

Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 10

#Adam Smith #David Ricardo #free markets #liberty #economics #politics #capitalism

Beyond the Nation: we conclude

In March we opened a new series called Beyond the Nation(LSS 5 3 26), which suggested that there are a number of practical , and very pressing problems which could be more efficiently addressed if the response were global rather than by the current group of 193 or so mutually suspicious, jealously competing, nation states. In particular we looked at things like pollution, disaster relief, and the economic brakes imposed by creating national identities,

Thinking about it, that last is the very heart of what we’re on about, isn’t it? Because national identities are really, no viscerally, important to people. They have more power over our minds than any alternatives offered by religions, class, sports teams or profession. They not only define who we are: they define the behaviour others expect of us, and more importantly, the behaviour we expect of ourselves. And no one can deny the critical importance they have played at times when freedom was in critical jeopardy. Would Ukraine have sustained the fight against Russia for so long without a crucial sense of its own identity? Or for that matter would the USSR have sustained its own fight against the Nazis without incorporating a strong sense of Russian Nationalism? All this, and more can can be set in the balance for the Nation as the highest form of organising human societies, as we have argued elsewhere. (LSS passim: see our World Government series)

Yet nations are transient, fleeting things. Where are the Spartans or the Akkadians now? Men and women lived and died for their causes, and many like them, across thousands of years of history. Yet the real drivers of existence are huge impersonal things like climate, disease or massive technological leaps such as the Industrial Revolution. Britain spent immense quantities of treasure and lives trying to defend a position it had established in the Age of Sail, only to discover that the Age of Steam made all its efforts irrelevant[1] And so the question becomes “If your identity is so important, what price are you prepared to pay to maintain it?” Because if technologies can change, so can societies, and the identities which they generate.

We shall close the series with a personal anecdote, a thing we rarely do, Many many years ago still trapped in Undergraduate adolescence we were debating the question of Britain’s membership of what was then called the European Community with a fellow inmate, albeit far more intelligent than ourselves Being good Young Socialists we then followed the Orthodox Labour Party Line: that the UK should leave forthwith. Being entirely of independent mind (and far less neurotic) our interlocutor laughed and observed “You would have been against joining up Wessex with Mercia, wouldn’t you?” A quiet wisdom which time has made more memorable than almost any other things we have ever heard or read.

[1]Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988. ISBN: 0394546741 (US hardback); 0049230737 (UK hardback). see especially chapter 3

#nation state #society #politics #history #russia #ukraine #USSR #Britain #economics