William Godwin: can we be held accountable for the future consequences of our actions?

RLF: Have you not asked the question, ‘How may the peculiar and independent operation of each individual in the social state most effectually be preserved?’

WG: I have, since the answer to that question is at the heart of the thorny problem of how we should best be governed so as to ensure that independent operation, of which I speak.

RLF: But the individual exists in a world full of individuals, does he not?

WG: He most certainly does.

RLF: So one individual action should not merely be judged and then protected purely on its own merit, but rather that it should be judged according to whether it acts to encroach or affect in any adverse way another such individual.

WG: I did also say that ‘Voluntary action is occasioned by the idea of consequences to result.’ That either hope or fear are its motives. If a person hopes that his actions will be beneficial, then he is motivated to act, is he not?

RLF: But beneficial to whom?

WG: To himself, of course, who else would he consider?

RLF: That is precisely my point – that in imagining the consequences of his action, he looks to those benefits that accrue to himself first, before he considers the benefits to others – rational economic theory supports him in this, makes him think that by acting out of a rationality that puts his own interests first, he is choosing the best possible action, whereas that may not be the case.

WG: You have something there – that his foresight must be as complete as it may be before he is moved to act, but I think that even then he may almost consciously ignore factors that inhibit his own preferences – like the man who tosses a coin to decide which course to take, and tosses that coin until he gets the right result.

RLF: Quite so. Everyone is inclined to think of himself first – himself and his own nearest and dearest first, if you prefer. Rationality is rarely so comprehensively considered that all adverse possibilities are taken into account. There is that element of risk involved in even the smallest, seemingly most inconsequential of decisions.

WG: If any risk is considered, it is the risk to the decision maker, is it not?

RLF: It is, and so what we should be examining is the time frame of consequences of an action: a short term or a long term consequence.

WG: That is fraught with problems though. Do not economists draw the line at taking long term factors into account when deciding to act, arguing that in the long term we are all dead.

RLF: That is a fallacy that is perpetuated by all who mistakenly utter it, for in the long term, we are not all dead, just those of us who happen to be alive at the moment of speaking. As a race – the human race, let us hope that our present actions do not impinge upon the lives of those who live afterwards.

WG: That is a noble sentiment, but alas one that is unreal or at least not in accord with the reality of how and why men do the things they do. Knowing that our sons and daughters and their children will regret decisions and actions made today is not and will never be any kind of watchword to those taking actions of whatever kind.

RLF: We are in agreement there. Were it otherwise, we would not have inherited a world so tainted by the foolishness of our yesterdays.

WG: History shows us naught else; it shows us that man rarely learns anything.

RLF: I think it shows us that the actions of men are motivated by neither hope nor fear of certain events; on the contrary, it almost seems as if such consequences were merely hoped for if deemed positive, and ignored outright if deemed to be negative.

WG: We may be doing ourselves and our forebears a disservice here. Situations and conditions limit our vision and constrain our decisions, so that what appeared at first to be beneficial to the many happened to have no such benefits in the fullness of time.

RLF: We must be careful not to be willing accomplices here; ignoring wrong merely because men did not think far enough ahead.

WG: What is past is past, as they say. All we can really do is to act from now on in ways that will not have negative impacts upon future generations.

RLF: And I will add that if we do look to the past, it is in order that we do not repeat the mistakes we made then.

WG: That is easier said than done, though, for those who have vested interests now are akin to those who had such interests in the past – the decision makers of today are invariably the apologists for those of yesterday. A politician is thus defined for me as a decision maker who has an interest in being thought a rational man when in actual fact he conceals his true motives from those who he would have believe in him and re-elect him when his time is up, so to speak.

RLF: I will go on to say that a politician is one who knowingly dresses up decisions to appear worthy of him, whilst actually knowing that any adverse effect will hopefully occur once he is out of office and cannot be harmed – is not seeking re-election.

WG: I would further state that he acts in ways in which any blame will fall on later officers, rather than on himself. Since self-preservation is the politician’s most fully developed sense, it falls upon all of us to place checks and balances on any wielding of power, political, economic or otherwise, lest we fall foul of actions that were based, not upon a full consideration of future consequences, but rather were only partly considered as to time and partiality.

RLF: Unfortunately, I fear that will never be; man is inherently selfish and must be governed with this in mind, which brings us back to our initial position and our first question: How may the individuals of the human species be made to contribute most substantially to the general improvement and happiness?

WG: That was not our first question – it was, How may the peculiar and independent operation of each individual in the social state most effectually be preserved?’ was it not?

RLF: It was, but to answer that question and protect ourselves, we must also include the one just stated. So that it should all read; how may the peculiar and independent operation of each individual in the social state most effectually be preserved and yet each individual be made to contribute most substantially to the general improvement and happiness?

WG: That is an excellent question. I should add that it should read’ ‘the general improvement and happiness of all people, both now and in the future.’

RLF: That would then take into account all short term plans, causing them to be reconsidered in the light of their long term implications.
Robert L. Fielding

Glasgow and Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of St. John of the Cross'

In 1951, Dr. Tom Honeyman, the Director of Glasgow Museums, purchased Dali’s famous painting for the city. That painting and that purchase have been the subject of controversy ever since.

A citizen of Glasgow talks about the painting hanging in the city’s Kelvingrove Museum and what it means to the people of the city.

RLF: Do you think the people of Glasgow like the painting?

C: We do now, yes, but at first we were skeptical – Honeyman paid something like 8,000 pounds for it and that at a time when Glasgow could have used the money.

RLF: That was in 1951, wasn’t it?

C: That’s right, 1951, just after the war. Glasgow toiled night and day to arm our lads fighting everywhere- we built ships that won the war. Then, once it was over, shipbuilding in Glasgow started to go into a swift decline. Times were hard here, as they were in the rest of the country, but particularly here in Glasgow, so we resented Honeyman paying all that for a painting. We thought it could have been better spent.

RLF: Do you think people still feel that way?

C: Well, most of the people around our way – around the East end of the city thought they should’ve spent the brass on swimming pools or play grounds – something for the wee’uns.

RLF: And do you still feel that way? Do the people of Dennistoun still feel that way, do you think?

C: Some still do, I think, yes. You see, everybody can’t appreciate art the way some folks do. I was more interested in earning a living that thinking about art. I think that for art to be appreciated, people have to have a certain part of themselves freed. I’m not saying we can’t, it’s just that either we haven’t the time, or there is something in us that doesn’t want to.

To most folk around here, getting up early and walking down to the river to do their work, all they are worried about is whether the job will spin out until Christmas, say, or where their next drink’s coming from. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with taking a drink, but if you’re no careful, it takes over your life and before you know it, you’re blaspheming and all that with the rest of them.

We couldn’t really appreciate the Dali thing – because – well, for a start, we didn’t go to Saint Mungo’s place by the cathedral, except for yon folk as lived up by Alexander Parade who wanted to get down to their work – they walked past it every day of their lives without giving it a second look, if you understand what I’m saying.

Some people think art isn’t for them. It’s not their fault – well not always, it’s just that we were never taught anything much about it at school, so it became something for others to enjoy but not for us. I didn’t know if it was done on purpose like, but the fact of the matter is that we never took hold of art except if the odd one of us could paint or something. Then our masters would encourage any wee’un who could put a bit of paint on a canvas or draw a wee bit, but the rest of us got no encouragement at all.

RLF: I suppose it’s no wonder then that most working people in Glasgow didn’t like the painting at first.

C: It wasn’t that they didn’t like it. They just never gave it much thought. The Museum Director bought it and that was that.

RLF: So what was it that changed people’s minds?

C: I suppose as people’s work life changed, they went out more, read more, and little by little our museums and art galleries and the like got more visitors through their doors, and then the pendulum swung – people started to talk about the wonderful things standing in yon Burrell Collection, things from all over the world, from different times in history and such and it sort of just took off. People started to realize what Glasgow could become – what it has become – a city of culture as it was named a few years ago.

Somebody, I forget who it was, said that art is the signature of civilizations, and that’s probably how Glasgow people have come to view the art in our city.

RLF: Getting back to the Dali painting that is now hanging in Kelvingrove Museum, is there anything you would like to say about it?

C: Aye, there is that. It’s canny and no mistake. Here’s that strange wee Spanish lad with the pointy moustache and his wee eyes always looking this way and that, and him being world famous, and his painting one of his biggest and best, hanging on a wall in the West end of Glasgow.

The world of reality has its limits, it’s said, but the world of the imagination is boundless.

RLF: It was Jean-Jaques Rousseau who said that.

C: Is that so, well, it seems to sum up what the painting says to us, from whichever the religious divide you happen to come from in Glasgow, and there’s more than one these days, let me tell you.

But it was when the tourists started to flood in to Glasgow to take a look at it that we realized we had something special. The visitors spent their hard-earned money in our city, and they liked what they saw, and they liked Glaswegians. I mean to say, what is there not to like about us. We’re ordinary folk, hard working and hard playing, straight people, so we are.

You go down to Barrowlands on a Saturday and talk to the folks selling their wares and see what it is I’m telling you – Glaswegians are the salt of the Earth, and now we’ve got something to show off, we’re going to do it too, without being braggarts, you understand. Nothing much changes a lad or a lass from the Clyde, not a braw painting no nor any fine building to house all the young folk that work in offices at the end of Sauchiehall Street or from our two or three universities that bring youngsters in every September. But that just goes to show what that painting means to us now – art is free – there is no ‘must’ in art, and we feel freed by that great painting. The dust of life in a city is washed off by art – all the art in the galleries and museums in the city of Glasgow, and that’s some collection, let me tell you.

RLF: Do you think anything in the painting connects with Glasgow?

C: I do, yes. Salvador’s view of Christ on the cross is not one anybody’s ever really considered, is it? It’s as though we are looking down upon Our Saviour, I don’t mean that in no detrimental, disrespectful way, you know, just that the aspect of the painting makes you feel you are standing up there with the Lord, our God, seeing what God saw.

RLF: And how does that connect with how you see Glasgow?

C: Have you been to our Necropolis near the cathedral?

RLF: No, I don’t believe I have. Why?

C: Because if you did, you’d see a view of Glasgow that is a rare one. You can take a look across to the East end and see the lines of streets and drives that were named after the lads of the family that built that part of the city – Finlay and Ingleby and all them. You can turn your head and look across the Clyde, right away south over the hills towards Houston and the hills going away to the Firth of Clyde and Arran, and you can turn back and see yon new buildings springing up everywhere. You can look down on our city, not to be disrespectful, you understand, but just to encompass all around you. Things are beautiful if you love them, you know, and no city in the world is loved as much as Glaswegians love Glasgow.

That’s what it signifies to me, and that’s enough. Glasgow has changed in the years since the end of the war. Most of the changes have been for the better, though some things have changed for the worse, but that’s no Glasgow’s fault.

If Dali’s painting has done anything for this city, it’s taught us that people can and should be better than they need to be. I think that’s the main message for me and a lot more people in this city. Glasgow’s a braw city, a fine city, with braw, fine people in its squares and its taverns. Just you look along our river and notice the skyline – this is no city famous for its run down tenements any more. Glasgow’s a city that’s got a future, and it’s that big painting up yonder that has helped to put us on the map again. I’m that proud of it, I can tell you.

I don’t know if anybody’s envious of our great art collections – in the Burrell collection, in the Hunterian Gallery or in Kelvingrove now it’s been renovated and cleaned up, three years in the cleaning, I might tell you, but as the lad himself said, ‘the thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.’

RLF: Cecil Beaton urged artists to be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary, and Salvador Dali seems, in this great painting, to have done just that, doesn’t he?

C: He certainly does. It’s difficult for ordinary people to express themselves in those ways, particularly about something like art appreciation; articulate what art does – how it makes them feel, or what it signifies to them, but I think Beaton’s words sum up what most Glasgow folk think about that painting of his that’s hanging up there in Kelvingrove.

Glasgow is no ordinary city; its people are no ordinary, and if you look around these days, like I said before, you can see it’s no an ordinary place. That is what Dali’s painting has done for this city – it’s made folk see what sort of city Glasgow is. We didn’t probably have the vision Tom Honeyman had back in the 50s, but I think it’s fair to say that we have managed to change something in our identity while at the same time retaining something that cannot be changed; the spirit of the city and its people.
Robert L. Fielding

Dwight D. Eisenhower - The world would turn in only one particular direction, were we to abandon our responsibilities to our children.

At a time when America embroils itself in a war for which no mandate from its population has actively been sought, it is instructive to imagine what a former US. President, Dwight D. Eisenhower would say about it. In 1961, he gave what was arguably his greatest and most influential speech – now referred to as ‘The Military-Industrial Complex Speech’. The conversation below never took place, but it provides us with food for thought, and would do the same for the present incumbent, were he to read it.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower: My final thoughts

RLF: Just before you vacated the office of President, Sir, you made what many have since referred to as your finest and most telling speech; known now as the ‘Military-Industrial complex speech’.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: That is true, it was just before my final days in the oval office. I remember it well.

RLF: What prompted you to make such a speech, when after all, you had been at the pinnacle of two of those pyramidal elites, first as a General and then afterwards as President of the United States of America?

DDI: First, you must realise that the memory of the Second World War was fresh in my mind. We had defeated Hitler in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific, but at what cost. My predecessor, Harry S. Truman, had dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had liberated those victims of the Holocaust, those that had survived those horrors, and we had lost some of our youngest and best people.

I may ask what was it all for?

RLF: Presumably so that we would be free from oppression and better able to construct societies in which individuals could attain their highest potential without let or hindrance from overbearing government.

DDI: Precisely. So, do you think that I as a person who fought in that last great conflict could so easily rest on my laurels, so to speak, once peace was declared?

RLF: But the year you made your speech was some fifteen years after the end of that war. Why did you wait so long to express your thoughts?

DDI: Until the last of those conflicts, the USA had no armaments industry to speak of. As I said that day, makers of ploughshares can, given sufficient time, manufacture swords as well as farm implements, but since those desperate times, when our future lay in the balance because of our unpreparedness for war, we have come to feel that we can no longer trust to emergency improvisation to pull us through – we have to prepare ourselves against the might of other nation states that might wish to threaten us.

In effect, we have been forced to arm ourselves in case of national emergencies of the most grievous kind: threats to our national security and our statehood.

RLF: You also stated, did you not, Sir, that we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or otherwise by the military industrial complex?

To ensure that, ‘societal power is decentralized, widely shared, diffuse and fragmented, deriving from many sources’, according to commentators such as Talcott Parsons and others.

DDI: The military-industrial complex I spoke of refers to a close and symbiotic relationship among a nation's armed forces, its private industry, and associated political and commercial interests. It is that closeness with which I took issue.

For if decisions are made by heads of elites that circumvent proper and necessary constitutional discussion then what is democracy worth, or more properly are not the democratic principles laid down by our Founding Fathers being flouted. Should decisions to go to war be left in the hands of those people who stand to gain everything and lose nothing by the act of going to war, or should such momentous steps be discussed by elected officials acting on behalf of the people who elected them, and who, incidentally, stand to lose their lives in such wars?

RLF: Surely the latter, Sir.

DDI: Quite so. We did not fight the oppression of tyrannical regimes merely to have them come in through open doors once war ceased, now did we?

RLF: Of course not.

DDI: I said that the potential for the rise, the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist, if it is not held in check by democratic and constitutional means. I advocated those checks in 1961, and see that they are much needed forty odd years later – when wars are perpetrated and continue to be fought with little if any recourse to the voice of the people or their assent.

The ceremony to consecrate the cemetery at Gettysburg was Lincoln’s opportunity to state that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth". Then, almost a century later, did it not behove me, as President, and even as my swan-song, to ensure that Lincoln’s historic address was driven home to ensure the liberty of the people that elected me, as well as those that did not, for I was all America’s President, and did not just represent those that voted for me, or those that sought favour from me merely by virtue of their being rich and powerful.

Disarmament, with mutual honour and confidence, I said that day, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.
Robert L. Fielding