"The Trap"... falling into itself?

This is becoming a bit like a TV criticism blog... I'll have to post on something else soon. I was tempted to ask Hal to do a post on Steve MacLaren, but as usual when attempting to write about football from the sports desk, he will merely deliver an incoherent melange of the last 7 days' tabloid headlines. So we'll leave it at the obvious conclusion that McLaren is crap, and move to the business of the day.

Or at least 2 days ago, which was the final episode of The Trap... which was pretty good, but, I feel, offered significantly less coherence than the first two instalments. In attempting to formulate a Grand Theory of The Course of Global Politics Since the 1950s (my words, not his), Adam Curtis overextended himself, which is hardly surprising; I don't think any social theorist has ever managed not to when the subject area gets that large, even the real greats (Marx etc.) The episode started promisingly with a very clear statement of Isiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" Thesis (about negative freedon - the libertarian concept of freedom as the absence of constraints on behaviour, and positive freedom - the concept of 'freedom TO do something', which Berlin argued collapses into totalitarianism as the state increasingly prescribes people's behaviour to conform to the leadership's idea of how free citizens should behave).

But then the programme got a bit bogged down in the idea that the pursuit of negative freedom by ideologues in the West, the developing world (via the neoliberal Washington Consensus policies of the IMF and World Bank) and then, after 1990, in the post-Communist transition countries, actually mutated into positive freedom (trying to force the populations of these countries into behaving like textbook rational agents and utility maximisers even if they couldn't, or didn't want to. This, in turn, Curtis argues, precipitated a revival of ideologies directly opposed to negative freedom (e.g. fundamentalist Islam.) The latest attempt to impose fundamentalist neo-liberal capitalist rules in the development of an economy (the post-war reconstruction of Iraq) merely resulted in a huge transfer of natural resource wealth and infrastructure into the hands of US and multinational corporations and the impoverishment of the Iraqi people.

My run-through of the argument here barely does justice to it, and I may need to set up a more traditional website to write some longer pieces of critical commentary on programmes such as this, as a blog entry hardly seems adequate. But anyway, I think Adam Curtis tried to pack too much in to this last part of his story. His wider critique of 'the trap' into which we've all been led over the last 30 years - the extinction of any wider meaning to our lives, resulting from the imposition of a world view in which we have been reduced to nothing more than selfish, calculating machines, told how to think, act and feel 'good' by an alliance of governments, academic experts and the corporate sector - only really came into focus in the last 5 minutes of the programme. (Sounds very Pink Floydesque put like that... 'Welcome to the Machine' etc. Maybe Roger Waters was there first.) And only in the last 30 seconds did he provide any critique of Berlin's original idea - that negative liberty was the only worthwhile concept of liberty. I think he should have spun this critique out into another episode - he could have made it much, much clearer just what the problem with 'The Trap' was, and more importantly, how on earth we escape from it. Offering hope for the future is important. Many viewers will have watched the end of The Trap with a profound sense of depression, not hope. But maybe the restoration of hope is Curtis's next project. Anyway, despite my misgivings about the final episode, a fine series.