Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary will celebrate a show with a simple concept and an idealistic message

Doctor Who, ostensibly a show about travellers running away from rubber monsters, down corridors and around Welsh quarries, has reached its 50th anniversary. While the basic concept of the show itself is fun enough, to have run for 50 years takes something more. And it takes something special to be, as Craig Ferguson put it:

'...beloved by geeks and nerds. It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance, over brute force and cynicism'.

At least part of what sets Doctor Who aside is that it possesses an idealistic streak. The half-century of stories about the renegade Time Lord, known as the Doctor, are about idealistic people from idealistic worlds. Explorers who seek out wonder, beauty and adventure. And in those adventures, violence is never shown be particularly ideal. So much more than many shows, particularly within the sci-fi and fantasy genres, violence is most often shown to be the particular tool that defines individuals as villains.

There are numerous examples in the rebooted series. In the two-parter, The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, the Doctor celebrates when 'everybody lives', including those who had been his enemies. In the series two episode New Earth and in the series three finale Last of the Time Lords, the Doctor does not seek vengeance against villains but rather justice, and retains hope for their reform.

In the series six episode A Good Man Goes to War, there is a particularly telling moment. The Doctor raises an army to free and protect his friends in a strategy that ultimately proves futile. As the dust settles the Doctor is confronted by his friend and ally River Song who challenges his pursuit of these war-like policies and his intervention against dangerous villains. River warns the Doctor about the affects that inspiring fear in others may have on him and his enemies.

That point in reinforced when the Doctor first meets his current companion, Clara, in the series 7 episode Asylum of the Daleks. The Doctor admits that he has been trying to stop fighting the Daleks fire with his own, when a Dalek-converted Clara points out that fear of the Doctor has only made the Daleks stronger.

Doctor Who does something incredibly important. The show offers us heroes whose heroism is usually in the face of violence rather than wielding it. Violence is rarely glorified, and where matters come to violence there are usually negative impacts that go beyond the immediate - for those who wield it as well as those who suffer at its hands. Furthermore, it often finds a way to create drama and find resolution without resorting to violence.

Doctor Who presents us with diplomatic and intelligent heroes, who seek to find diplomatic and intelligent solutions to the problems they encounter. Those are the kind of examples the world sorely needs.

Welfare Reductions and False Recoveries: Why Natural Liberty Isn't Enough

There is a line in the United States Declaration of Independence that runs:

'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' [ed - emphasis mine]

During the Age of Enlightenment, the idea that human beings had a fundamental right to certain unalienable freedoms served as a powerful force in combating the established power and rights of monarchs. However, the idea of 'natural' liberty also bred a problematic distrust for organisations, particularly government.

'Natural' liberty only allows for the removal of restrictions, leaving people to the struggle that lies beyond. In that struggle people are vulnerable to the inequality and unfairness of a way of life without safety nets, and where people are only restrained by the limits of their own power.

These concerns are as vital as ever as we see the ideology of natural liberty being brought to bear in government policy. The government's welfare reforms, criticised as 'overambitious and poor value for money', and involving deep cutbacks, have finally started to roll out in earnest (Sergeant, 2013). The reduction of safeguards would be bad enough at any time. However, when there is a weak - what some have even denounced as false - economic recovery under way, individuals and communities are placed in great danger as the weakening of safeguards threatens to send them back into trouble (Elliott, 2013).

Enlightenment writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau were amongst those who argued that there were limits to the freedoms that natural liberty could offer to individuals. They argued that what was needed instead was a social contract - an agreed set of laws that could govern a state by protecting the ability of individuals to exercise their rights without infringing upon those of others.

John Stuart Mill called this the harm principle. Mill set out that this limitation of the absolute freedom of people was of great importance. That, without checks, the exercise of unrestrained action on the part of one could override the ability of another to exercise their rights.

In On Liberty, Mill laid out why ensuring the liberty of all individuals is essential:

'The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.'

The essence of negative liberty, freedom from restrictions, is not enough. People must be free to choose, and to think for themselves, because in that freedom, in those choices, is the path along which people develop into rational and critical thinking individuals. And those skills are essential for innovation, for remaking the world in better forms.

To find that path, a more positive liberty is needed - one where people are enabled. A social contract, with the harm principle built in, that seeks to construct the right surroundings for humans to find and develop the absolute best of themselves. Enlightenment thinking, inherited by the ideology of liberalism developed in the 19th century, described those free institutions as those that left people free to make their own choices and protected them against those things that might prevent them from doing so (Collins, 1971). At times those impediments might even be the structure of the system itself. As Thomas Paine described:

'Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.'

We need to foster the development of systems of government that address the domination of individuals and subversion of their freedom. This means restraining the ability of the strength of one, some, or many, to overmaster the essential right of an individual to decide for themselves, about their own lives. But in doing so we must not forget the weakness of natural liberty and of focussing only on removing restrictions: the suffering, poverty, and exploitation imposed by competition. We must not forget those who need enabling action on the part of others to exercise those same essential rights.

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References:
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+ Mike Sergeant's 'Universal Credit scheme rolls out'; on the BBC; 28 October 2013.

+ Larry Elliott's 'UK economic recovery built on shaky foundations - again'; in The Guardian; 27 October 2013.

+ Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'The Social Contract'; 1762.

+ John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'; 1859.

+ Thomas Paine's 'Agrarian Justice'; 1795.

+ Irene Collins' 'Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe'; The Historical Association; 1971.

Letta's success in surviving Berlusconi is not conclusive, it is only the beginning of a better path.

The survival of Prime Minister Enrico Letta's Italian Government, in the face of the political controversies surrounding Senator Silvio Berlusconi, is an important moment for European politics. But that success is not conclusive, and is only the beginning of a better path.

Letta, leader of the Partito Democratico (PD) and head of the left-wing bloc of parties, was forced by the 2013 Italian elections to form a coalition with Berlusconi's Il Popolo della Liberta (PdL), which headed the right-wing bloc of parties. The controversial PdL Senator, Berlusconi, had sought to wield his supporters against the government over their fiscal policy, in order to redress the balance of the coalition in his own favour (Davies, 2013).

However, support for his threat - resignations should his demands not be met - dwindled in the face of the potential instability that the fall of the government might bring, and Berlusconi was forced to back down and support the government's position (Davies, 2013). But those in favour of a sensible and moderate resolution to Italy's problems, without this kind of 'brinkmanship', should be wary of heralding such a moment as a victory. Such a statement would be entirely premature.

Facing down personal interests in favour of greater goals can be a brave move in politics. And this time it has bought a government time to get its house in order. But the continued presence of the Movimento 5 Stelle, Italy's continuing financial difficulties, the continuing indecisive division of Italian politics between two large left and right blocs, and above all the continuing need to find a cure for political disaffection, means that there is still a lot of work to be done (Toscano, 2013; The Guardian, 2013).

Ultimately, then, these moments - as with this one for the Italian Premier Letta -  are only beginnings. That is important to remember. And remember it we must if we are not to delude ourselves into complacency by putting too much faith in particular symbolic events, or symbolic victories, as heralding some sort of magical transformation.

Psychiatrist Carl Jung described these kinds of construction as 'archetypes'. These archetypes, based on existing objects and roles, and then shaped by culture and history, in turn shape our reactions to the things we encounter. They serve to simplify our navigation through the world. However, strictly adhering to these 'instinctual' relations to objects, persons or events - particularly when success or victory are involved - limits us. Buying into these archetypes - stereotypes or cultural constructions - only encourages an unhealthy lack of scepticism towards our own reactions to the world and far too great an amount of certainty.

A much healthier alternative is to find hope in moments such as Senator Berlusconi's climbdown, not as a conclusive transformative event, but to find hope in it as a beginning. Taking hope in beginnings means still cherishing successes, but without relying on it to magically transform us. It instead encourages us to see success as work done, in our ongoing efforts to transform ourselves.

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References:
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+ Lizzy Davies' 'Silvio Berlusconi makes humiliating climbdown in Italian parliament'; in The Guardian; 2 October 2013.

+ Lizzy Davies' 'Silvio Berlusconi U-turn keeps Italy's grand coalition afloat'; in The Guardian; 2 October 2013.

+ Alberto Toscano's 'Italy's latest coalition crisis is a morbid symptom of deeper political malaise'; in The Guardian; 1 October 2013.

+ The Guardian's 'Italy: Red Letta Day'; 2 October 2013.