The Republic of Dissent

Faith and viruses

Is it rational to compare Faith or rather its persistent presence and spreading in Human societies to a virus? I'm not sure. However, Dawkins is entertaining in this video even though not always convincing. I was left to wonder whether Faith is only unacceptable because it appeals to the worst of humanity by making it believe in mirages and therefore devaluing the reel and whether religion is something that can be fixed by disinfecting Faith.

Carrie Bradshaw vs. Hillary Clinton

“In the female world I observe more Carrie/"Sex and the City"-copycats than…hmmm… Hillary Clintons. Both personalities are successful, beautiful, desirable, dynamic, self-reliant, troubled in the sector of relationships, with a difference to distinguish them: one is fictional, the latter’s real. And I ask myself, “Why’s there a quantitative difference?” You will answer me reasonably, “Because the New Yorker, emancipated, fashionable writer, is a more charming and interesting personality.” Well no… I disagree, this can’t be the difference. I mean Hillary is an aspiring first female planet leader, how cool is that? Cooler than any Samantha's orgasm!
My view? The difference lays in the difference: Fiction-Reality!
Television cultivates personas-caricatures, this is its nature - it would be impossible for it to attribute the totality of life. So it is sex, it is shoes, it is talking about sex and shoes, (simple and countable things, hmm?). The persons I picked for the comparison are symbolic to the syllogism, symbolic for fiction & reality. I don’t want to stick to the characters as much as to analyze the symbolism I use to give you an idea about what I roughly have in my head. Television brings to our attention fake personas daily. Female viewers are deceived that they’ll gain several assets by copying these TV pictures.” Jane Eagle, “Keep It Fake.”

Marriage, education, and fuzzy correlations

“There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%. ” The Economist,“The Frayed Knot.”

Unveiling Hitch

The Times of London has a portrait of Christopher Hitchens, which shows how intriguing and eccentric a character Hitchens is. It discuses of course Hitchens’ latest book God is Not Great and his career as a polemicist. Sugary excerpt:

While Hitchens’s opponents contend that he has veered right in his defence of Iraq, he maintains that he has simply stayed true to his primary cause: defending secularism and reason latterly against its new, fiercest adversaries, “Islamo-fascists”. He prefers to be known as a Blairite, not a Bushite, he says: “Not to duck the issue. We were right to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo, and we should have done in Rwanda. I would have supported any president who got rid of Saddam.”

Hitchens has decided that 9/11 is the defining moment – just as the Second World War was to his naval officer father – and fundamentalist Islam is his glittering nemesis. “It is a war to the uttermost with the original form of totalitarianism, which is theocracy. I’ve made a very good living out of freedom of expression and I haven’t had to sacrifice for it yet. And I think it is payback time. And it should come to everyone once or twice in their life. The hour has struck. I regard these people as deadly enemies and I want them to know that I hate them much more than they hate me.”

Would he die for secularism? He has only, as yet, received the odd sinister phonecall. “I’m not going to say that. It’s bravado. But I think it might come to be the case that anyone who believes in unfettered science, sexual emancipation, open society, would have to say they were ready to risk their lives.”

Europe, the Holocaust, and free speech

George A. Pieler and Jens F. Laurson have an article in Reason Magazine against Europe’s attempt to make Holocaust denial a crime. They argue that making Holocaust denial a crime is a form of censorship, which is unnecessary because the Holocaust doesn’t need to be protected by restricting free speech. Sugary excerpt:

Cynical Realpolitik also betrays racist aspects of this legislation: Western Europe, where Holocaust Denial already is stigmatized or outlawed, wants to ensure its new and "less-enlightened" Eastern cousins, not always in conformity with Western sensibilities and political correctness, won't embarrass the EU. The Holocaust as such may not be an issue, given its sweeping historical weight across Europe, but the law's implications go far beyond that. What Western experience, education, and gained knowledge have made unacceptable is being legislatively-prescribed to other peoples, rather than letting knowledge, discussion (yes: demagoguery, but also common sense and fact) settle through the marketplace of ideas what should be a non-issue to begin with.
The danger is that fringe radicals will style themselves "martyrs of freedom" claiming—not without success—that what they have to say is so 'dangerous' (i.e. true—what state has to outlaw a lie?) that it needed to be banned. Trivializing or denying the Holocaust is so pernicious, it does not deserve the honor of being outlawed. That will not serve the memory of its victims, living or dead.

I agree with Pieler and Laurson for two reasons. The first reason is that such laws ineffective in the sense that they don’t stop Holocaust denial, but simply give Holocaust deniers more attention and attention in this case means more money and more followers. The second reason is that it takes Holocaust denial into spheres such as the internet where it is practically impossible to disprove by countering it with facts. Free and democratic societies have nothing to fear from Holocaust denial because they have the facts on their side. Banning Holocaust denial is a form of surrender because it says in a way that society has no other means than the law to protect its history when it has something more powerful than the law, the truth.

Oxford and Fanaticism

Giles Fraser argues in the Guardian that Oxford is becoming like Bob Jones University, that is a place where religious fanatics are able to spread their venom.

Arts and Inheritance

The New York Times has a good article, which illustrates the problem that heirs of a work of art can create when it comes to the use or interpretation. The article is about specifically the controversy created by the interdiction by François Koltès, the heir of Bernard-Marie Koltès to the Comédie Française to play Le Retour au Désert, one of his brother’s plays because the Algerian character wasn’t played by an Algerian actor. The Comédie Française has sued and I think that it will win this case because clearly the heir in this case went beyond the rights given to him by the laws. Sugary excerpt:

More recently the question of ownership of an image has been taken up by some architects, who have claimed copyright over published photographs of buildings they have designed. If recognized, this right will also benefit their heirs.

On the other hand, in the performing arts, the creator’s intention is more relevant. In dance, choreographers or their trusted assistants usually oversee interpretation of their work. Yet, after their deaths, even when some estates, like the George Balanchine Foundation, insist on approving new productions, original visions are inevitably blurred by individual dancers.

But it is in the literary world where some of the most serious rights battles have erupted. Stephen James Joyce, who controls the moral rights to the works of James Joyce, his grandfather, has become famous for blocking the use of Joyce’s words in publications and even at public readings. (That power will end in 2011, 70 years after Joyce’s death.)

Similarly, in theater, the Koltès case is not unique. With Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, who both wrote stage directions for their plays, new productions must be approved by their estates. And not infrequently, when the interpretation or casting is considered inappropriate, changes are demanded or permission is refused.

But is it proper for the creative freedom of stage directors to be restricted by heirs or estates?

The answer to that question is no in most cases especially as long as the creative freedom doesn’t scar the work or change its meaning. Whether an Algerian actor plays a character has nothing to do with the meaning of the play, but more to do with stage directing.

God and relativism

“Less often discussed is the problem that, actually, all the evidence points to the fact that God, if he exists, is the greatest relativist of them all.
Let’s say, for example, that you are a Christian. In the Book of Leviticus, there are all sorts of bizarre sounding rules, laid down by God, which Christians no longer feel themselves obliged to follow. These include the death penalty for homosexuals and children who do not respect their parents, bans on eating hares and calamari, prohibitions on men trimming their beards and approval for slavery. Most Christians believe, however, that the New Testament supersedes the old and that these rules no longer apply. What this adds up to is the belief that what was wrong for the ancient Israelites is not wrong for modern Christians, on God’s command. That seems to me like a clear combination of relativism and the belief that God’s will underpins ethics.
In many ways this should not be surprising, since many have argued that the trouble with divine command theory – the idea that what is right or wrong is what God commands – is that it leaves open the possibility that God could command what is currently wrong to be right and vice-versa. Christian texts seem to provide evidence that this is precisely what Christians should believe.” Julian Baggini, “Is God a relativist?”

Chastising American justice

“Americans are well aware of the horrid faults of their legal system, but they still like to think that it is the best in the world. Its abuses include plea bargaining, class actions, Hollywood actions, Guantanamo Bay, racism, elected district attorneys looking for votes, hick justice in states such as Arkansas, federal patronage of prosecutors and judges, the politicisation of the Supreme Court, the squalor and brutality of big federal and state prisons and the aggressive ruthlessness of tax and regulatory authorities. In the United States, you can be ruined by the cost of doctors if you get sick and by the cost of lawyers if you get into court.

There are, of course, honourable lawyers and distinguished judges, some of whom are among the best in the world. It is the downside of US law that terrifies Americans and should terrify foreign businessmen.” Williams Rees-Mogg, “American justice? Isn’ t that a contradiction? ”

Truth and the last believer

Gwyn Tophan has a great article on David Pryce Jones who wrote what I believe to be the most fanatical anti-French book of the last few years, Betrayal: France, the Arabs and the Jews. Since I’m incapable of saying anything remotely objective about Pryce Jones although in spite of my lack of objectivity I believe that I’m fair and right when I state that Pryce Jones’s anti-French sentiment takes the form of fanaticism, which is similar to Chávezism, I’m just going to quote what Tophan writes:

But it turns out that if there's one group worse than the French, it's Muslims. Pryce Jones says "the Islamisation of France" has now becomes an electoral factor. The rise of Le Pen is indisputable, though any implication that Muslims are a crucial electoral force might be news to those in the banliueues.

It doesn't appear though that the latter have his sympathy. "100 cars are burnt every night in France. Who is burning cars? It is Muslims. They cry allahu akbar as they burn them." Does Pryce Jones really wander the streets of France listening to the cry of arsonists, or is he taking his thesis a little bit too far?

Defining relationships

“I find that people want to name it. The woman is saying, ‘What is our relationship? Are we engaged? Are we boyfriend and girlfriend? Are we lovers?' And my disposition is, ‘Do we really have to have this discussion, because it's not as good as our relationship? We were having a good time until you brought this up.' […] But as you get older, you want to accommodate, and say, ‘Yeah, we're living together. This is for real. I'm not looking for anyone else. You're the woman in my life.' Whatever terms that takes: a ring, an arrangement, a commitment, or from one's behaviour, by the way you act. You make it clear by minute adjustments. A woman goes by. You can look, but you can adjust so that it's not an insult, an affront or a danger. So you're continually making those adjustments, so that you don't make anyone suffer. You're with somebody, and you want to make it work. I'm not interested in taking off my clothes with a woman right now.” Leonard Cohen.

L'amour, pepe le pew, and Baudelaire

Pepe le Pew was my favorite cartoon character when I was young because I find it hard to resist somebody who always falls enthusiastically the wrong person. This video, I think, illustrates what love, in the Baudelairean sense of the term, is all about. It is about erroneous perceptions, misunderstandings, and asymmetry in the sense even when a couple is formed, one always who loves more, and becomes the victim of the other. It is for that reason that Baudelaire compared love to a surgical operation and affirmed that even during the sexual act, the man and the woman are never together and even pleasure separates them.

Faith Schools and religious segregation

“However, there are even greater objections to such schools: by encouraging religious segregation from the age of 4 upwards, they create a social fragmentation that is unhealthy for society at large.

The best of them do attempt to teach about other faiths and British culture, but many do not, and exist precisely to oppose integration.

It is possible to believe in a faith, and in schools that take faith seriously, but not in single-faith schools, with religious identity instead coming from the home and extracurricular classes. Schools should be places where national cohesion takes priority.

Politicians need to be brave enough to resist the demands of local religious groups that wish to isolate their children, while bishops, rabbis and imams should see the common good as a religious value in itself.” Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain.

Deepa Mehta, life, film, and controversy

The Telegraph has a great article on Deepa Mehta, which is worth reading. It shows why she is not only a great director, but also a fascinating person. Meetha talks about the controversies behind some of her movies and also about her life in Canada and India. Sugary excerpt:

There was no particular reason to expect trouble when, in 2000, Water began shooting in the holy city of Varanasi. The script had been vetted by the then ruling party, the Hindu nationalist BJP. But the first days of filming were interrupted by chanting crowds, by the phone ringing with death threats, and one man even threw himself into the Ganges in protest. The set was burnt down. Ironically, many of the elements under attack were not even really in the script; the protesters 'were writing their own version of Water,' Mehta says, and most were 'quite illiterate. When did you last see a mob sitting down to read a screenplay?'

[…] She is a determined downplayer, though perhaps the illnesses she suffered - on the first shoot, an asthma attack complicated by exhaustion and serious enough to see her in hospital; on the second, a 104-degree fever - tell another side of the story. 'I remember being really upset but I tried to retain a sense of humour - that's the way I dealt with it. I also knew I was very angry.' But her natural reaction to threat would always be fight rather than flight; in those days, she has recalled, she found her fists and her teeth were permanently clenched.

Fact and fiction are hard to disentangle, since myth was being used against the mythmakers. The Varanasi police told the filmmakers they could not shoot because 10,000 people were protesting on the ghats, the cremation grounds on the banks of the Ganges. The filmmakers sent their own observer, who found only 12. The man who threw himself into the river in protest turned out to be a 'professional suicider', paid to make such gestures.

[…] Does the sense of being poised between two cultures fuel her art? 'I'm not conscious of making it a perspective - after all, everyone is an immigrant these days. And access to both cultures is a distinct advantage. As Salman Rushdie said, "East and West, I refuse to choose."

Protesting against Gay Penguins

The Guardian had an article yesterday about the controversy, which a children book about gay penguins And Tango Makes Three has created in the US because some feels that homosexuality is an inappropriate topic for children. I wonder if the argument of those who protest is that homosexuality is a disease, which children can catch by just reading it about it. Sugary excerpt:

Though Parnell is keen to emphasise the story's connection with classic children's tales, Richardson, who is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia and Cornell universities in New York, focuses on the need that the book answers for many parents. "One of the areas that parents find very difficult to discuss with their children is homosexuality," he points out, "yet many children have classmates who live in families with two Dads, for example." His description of the book as a useful tool for parents will doubtless alarm its critics. When it comes to homosexuality, admits Judith Krug, director of the ALA's office for intellectual freedom, in the US, "people go a little crazy".

Last year the ALA was notified of 546 formal requests for books to be removed from libraries, most of which came from individual parents. The role of the ALA, Krug explains, is to help librarians resist these requests.

"We fight," she says, "to keep these books on the shelves. People who complain about And Tango Makes Three really believe that homosexuality is wrong, that it's against God's commandments, that it's harming society. The problem is that these children are growing up in a society where some of their classmates are going to come from same sex couples."

Art and nationalism

“Art's more anarchic impulses are deeply anti-nationalist in nature; this is something Tagore knew first-hand. And yet there's an intriguing juxtaposition between the violence of the art-work and the violence of nationalism, especially in these days of immediate technological reproduction.

The righteous arbiters who blew up the Bamiyan Buddha (and it's nationalism, more than religion, that sanctions such outrage) were, in allowing their 'work' to be recorded by a camera, disseminating it to two kinds of audiences, in order to vindicate and satisfy one, and shock and awe the other. But, in letting the moment be reproduced, by permitting it, in effect, to pass into the realm of symbolism, they were also letting its purpose be altered forever. Very little -- only a question of syntax and symbolism -- separates the violence of art-work from that of nationalism, and from the possibility of one rearranging the other in its own language.” Amit Chaudhuri, “Sacred Object.”

National identity and minorities

Tariq Modood argues that multiculturalism is a necessity for Britain because it goes hand and hand with nation building. He makes the point that national identity is an ever-evolving concept and that multiculturalism can contribute to its evolution and to its strengthening. Sugary excerpt:

It does not make sense to encourage strong multicultural or minority identities and weak common or national identities; strong multicultural identities are a good thing - they are not intrinsically divisive or reactionary - but they need a framework of vibrant, dynamic, national narratives, and the ceremonies and rituals which give expression to a national identity. It is clear that minority identities are capable of having an emotional pull for the individuals for whom they are important. Multicultural citizenship requires, therefore, if it is to be equally attractive to the same individuals, a comparable counter-balancing emotional pull.

National identity can play this role. […] We cannot afford to leave out multicultural citizenship from social reform and justice in the 21st century. Rather, the turning of negative difference into positive affirmation of difference should be one of the tests of social justice. It is at the centre of democratic citizenship. That citizens enjoy more rights than non-citizens is justifiable and a better basis for considering entitlements than Margaret Hodge's racialised suggestion of "indigenousness".

Fiction and reality

“As in The Matrix there is an interesting critique of utopia woven into the question of whether we prefer the false but perfect ideal world to the imperfect but nevertheless genuine one. But these pop cultural products have also thrown some light on what is problematical in post-modern criticism of traditional science’s pretensions to objectivity. When, in the Matrix films, it appears that the resistance struggle against the matrix is really part of its underlying plan, this may be seen as an illustration of how difficult it can be to escape from the system one believes oneself to be opposing and criticising. In a corresponding way, one might ask oneself why the contemporary post-modern relativist view of the world should be less typical of its time and have greater objective relevance than other earlier, equally culturally-conditioned views of reality? It is scarcely surprising that, in a world in which technology allows us constantly to overstep our spatial limitations, we have become spiritual nomads. From this perspective the relativist scientific view appears as a confirmation rather than a criticism of those tendencies to dissolution that charactise the late capitalist world.

The fact that the boundaries between fiction and reality are fuzzy does not necessarily mean that they do not exist. Does the preservation of these boundaries, like a fixed basis of values resting on Enlightenment ideals and having its basis in values such as freedom and truth, rather appear to be a radical act of resistance in a late capitalist existence in which all worlds—aesthetic, ethical, economic—tend constantly to dissolve?” Johan Lundberg. “When reality becomes fiction.”

Bernard Lewis, Osama, and Manichaeism

Bernard Lewis has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which examines the writings and the beliefs of Osama Bin Laden. Lewis shows in my opinion that his vision of the world is too Manichean to be the basis for a constructive foreign policy because reading him one has the feeling that we are back to earlier centuries when people still believed in manifest destiny. Lewis’ ideas reminds of Jansenism in the sense that I get the feelings that he believes in predestination and divine grace for the good is always on one side while evil, violence comes from the other. The West is the chosen side and it must accept that its task is not to bargain or to compromise with the rest of the world, but to impose its will and its view of history for it is the illuminated side, which must not surrender to darkness. In other words, Nietzsche is right, the will to power is everything except that in this case power lasts because it is on the side of those who deserve it, who are good, and who must therefore accept who they are and what the world is. Sugary excerpt:

We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility.

From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks – on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000 – all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two – to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences – both for Islam and for America – will be deep, wide and lasting.

Cultural diversity policies and ghettorization

Spike magazine has a good article on Sonya Dyer a black artist who has written a essay Boxed In: How Cultural Diversity Policies Constrict Black Artists. Dyer argues that black artists are treated differently because they aren’t considered artists and their work isn’t considered art. Sugary excerpt:

In the 1970s and 80s, radical arts movements challenged the lack of support for black artists in Britain. But whereas exhibitions by black and Asian artists during that time were often seen as temporary responses to racism, as a step in the direction towards a more equitable society, today’s establishment-led diversity policies emphasise the supposed difference and separateness of non-white artists.

Paradoxically, this only ghettoises such artists, pushing them into separate systems of funding and exhibition. It also unfairly places a ‘burden of representation’ on ethnic minorities, who are expected to demonstrate their ethnicity in their work or be responsible for bringing in ‘diverse’ audiences into galleries and museums. It is as if the subject matter of non-white artists should always be about negotiating identity and certain members of the public can only appreciate work that reflects their own ethnicity. As Dyer asks: ‘Can’t we (non-white people) ever just make art?’

The focus on diversity ultimately reinforces an essentialist view of human beings as bound by skin colour, and it is far removed from the ideal of a ‘colour blind society’ according to which people’s colour or cultural background really should have no bearing on their status as equal citizens.

Unfortunately, not only is Dyer is right, but this ghettorization is just happening in the world of arts, but in almost every part of society for one major in my opinion: policies, no matter how well intended, can’t force people to change and to see past color and difference. In fact, what has happened in too many multi-ethnic societies is that politicians have hidden behind laws and policies in order to give up their obligation to educate and to promote change instead of taking shortcuts and of believing naively that a law can change the human heart and destroy prejudices, which are survived through centuries.

When hugging a Frenchman becomes dangerous

Well, we can really see that Pakistan has reached the bottom now that hugging a Frenchman can lead to the resignation of a politician. Nilofar Bakhtiar, Pakistan's Minister of Tourism, has been forced to resign after the furor created by the hug that she gave to her French tourist instructor. Clerics called her act obscene and issued a fatwa against her. The fact that such events can happen in Pakistan isn’t just shameful, but intolerable but the silence that is going to follow this resignation shows that for too many countries some behaviors, which if they happened in their own countries would lead them to blast cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and radical leftism, are acceptable because they are happening elsewhere. I disagree. Geography doesn’t determine morality neither does culture. There isn’t something holier something different about Pakistan and Pakistani air that would make it acceptable that a hug to Frenchman whether he is old or not (he was in this case in his sixties and some have argues that because of his age, the hug wasn’t obscene), unacceptable.

Denouncing Londonistan

“For the British mainstream, multiculturalism has been the official civic religion for so long that any criticism of any minority group has become the equivalent of profanity. And Islamic extremists have long understood that they need only suggest a racial bias—or a hint of the newly invented and meaningless term "Islamophobia"—in order to make the British cough and shuffle with embarrassment. Prince Charles himself, the heir to the throne and thus the heir to the headship of the Church of England, has announced his sympathy for Islam and his wish to be the head of all faiths and not just one. This may sound good, if absurd (a chinless prince who becomes head of a church because his mother dies?), but only if you forget that it was Prince Charles who encouraged the late King Fahd, of Saudi Arabia, to contribute more than a million pounds to build … the Finsbury Park Mosque! If you want my opinion, our old district was a lot better off when the crowned heads of the world were busy neglecting it.

Anyway, you can't be multicultural and preach murderous loathing of Jews, Britain's oldest and most successful (and most consistently anti-racist) minority. And you can't be multicultural and preach equally homicidal hatred of India, Britain's most important ally and friend after the United States.” Christopher Hitchens, “Londonistan Calling.”

The sexual world of Tom Ford

New York magazine has an intriguing article on Tom Ford, the ex mister Gucci, which gives great insight about fashion, gender, and sex. Tom Ford has started his own line of clothing and it is fascinating to see what he thinks of sex, of women, men, of clothes, and of himself. Sugary excerpt:

“I feel,” he says breathily, “that I am keyed into the female consciousness.”

[…] “I am my own muse,” he says. […] There was the clamorous cover of Vanity Fair’s “Hollywood” issue, where he was featured nibbling on the ear of a naked Keira Knightley. “Well, I was illustrating, in that photo,” he says. “I don’t know—it’s always nice to have your picture on the cover of Vanity Fair.” He shifts in his seat. “I guess I’m hyper- self-conscious about people thinking that I’m egotistical, but there’s a difference between being egotistical and knowing your value as a product and an actor. I know my value as a product, and I’ve divorced myself as a human from myself as a product.”[…] Ford’s new vision for men is very Ken Barbie on the jet for the weekend for razzle-dazzle business and pleasure in Dubai. The store, which comprises one ready-to-wear floor and a mezzanine of made-to-measure suites, is an Egyptian temple of metrosexuality—gleaming vitrines of diamond-and-onyx cuff links, eyeglasses with 18-karat-gold bridges, monogrammed hand-knitted socks, and a perfumery of Estée Lauder–produced scents. Ford has said that they are supposed to smell like the sweat of a man’s balls. A woman wants a man to smell like a man, he thinks. “You know, when I was young, men were very attracted to me, and teenage girls were attracted to me, but women weren’t, and now women are very attracted to me,” he confides. “So I think that I know what kind of men women want.

I understand Tom Ford’s ego (in fact I love it!), but I wonder what it says about the fashion industry, if the best designers are males. Does this fact tells us that in fact women are unable to key into the consciousness of other women because they can accept to use all of their talent to make other women beautiful and desirable because it may take the center of the attention away from themselves. It seems that since Coco Chanel, the greatest designers and glamour creators have been male and I wonder the explication can be limited to the sexism of the fashion industry. It’s always peculiar to realize that it isn’t diamonds, which aren't a girl’s best friend, but gay men.

Killing literacy

“Other industrialized countries with long literary traditions-- France, Japan, and Germany, for example--not only champion books by way of comprehensive newspaper reviews, but also regularly, often in prime time, sponsor in-depth author interviews on television. Newspapers in smaller countries like Greece, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands sustain exciting, wide-ranging book departments.

We have serious problems with literacy in the United States, and it is not just shameful, but stupid, that we would compound them by becoming a country in which books, and readers, are simply not served by major periodicals. I am a baseball fan and a film buff, and no matter where I find myself, in big American cities and farflung towns, my interests in those subjects is faithfully served by periodicals large and small. That I cannot say the same about books is a scandal. We will pay a heavy price for abandoning our cultural heritage through such short-sightedness, denying the generations to follow us the opportunity to become active and vital readers. Without the latter, we can expect to produce, and nurture, even fewer writers, at which point we'll really be in trouble: a country with a diminishing national literature and an utter loss of civilized values.” Nicholas Christopher.

Avoiding a necessary debate on multiculturalism

Michael Collins has a worth reading article in the Comment is Free section of the Guardian in which he attempts to show what he considers the effects of multiculturalism on the British urban schools. He argues that white pupils in urban schools are falling because of the cult of multiculturalism, which is based on a lie. Sugary excerpt:

Bad parenting was flagged up as the key culprit, with the high level of success of pupils from more family-based, insular, Chinese and Asian communities cited as the standard of attainment to aim for. If the response of those present at this day-long conference mimics that of the teaching staff at my own secondary school back in the punk spring of 1977, you can bet that the short-sightedness and fear around modern racial etiquette is responsible. With poor performance of black pupils the burden of blame is apportioned to those post-Macpherson fallbacks institutional racism or "unwitting prejudice". In the case of white pupils, racism can't by cited as a reason or excuse any more than the industrial revolution or the age of the child chimney sweep. However, were this any other ethnic group, cultural alienation, lack of high-profile role models and its derogatory portrayal within the media would be brought into the proceedings.

Therefore there might be an argument to suggest the fact that urban white working class communities have endured more change, dislocation and upheaval than any other over the last 40 years, added to the racial and classcist slurs targeted regularly at this group by the press, might have some small part to play. But the greater responsibility for what is very much a 21st century trend might rest with the cult of multiculturalism.

How has multiculturalism become the cause of everything when I would argue it is about nothing else than not letting culture become a reason for isolation and for justifying segregation, exclusion and the perpetration of intolerable traditions? There is a growing and a successful attempt to make multiculturalists racists and naïve leftists because it is easier to defend conservatism in the restrictive sense of the term and the status quo by arguing that métissage, the blending of culture is a form of surrender because cultures either have to clash or to fail. Culture isn’t everything, as I like to say if I have to choose between culture and humanity and individuality, I will always choose the latter that is precisely the reason why I believe in multiculturalism because I don’t want culture to do to societies why religion has done to them in too many cases. Michael Collins is so unsure of his thesis that he plays cat and mouse with the reader in other to take all the necessary detours he has to take to avoid defining multiculturalism, to associate it with radical leftism, and to make it responsible for the failures of white students in urban schools. Collins doesn’t want to have a debate or even to have a trial, but only want to condemn because he doesn’t want the world to be complicated and doesn’t want to accept that contractions aren’t always signs of hypocrisy.

Wit, religion, and death

Is it acceptable to speak ill of the dead? After seeing this video, I wonder if crossing certain boundaries isn't tolerable and even necessary if the act isn't as much of a transgression as it is about learning something or saying something that has to be said. But still, I'm not sure that I'm right.

9/11, Literature, DeLillo, and meaning

Pankaj Mishra has a wonderful article in the Guardian Book section on 9/11 and literature. He shows the different ways in why writers have tried to deal with this decisive event and the ways they have chosen to give it meaning. He focuses partly on Don DeLillo’s new book on the same subject 9/11 to argue the point that this terrorist event opened American writers to the world. Sugary excerpt:

Some of the most interesting young American novelists were alert to the self-indulgent mood of the 90s. Novels such as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (published, coincidentally, on September 11) and Richard Powers's Gain explored the perennial American theme of the gap between reality and the American dream against the context of aggressive new ideologies of profit and materialism. Bret Easton Ellis and Bruce Wagner described the weirder and darker mutations in sensibility and manners in this period.

But, on September 11 2001, these preoccupations were broken into by the previously invisible conflicts and traumas of an interdependent world. "Our world, parts of our world," DeLillo wrote in an article in December 2001, "have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage." But the collision between the paradise of domestic security and the hell of global insecurity had happened long before it horrifyingly manifested itself on 9/11. The cold war and then economic globalisation had knitted the world closer together. Yet the western vision of endless prosperity and well-being had proved a deception for the billions of people living outside the west.

The aggressive paternalism and self-righteousness of American business and politics provoked resentment among even the beneficiaries of an American-ordered world, such as the secular middle-class Turks in Istanbul who told Orhan Pamuk on 9/11 that the terrorists had done the "right thing". (The attacks bring a similar gratification to the Princeton-educated Pakistani financial analyst in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, who, watching the twin towers collapse, finds himself smiling - "remarkably pleased".)

In a world rendered deeply unequal, television and the internet stoked many people's aggrieved sense of being "crowded out", as DeLillo writes in Falling Man, "by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies". Reflecting on his compatriots' callous response to 9/11, Pamuk described how an ordinary citizen of the non-western world is today more aware than before "of how insubstantial is his share of the world's wealth; he knows that he lives under conditions that are much harsher and more devastating than those of a 'westerner' and that he is condemned to a much shorter life. At the same time, however, he senses in a corner of his mind that his poverty is to some considerable degree the result of his own folly and inadequacy, or those of his father and grandfather."

"The western world," Pamuk wrote, "is scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population." This indifference came to be particularly entrenched in the pre-9/11 decade, when the dotcom boom promised to enlist the entire world in the forward march of western capital and technology.

I wonder if writers in general aren’t always isolationists. I think that people expect American writers to be opened to the world, when it isn’t the propensity of writers in general to focus on something other than their world whether it is American or something else. Of course, 9/11 changed things, but not as much in the way that Pamuk argues that it has. 9/11 revived Sartre’s litterature engagée (militant literature) because many writers realized that literature could again change the world and that writers could do what politicians, journalists, and consultants couldn’t do by imagining a world where clashes and fears aren’t necessary and thus inspiring a frightened citizenry to not fear the world and the other.

I haven't read Falling Man and I’m not even sure that I want to read it. However, I've read many reviews of the book and wondered whether it was possible to review as any other book especially for people who “experienced” 9/11 and whose experience is very different from the characters in the books. For example, Chad Roedemeier of the Canadian praises the novel, but has the following complaint:

But the flaws of this slim novel are almost to be expected. The aftermath of 9-11 fits too neatly into the Big Ideas that DeLillo has about American society and culture. Keith is the perfect DeLillo Man, alienated from his work, his family and himself, conditioned by the faceless mass culture. "By the time the second plane appears," Keith says, "we're all a little older and wiser." It's a novel that sometimes reads more like a political essay.” He wonders “if this ghostly automaton is an accurate reflection of what we have become after Sept. 11? Aren't we still hopeful and stupid and connected to each other? Didn't we blink the soot out of our eyes and look up again?

Roedemeir refuses to treat DeLillo’s novel as any other by accepting that it may not have been written to answer his questions or any other reader’s question, but solely DeLillo’s and therefore cannot be expected give “the” answer that will make him say “Ah” by making him feel like a perfect man or like a god.

Eric Homberger wrote the following in his review in the Independent:

Falling Man is an excavation deep into the heart of a world in which only fanatics and terrorists, with calm certainty, claim to grasp the sense of things. In the immediate aftermath of the plane crash above him in the World Trade Center, Keith saw a man in a striped shirt falling from the building. Richard Drew's troubling photo of that man, against the stark vertical side of the building, gives DeLillo a title, and a recurring trope: we are all there, with the falling man, in a world without safety nets or the hope of rescue.

Reading Homberger’s review I wondered whether DeLillo had given him what our parents gave us when we were children when we wondered where the dead went: a soothing, beautiful, hopeful, but shallow answer designed to stop questions and to quash anxiety in front of the nothingness.

Michiko Kakutani’s review of DeLillo in the Times shows my concern that it isn’t really his work, which reviewers are judging, but his attempt to deal with 9/11 and whether it enables them to make sense of that event, to give it meaning. Sugary excerpt:

It was Mr. DeLillo who, years ago, wrote about the rise of the terrorist, “the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith”; the power of crowds, melded by mass media into a violent, history-changing mob; the seduction of technology and its magnification of the glut and glare of pop culture; the institutionalization of paranoia and conspiracy thinking in the collective mind; and the realization that “the rules of what is thinkable” have changed ineluctably in recent years.

Given this achievement, the reader approaches Mr. DeLillo’s post- 9/11 work with great anticipation. Unfortunately, his strangely stilted 2003 novel, “Cosmopolis,” was a terrible disappointment, and so is his spindly new novel, “Falling Man.”

Certainly it’s unfair for the reader to expect any work of fiction about 9/11 to come close to the visionary scope and depth of Mr. DeLillo’s masterpiece “Underworld,” which so brilliantly captured the American experience of the cold war era: not enough time has passed for any novelist to put the events of that day and its shuddering consequences into historical perspective; perhaps not even enough time has passed for any novelist to grapple convincingly with those actual events, without being eclipsed by the documentary testimony (from newspaper articles, television footage and still photographs) still freshly seared in readers’ minds. And yet even within these parameters of reduced expectations, “Falling Man” feels small and unsatisfying and inadequate.

Whereas “Underworld” gave the reader a big panoramic window on history by tracing the intersecting, crisscrossing lives of dozens of people, “Falling Man” — like the author’s 1977 novel, “Players,” which also grappled with terrorism and also featured a character who worked in the World Trade Center — focuses on the lives of one man and one woman.

People read 9/11 novels with great and unfair expectations. They don’t just want to read a great, fascinating, and well-written story, they expect to read a meaningful story, one, which will soothe them by making fit in their worldview the horrific images they saw that day and by making them comprehend the incomprehensible with a satisfying answer to their unspoken questions. The truth may just be that it is impossible to get some satisfaction with a 9/11 novel.

Branding Atheists

“And this, perhaps, is one of the most striking characteristics of the current wave of intellectual atheism: its affective content, the fact that there is little measured or polite about the way it expresses itself. Even the term 'atheist' seems a little too mild, too respectable a designation for the position occupied by Hitchens and Dawkins (to which list one should also add Ayaan Hirsi Ali). They are anti-theists, opposed in principle to every last attachment to the divine, leading many to accuse them of a kind of inverted fundamentalism, a failure to exhibit the core modern virtue of tolerance or respect for others.

But is this heedless intensity really so bad? It is hard not to be taken by the seriousness of anti-theism, particularly when compared to the suffocating cultural and religious lethargy from which it has emerged. Indeed, it is the very impotence of so much Western Christianity — having long since been content to give succour to people’s basest fears and to acquiesce in the 'spirit of the age' as yet another vendor of personal satisfaction and spiritual meaning — that has created the intellectual space for the current debate to occur.” Scott Stephens, “Why Militant Anti-theism is a God Send.”

Cannes, France, and class

Ken Russell describes his experience at Cannes in an insightful, which says a lot about the festival and about France. Sugary excerpt:

Applications for a critic’s ticket for the festival are investigated by a committee. Should the applicant not enjoy international status, they stand a good chance of complete rejection. And even if the authorities are gracious enough to grant you a pass, your troubles could be just beginning. This is because you are not informed of the colour of your pass until you arrive and, at Cannes, colour is everything. It reflects your status and which holding pen you will be packed into like so many cattle. And if you are unfortunate enough to possess a bog-standard blue pass, you’d better join the box-office queue at the crack of dawn or you’ll have to fight your way in. Should the screening in question be a hot ticket, you could get your shirt torn off your back, as was the case in 1995 in the frenzied scramble to see Larry Clark’s controversial teenage romp Kids.

Cannes is a beautiful and stylish city, but it also one where class in the social sense of the term is closely bond with style. Cannes shows an essential difference between the United States and France. With Cannes, the French show that what matters for them first of all is glamour and eccentricity in the sense that Cannes want to be apart and to continue to show that showbiz is about glamour, art, and quality, in simpler terms about beauty and well-dressed people making beautiful and artful films. American film festivals such as Sundance and Tribeca are a lot more democratic and less about the presentation and the style, which are considered fluffy or secondary. To say things crudely, Cannes shows that in France the principles that not all things can be accessible to everybody and that art rhymes with glamour are rooted deeply into the French consciousness. This is the reason why access in Cannes is difficult because it is a world where class, style, and art are everything and bound closely together in the sense that if you lack one, you need to have a lot more of the others. In the US, it is a lot easier to become a nouveau riche or artiste without class, style, and artful qualities becomes more often the defining criteria is whether what you are making will sell and there is in a way nothing more democratic than that.

When literature loves misery

“Misery memoirs sell because today it has become commonplace to seek meaning through degrading experiences. In providing graphic details about people’s lived humiliations, these memoirs make us feel more comfortable with our own existences. It is sad that we need to gain a sense of meaning and calm by reading about the degradation of others; yet the fact is, we live in a world where the victim trumps the hero. Some writers are happy to invent stories of painful abuse because they recognise that being a victim has public appeal today. The public is no longer very interested in stories of happy and purposeful childhoods, since such stories must surely have been written by people ‘in denial’ who cannot face the bitter truth about just how badly their parents hurt them….”Frank Furedi, “Emotional Strip Tease.”

Defining European identity

Rene Wadlow writes about European identity and its fluidity. He attempts to define European Identity in spite of the fact that he admits that it may be unrecognizable and unverifiable :

But European identity doesn’t consist of the use of one language, many languages or specific languages. If we intend for identity the complete and absolute equality or the persistence of the unity of an individual or of a collective people without considering the alteration of some attributes and qualities, a European identity becomes very difficult to recognize and perhaps it is not verifiable.
During the Enlightenment many intellectuals started to appeal to Europe as a point of reference for their identity, but it was not a true identity, at most it was an identity of élites. The idea of Europe, very vague in that age, coincided more or less with the cosmopolitan ideal. Neither was there a real idea of Europe in the words of Napoleon and after him of the prince of Metternich.
Today, if we ask a European what Europe means, what Europe is, what the European identity is, we would probably experience difficulties in answering. If we ask him if he feels European, he will hesitate for a moment, if pressed for an answer, he will say that he feels French, German or Italian. In order to help him we can say that to-day we are subject to a pluralistic identity, the national and the European one, and nevertheless conclude that a European identity doesn’t exist.

The tyranny of geography, fears and realities

Philippe Legrain talks about his new book on Immigration, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them in an interview on 3 AM magazine in he explains why he believes that in open borders and that geography should be tyrannical. Sugary excerpt:

The case for open borders — or for freer immigration — is three-fold: it spreads freedom, it widens opportunity and it enriches the economy, culture and society. So let me pose the question differently: is it fair that the rich and the educated can circulate around the world freely while people in poor countries are expected to stay put in the country where they were born? Is it fair that under the government’s proposed new immigration points system people from developing countries who lack the qualifications that the government deems necessary will have no legal route to come work in this country? Is it surprising — or unfair — that if it is impossible to come work in Britain legally that some people do so illegally?

In the case of immigration, there is always going to be a difference between perception and reality, and between need and desires. Immigration is going to remain an unpopular and explosive issue not only in developed countries, but also in developing country. The reason for this is very simple is that immigration is the perfect issue to both reassure and scare people. The Immigration issue reassures people because they can put the blame for the troubles of their society on others. It scares them because it reinforces their own perception about their loss of control over the changes in their society, which they dislike. In other words, there is no question that immigrants are needed, but the issue is elsewhere is that people want them to become invisible and or to be as much as them as possible to neutralize the possible influence, which they may have on their host country.

Françoise Sagan and Easy beauty

There is a post on Françoise Sagan on the Dovegreyreader blog, which makes me nostalgic because it reminds of books, which made my teenage years and of a great writer who never got the acclaim that she deserved. Sugary excerpt:

Some books are etched on my consciousness from this time. There was one called Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon that we were almost killing each other to get our hands on.
H.E.Bates, John Galsworthy, Nevil Shute, Joseph Heller all had their day but  favourites were the Francoise Sagan's, Bonjour Tristesse, Aimez-Vous Brahms..., La Chamade, The Heart-Keeper. All so precious that I still have my old 25p Penguin editions.
Every time I think it's time to throw them all out I can't.They are too faded, foxed and yellowed even for a jumble sale but the covers so of their time I only have to see them on the shelf to be back there...sitting in the launderette on Haringey High Street hoping against hope that someone, anyone would steal that rusty I'd pram left outside.
Honest as the day was long they were in Haringey in those days.

There is a famous poem of Paul Eluard, La Parole, (The Spoken word) in which there is this verse, which applies to Sagan “J’ai la beauté facile et c’est heureux.” The verse is about getting beauty easily. Sagan not only got beauty easily, but she seemed to write beautiful things very easily, almost lightheartedly. This ability made her the ideal target of those who believe foolishly that that easiness and carefreeness proved that she didn’t put enough efforts into aher craft for it to be considred art when all of us who have tried writing seriously know that easy, carefreeness don’t come easily and require a lot of work.

The fallacy of religious identity

“Religion is a great source of violence. That’s why Amartya Sen’s book “Identity and Violence” is so important. In a word, we’re put into boxes. You are told you are a Muslim or Jew, I’m told I’m a Christian, and this is our identity. Sen points out that there is no such thing as a single identity. Each of us has many identities.

Religion tells you what you are, but it does not define what I am or what you are. We are many things. We must allow society to see and to understand that we cannot be boxed into a singular identity. Boxing an individual’s identity contradicts the spirit of modernity. And this goes for race or ethnicity as much as for religion.” Nadine Gordimer.

Men and Feminine chic

The Financial Times had an odd article last week about the increased “feminization” of men fashion. The article showed that actually being “girly men” to use the Governator’s favorite expression is what’s in nowadays in the world of men fashion. Sugary excerpt:

“Whether gay or straight, men are getting more adventurous, but it takes courage to wear something ‘feminine’,” concedes Joe Casely-Hayford, designer for Gieves & Hawkes, whose Gieves range includes “Quentin Crispian” scarves and a nice male take on the classic country lady’s twin-set. “There is an opening up of traditional male roles and that’s coming through in the way men present themselves. Admittedly, this tends to be for younger men who are less tied to tradition and more influenced by the recent 1980s music scene revival, during which styling was generally more feminine. But I remember Rod Stewart in the ‘70s wearing chiffon scarves, despite his macho football fan attitude.”

Call it the Russell Brand Effect, after the stand-up comic and fan of skinny-fit denim, neck-scarves and Byronic shirts (pictured right) who also manages to maintain a reputation as a Lothario.

According to Stacey Smith, men’s buyer for London fashion independent Matches, “Femininity is filtering down from fey celebrities like Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell to the mainstream, and the female/masculine barriers in fashion are starting to come down. Men are more willing to experiment with the idea of femininity in fashion. Look how many will wear colour now. Rugby-playing estate agents now come in and are interested in clothes that verge on the feminine – clothes that two years ago they’d have laughed at.”

Andrew Wiles, communications director of decidedly masculine brand Dunhill (which this season has some very fine gauge cardigans that “a woman could wear comfortably”), says: “Femininity in men’s wear is a trend that’s been coming through and has reached its peak. There is a market for it: younger consumers, footballers, guys in rock bands, models – men in industries with the money to spend on items they may wear once, who need clothes to individualise them, and to whom the stand-out qualities of such feminine pieces appeal. But, to be honest, it doesn’t make for the kind of items that most men would buy.”

Surprisingly, I find myself insulted by that article and I’m going to try to explain even though I probably won’t do it very well. I resent the idea that femininity is first a fashion tool in the sense that men can use it, own it, mold it, and perfect it. It leads to me wonder if the implicit message isn’t the unsettling idea that only men can make femininity chic by bringing it not in the mainstream, but in the closed arenas of power and of masculinity. I have nothing against “girly men” except the fact that they are actually called “girly” and that the fashion is femininity as an accessory to make them hip and cool. Of course, it is acceptable for men to take fashion seriously but must they make that daring adventure in the world of chic an assault the forceful conquest of something, which I as a woman don’t want them to touch. The question here isn’t one of sectarianism or of separation for I don’t believe that gender is everything. What are at issue are the perpetuation and indeed the strengthening of the enduring stereotype that femininity when it applies to women can never be the equal of masculinity.

Interpreting Literature

Laila Lalami has a great post on her recent encounter with students, which tried to interpret her book by trying forcibly to connect it to their own understanding of the world and what literature should be. It’s a great point because it shows that interpretations are always problematic in literature when the book interpreted and its characters are serfs to the biography of the author and to the reader’s view of the world. In other words, there is a wall between literary interpretations and preconceived nations, which people who believe that literature always has to be bigger than itself hit. Sugary excerpt:

As I talked, I realized that this young man (and indeed several of the people who were so eager to ask questions that put literature on trial) was not a regular reader of books. It seems impossible to me that anyone who reads novels on a usual basis could come up with such a reductive interpretation, and I felt an overwhelming sadness, for him, and for what he was missing. After the reading, he came up to the podium to have his picture taken with me. I didn't know what to think. I didn't know if he had asked that question because he truly felt the way he said he did, or because he thought it would be funny, or if he was just being a punk. I think what upset me most was this expectation that my work, or literature in general, should be a stage in which good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. In other words, what this student wanted was a fairytale. Life is not like that, and neither is literature.

The priest, the church, and his girlfriend

The Telegraph has the best article I’ve read this morning about a French priest, the Catholic Church, and his girlfriend. Father Léon Laclau is a 55 years old priest of Asson, a small French village in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques who has been forced by the Church out of the priesthood because he has been living with his girlfriend Marga, a widow with whom he had been having an affair for 22 years. The villagers are taking the side of their priest by refusing to believe that concubinage coupling is an impediment to Godliness for a priest. Sugary excerpt:

"Marga has made me a good priest," said Father Léon. "I know I haven't remained strictly faithful to the vows I made when I was ordained 30 years ago, but I also know that my love for Marga has in no way been a handicap to my mission as a parish priest. In fact, it's been a great support. A lot of my parishioners look at me and say, well here's a priest who loves the Church but who listens to us, who understands us, and who lives like us," he said.

It’s funny strange to realize that the Catholic Church seems to be able to forgive more easily priests who abuse kids than priests who actually fall in love with a woman. Women cannot be priests because like Eve they are unable to bond with God and men who bond who then became ordinary because they are succumbed to the pleasures in the flesh. The most disturbing question is the following, are women nothing more than sexual objects in the sense that they distract men from the spiritual and are nothing more than an empty vase begging to be filled? The answer to this question for the Catholic Church, as this case shows, is unfortunately a resounding yes.

Stoicism, anxiety, and life

Jules Evans explains in the New Statesman how stoicism helped him get his groove back. He argues that by accepting Stoic's principles, he was able to overcome an anxiety disorder, which made him have panic attacks. Sugary excerpt:

I bought a book called The Discourses, by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. It was he who first declared that it was not external things, but our opinions about them, which caused us suffering. It was our own thoughts and opinions that imprisoned us and made us miserable.

But, uniquely among animals, we had the power of ‘meta-thinking’. This means we could become aware of our own thinking patterns, analyze them, and if necessary change them. Our mind could imprison us, but it could also set us free.

[…] adversity is the cosmos sending us a sparring partner, something we can take on and try to conquer, in order to strengthen our inner detachment and mastery over our passions and conventional opinions.

Sure, sometimes we may lose and fall into a depression, but then we get back up, dust ourselves off, and get back in the ring. Each time we beat our conventional opinions, they get less and less power over us, and we become more and more masters of ourselves.

Above all, we can learn to accept what happens to us. Stoics accept external events because they believe they are part of the Logos, the divine law that guides all events. They believe the universe is rationally ordered, so we should accept whatever it dishes out to us.

I find Evans’ use of Stoicism fascinating, but because it shows how powerful one's belief-system is and how it can affect or rather control one's life. It is for this reason that religion can be dangerous especially when it becomes an impediment to rational thinking (Hitchens would say that it always is), or when it leads to the rationalization of the irrational and of the intolerable.

Women spies

Ben Macintyre has a good article in the Times of London on women spies. He Talks about the disadvantages and the advantages of being a woman spy in a hostile and still traditional world. Sugary excerpt:

A female officer must have all the qualities of her male counterpart – courage, ingenuity, resourcefulness – but she must also deal with the fact that in most nonWestern countries she will be a woman working in a man’s world. In many parts of the world a woman, especially a good-looking one, attracts attention – the last thing a spy wants. In Muslim countries this attention may be openly hostile if she is unaccompanied, and there may be other practical problems: for instance, if she is sent to Saudi Arabia, she will not be allowed to drive a car. There are also the risks of being mugged or worse, and sadly spies are not allowed to carry guns as often as the movies lead us to believe.

Even in more civilised areas, although a pretty face may help an officer to gain access to a target, there is often a sense of disappointment when the target finds out the reason for her interest in him – and that can make it even harder to recruit him as an intelligence source.

All this is coupled with the fact that being a spy can be a very lonely life – few partners are prepared to follow their wives around the world.

Of course, it is possible to be a very successful female spy. A woman with the strength of character and qualities to become a spy will find a way around the difficulties: it may not be possible to recruit a Muslim terrorist but his wife might be prepared to talk, especially to another woman.

The very fact that other societies often underrate women may also allow a female officer to gain access to a target where a man would come under suspicion and fail. There are certainly two successful female spies currently sitting in the House of Lords: Baroness Park of Monmouth, who later became principal of Somerville College, Oxford, and Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, who sits on the Intelligence and Security Committee that oversees all the intelligence services. Both are remarkably strong characters and you cannot imagine either of them allowing a man to take the lead.

I have contradictory feelings about this article because I don’t know whether it should be encouraging to realize that “female” spies are female before being spies in the sense that the best of them will more than likely be those who use their femininity to their advantage. However, this fact in itself poses a problem because femininity is only an acceptable tool to use when it benefits somebody else but the woman using it. This truth is epitomized by the loss (I’m sorry but I just can’t get over it. I don’t even want to try to get over it) of Ségolène Royal.

The limits of the sexual liberation

“When I was younger, many men regarded contraception as someone else's problem. From what I hear, some things never change, despite - perhaps because of - the brute fact of Aids. Yet that blight had not been imagined when I first became, in the dismal phrase, "sexually active". We had the pill; we had legal abortion as required; we had liberties unparalleled in history.

Women had access, for the first time, to reproductive choice. Men - and I generalise recklessly - breathed one collective sigh of relief. Almost overnight, they ceased to be responsible and were free - this version of sexual liberation was easy to grasp - to be as irresponsible as they liked. Pregnancy was no longer their concern. She was supposed to take care of "that". If she didn't, the blame was hers. The attitude bothered me then, and bothers me still. How many drunken rapes took place because coercive sex was deemed a victimless crime? How many relationships became abusive when the rutting boy-child decided that his actions had no consequences?

The sexual pre-history of humankind is best consigned to the darkness. Contraception and abortion are fundamental rights, not fashion accessories. But how many men still refuse to understand the word "no" merely because they believe they need never answer to paternity's obligations, or name a child?

Society was never permissive: trust me. Old hippies, among their numerous crimes, were as sexist as any superannuated toff. The pill was their get-out-of-jail card, not a means by which human life could be reimagined.

Permissive? Sexual rights are not "permitted", but men are disinclined to shut up. Instead, they abuse the trust of young Polish girls and pontificate, weekly, on the obligations of womanhood. They demand control but dodge every risk. You would almost think they do it on purpose.” Ian Bell, “Why are baying men still telling women what to do with their bodies?”

Drinking the blood of tyrants

Michael Walzer argues that the death penalty is acceptable for tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and others even when if the death penalty is unacceptable. His argument that there isn’t no contradiction between believing in the immorality of the death penalty and believing that people who butcher their own people should be killed:

I don’t believe that the state should kill people convicted of crimes against other people, even of terrible crimes. Except when it is resisting military attack or helping others who are under attack, the state should not be in the killing business; its first commitment is to the preservation of life. But a tyrant has committed crimes not simply against individuals but against the solidarity of the citizens, against the commonwealth, against the very idea of a political community. And that seems to raise the stakes; a tyrant is not an ordinary criminal.

Assassinating a tyrant poses no moral problems. Here is a ruler fully empowered and actively engaged, right now, in the oppression of his subjects: his prisons are crowded, his torturers are at work, his death squads roam the country, his tax collectors are extortionate. He is at war with his subjects—actually, not metaphorically—and killing him is a legitimate act of war. Tyrannicide is an honorable killing, and the killers are commonly honored. But now imagine the same tyrant overthrown: he is a prisoner of war; he cannot simply be killed. Shouldn’t he be brought to trial for his crimes and, if convicted, punished in a just and humane way? He is powerless now, locked up, in prison garb—why should we treat him differently than we believe all prisoners should be treated?

The answer to Walzer’s question is a resounding no, because by arguing for the death penalty in the worse of cases he is legitimating it in all cases since the question no longer becomes its immorality, but its application in the appropriate case. There will always be somebody to argue with passion and convincingly that tyranny isn’t the only crime, which deserves such a final and bloody punishment. In the case of the death penalty, exceptions kill the rule because it is impossible both say never and sometimes. The death penalty isn’t about the criminal, it isn’t about the convicted felon with dirty hands, and it is about the rest of society and about whether it wants to lower itself to the level of the culprit instead of refusing to follow him/her in the gutter. The issue isn't what tyrants deserve, but what whether society should choose not to uphold its standards for the person who least respected it. There is no middle ground in this issue. It is impossible to divide the baby.

Globalization and Americanization

Nathan Gardels makes the following point about Globalization in NPQ magazine to show it is no longer Americanization:

Globalization now belongs to everyone who can figure out how to take advantage of its opportunities and minimize its dislocations. American-bred technology may be its midwife, but Americans are no longer solely the parents.

Implicit in that assertion is the assumption that America has lost its control over globalization and that such a loss of is to its disadvantage. If we use Gardels’ metaphor and that indeed Americans are no longer the sole parents of globalization, it also means that they are not solely responsible for its negatives and inequities, which is a good thing. The fact that globalization is not Americanization means that it gives America the opportunity to extend its influence without having other screaming that it is pursing neo-imperialism policies and that it is trying to shape the world in its image. Thus the most important issue is not America’s control of globalization, which as a child, cannot be controlled as it matures, but whether America “raised’ globalization well by giving it the basis and the values to shape a world in which it will not be vilified, but one in which it can prosper by being itself.

Falling out of love with Sarko

The Times of London and others are already out of love with the new French president Sarkozy (well “out of love” is a strong expression):

Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing reformer who becomes French President on Wednesday, upset both the United States and his opponents yesterday by offering the job of Foreign Minister to a Socialist veteran with anti-American credentials.

Hubert Védrine, 59 — a former senior aide to the late President Mitterrand — who served as Foreign Minister from 1997 to 2002, was considering the proposal yesterday.

The prospect of Mr Védrine running foreign policy has infuriated the beleaguered Socialists and amazed the diplomatic world because he is the architect of a doctrine for containing what he called the abusive “steamroller” of American power. His views on “the hyperpower” — the term that he coined in the 1990s — would appear to conflict with Mr Sarkozy’s pro-Atlantic views.

First, that Hubert Védrine is not anti-US but pro-multipolar world and there is a big difference. Védrine believes that the world cannot prosper with the power in the hands of one nation. It is a legitimate view even though a narrow one, but it isn’t anti-US because calling it so delegitimizes it as though Védrine were on the side Bin Laden,  Chávez, and Ahmadinejad, all of those for whom the US is evil. 

Second, Sarko isn’t giving up his ideology, but showing his tactical skills. He wants to have some members from the left in his government to keep the opposition the Socialists and the centrists in a coma so that they won’t prevent him from ruling and from winning in 2012. After all what better way to legitimate the view that he represents la magnifique France if he is the rassembleur¸ the uniter with results to bring back to life a term that was popular during the 2000 republican primary.

I think that those who believe that Sarkozy is going to be as openly pro-American as Blair are mistaken because that would be political suicide. Sarkozy will be anti-anti-American, but nothing more because the differences between France and the United States aren’t superficial and real even though they need not to become sources of unnecessary animosity and confrontation.

Religion and meaning

“Just structures are an indispensable condition for a just society, but they neither rise nor function without a moral consensus in society on fundamental values. […] Where God is absent — God with the human face of Jesus Christ — these values fail to show themselves with their full force: nor does a consensus arise concerning them. […] I do not mean that nonbelievers cannot live a lofty and exemplary morality; I am only saying that a society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values. […] Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves. And this ideological promise has proven false.” Pope Benedict XVI.

A musical sunday

The name of this French rapper is Abd al Malik and he is, I believe, the best French of the moment. The title of this song is 12 Septembre 2001 (12 September 2001) and it talks of course about what followed 9/11. Great song, original artist to enjoy a slow Sunday. Happy mother's day! On the subject of mother's day, why is it on different day in the US than in other countries?

Bernard-Henri, Ségo, French identity politics, and the “perfect woman” myth

Haaretz has a great article about the French presidential election,  which is presents a narrow-minded view of that election, but a fascinating one nevertheless. In the article, Bernard-Henri Levy explains why he didn’t vote for Sarkozy but for Ségolène Royal even though he shared a twenty years friendship with Sarkozy. I had savaged BHL in the end of last year because I thought that he went a bit too far in his criticism of Ségo, but I have to admit that the French elections reconciled me with him. The first one is that he was one of the few prominent French intellectuals who didn’t follow support Sarkozy even though it would have been easier for them to do so. The second reason is that he make a critical point, which rebuted the argument of those intellectuals, which included to my horror Glucksmann, by making the point that when one considers oneself a leftist and vote for a right wing candidate unless one has changed in that case one must take responsibility for that change. The article in Haaretz ends somewhat on sour note because it portrays France not as a united country, but as one, which is a collection of communities to which each political candidate must talk separately to gain their vote. Sugary excerpt:

A Jewish Frenchwoman, a socialist, explained to me this week why she abandoned the left in favor of the right in this election. She says many French Jews did so, contributing to Sarkozy's success. She works in the National Assembly and is close to many members of the Socialist Party. In recent months, the greater Royal's status in the party became, the more convinced she became that the time had come to leave.
"I have always been a socialist, and I felt complete identification with the party," she said. "And then something happened that caused me terrible distress. In 2000 a wave of attacks on Jews began in the wake of the intifada in the territories. I felt that my government had deserted me. People I had voted for preferred to ignore the attacks and to abandon us. I came to the conclusion that the government did not want to alienate the North African immigrants and therefore did not call a spade a spade. The country became closer to the Arabs but turned its back on the Jews.
"And then came the stupid law on the issue of the shortened, 35-hour work week. I saw that this law was creating confusion in the workplace. I felt that the shortened week, instead of creating more work and increasing growth, was doing the opposite.
"I didn't forgive my party for betraying the Jews. As a Jewish woman I felt so alone, so vulnerable, so abandoned. I didn't have a single relative who hasn't been harmed by Muslims. It was terrible.
[…] "And then Segolene Royal came and hijacked the party. I simply got up and left. Who does she think she is? She's an invention of the women's magazines and the polls. The women's journals turned her into a smiling, pleasant woman, but from working in the National Assembly I knew the party members hated her - because of her dictatorial personality, because she is not a nice person. As opposed to the compassion that she demonstrated outwardly, we knew she was manipulative.

Ah now we get it! Ségolène Royal was unfit to be president because on the contrary to Sarkozy who is a lamb, she had a dictatorial personality. Such vile assertions are used in order to belittle Ségo by arguing that she represents nothing and is good at nothing. Ségolène Royal was not the perfect woman nor was she the perfect politician. Ségolène Royal became Jezebel in the French election because her faults became sins and signs of incompetence. More importantly because she made the mistake of listening to people who told her that she couldn’t be herself even though she sensed that it was the best and the only thing that she could be. The lesson of the French presidential election is the same, which Jane Fonda explained poignantly in an interview when she was promoting her autobiography My life so Far, sometimes being good enough is good enough.

Harvey Mansfield, politics, and manliness

Harvey Mansfield was this year’s Jefferson Lecture at the national Endowment for the Humanities. He talked at great length about politics and how about the role that humanities can play today in the understanding of politics. Here is a short excerpt of his lecture:

Politics is not an exchange between the bargaining positions of a buyer and a seller in which self-interest is clear and the result is either a sale or not, and without fuss. Self-interest, when paramount, cools you off and calms you down; thumos pumps you up. That we get angry if we feel cheated, or that we succumb to the charm of salesmanship, shows that self-interest does not explain even commercial transactions. More than a small measure of ego enters into the behavior of those who pride themselves on calculation. In politics there is bargaining, as in commerce, but with a much greater degree of self-importance. People go into politics to pick a fight, not to avoid one. Self-interest tends towards peace, and if it could replace the thumos in our souls it would accomplish universal peace. Meanwhile, however, people want to stand for something, which means opposing those who stand for something else. In the course of opposing they will often resort to insults and name-calling, which are normal in politics though never in your interest. The demand for more civility in politics today should be directed toward improving the quality of our insults, seeking civility in wit rather than blandness.

Philip Kennicott wrote about this lecture in the Washington Post on Wednesday and made this great point about Mansfield’s emphasis of thumos:

So thumos is no quaint philosophical idea borrowed from Plato and dusted off for the humanities crowd at the Jefferson Lecture. It is the underlying sense behind an almost nihilistic view of politics as the plaything of great men, a form of play that is more exhilarating and interesting and compelling to scholars such as Mansfield than the rusty old rule of law that might constrain greatness.

That is precisely what is bothersome about Mansfield's view of politics and of society. He makes politics a contact sport where what matters is power, anger, and other unashamed expressions of manliness. If Mansfield is right then we are back to the Hobbsian state of nature where power (which Mansfield equates to greatness) is the sole thing, which matters, and equality becomes  a notion that is for suckers, the weak. Manliness becomes the norm because it is about accepting nature and burping when one wants to burp. Laws and ethics don’t matter because they try to make natural and normal expressions of anger unmanly.

Rudeness and doom

“Rudeness has a long history as a token of radicalism – the Roundheads, French revolutionaries and Bolsheviks were all notoriously short on manners – so a generous interpretation of middle-class nastiness might be that it is a perverse signifier of solidarity with the masses. Or perhaps people are having a bad day, or had unhappy childhoods, or their cat died that morning.

Then again, the mark of a grown-up is the ability not to make other people suffer for one’s own misfortunes. I had a dear friend who was killed because the driver of the car that ran him over had been having a bad day, and it didn’t strike me as a good-enough excuse. In fact, it has left me with a conviction that our only hope as a species is to be kind to one another. And if the middle classes can’t behave properly at parties, we’re all doomed.” Jane Shilling, “If the bourgeoisie can’t behave, we’re doomed.”

Dawkins and belief

Ruth Gledhill wonders whether Dawkins is more than the angry atheist, which he appears to be and whether he is a believer after all. She portrays him as a man who has belief, but who is just unwilling to admit. Sugary excerpt:

“Love is not a rational process and I’m as susceptible to love as anybody else,” he says. “To say God is love, if that is an actual definition, then I believe in God because I believe in love. But God isn’t love, God is something supernatural, and in certain religions, love is supernatural. When you say love is not rational, there are two ways of interpreting that. You could say that love is not intelligible by rational means, and I’m not sure I believe that. As a scientist I believe that love is intelligible on rational grounds. That doesn’t mean that a particular person who is in love can learn anything, gain anything, or understand their own emotions in rational terms. But I do believe that love, like any other manifestation of brain stuff, is intelligible in rational terms, although maybe not in practice.”

So love is merely a biological phenomenon? “Anything to do with life is biological. So, in a way, you haven’t asked me a very big question and I haven’t answered it.”

People of faith make the assumption that people who don’t believe don’t have a soul, are empty and in the dark. I find it interesting that there is much more of a burden put on atheism and non belevers to justify and explain why they don’t believe as if that mere fact is an abnormality and an impossibility. In other words, Atheists and nonbelievers are either people who believe and don’t know it or people who are stubbornly refusing to see the light. However, all of this circular reasonning leads nowhere except to one issue and that is the value of human existence and human beings without God. Is humanity precious in itself or do humans have to tie themselves to God to make their life meaning, valuable? What if Dawkins is exactly what he puports to be, an atheist who thinks that God is delusion, would that make him a sas pitiful little man or a man with the courage to say no and to assume the consequences of his worldview.

Desire and morality

“Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is guilty. This "either-or" encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge.” Milan Kundera.