The Republic of Dissent

France and the obsession with motherhood

“There's a loud and expensive national crusade to have as many children as possible and valorize motherhood. It is a nation where the winner of the President's motherhood medal (what other country has those?) makes the cover of Paris-Match, a place where people follow the fertility rate the way Americans follow the Dow Jones Industrial Average and where a national celebration with distinctly racist overtones erupted last year when that fertility rate reached the stable-population point of 2.1 children per mother, making France the continental European leader in fecundity. Upon the loins of the Frenchwoman, the weight of a nation.

To counter this, Ms. Maier has used her little book to place a new word in the French vocabulary, a word that has entered the popular lingo in much the same way that "soccer mom" entered North American English in 1993 - and for the same reason, because it defines a new category of person who is instantly identifiable.

The word is merdeuf. French speakers recognize it instantly as a contraction of mère de famille, the traditional phrase for a full-time mother, a housewife, a woman who makes mothering her career. But the contraction turns it into something that sounds like a combination of merde and oeuf, carrying the implication that these patriotic mega-moms are "egg-shitters."

She explains: "It means, 'a woman who has children, so she no longer cares about anything else.' " With this word, the French image of the full-busted Baby-Bjorn soldier is transformed from Marianne, the patriotic ideal, into something more tragicomic, a victim of that patriotism.

"France," Ms. Maier says, "the infantophile state par excellence."

It was partly this pressure that caused her to leave for the softer and less fertile shores of Brussels, only a 90-minute drive from Paris. She and her partner, who have a psychiatric practice, prefer to have their kids in school here.

"In France, we are supposed to love children more than anything, and it's a bit ridiculous, because it brings a lot of deceptions. It's an idea that is growing in popularity now, and it's very heavy on me. It's become a matter of national identity and it was unfortunately one of the themes of the last election."” Doug Sanders, “'I really regret it. I really regret having children.'”

Turkey and the EU

“Turkey has no chance whatever of joining a European Union which is significantly more deeply integrated than it is now and next to no chance of joining an EU that is as integrated as it is already. The reason is straightforward. The size of the Turkish population—expected to reach 85 million or more by the end of the next decade—would give Turkey the right to a weighting in European decision making bodies equal or greater than Germany. It would become the European Union’s pre-eminent power. Combined with all the other misgivings about culture, Islam, migration and democracy it is inconceivable that all, or even most, of the EU’s 27 (by then perhaps more than 30) member states would allow a mainly non-European nation to become top dog in a tightly integrated European Union where qualified majority voting had been extended and scope for the national veto had been diminished. Think what you want about the virtues of more or less majority voting on other matters. But at least be clear on this. Further moves towards deeper integration would kill Turkey’s chances altogether. A looser EU, in other words, will find it easier to be a wider EU. Or to put as provocatively as I can, Turkey should be praying that Britain's Eurosceptics win the day in the debate about Europe's future. As far as EU membership is concerned, they're her only real hope.” Robin Sheperd, “Why Britain's Eurosceptics are good for Turkey.”

The trouble with Hitlerization

Seymour Hersh has some interesting things to say on the United States, Iran, the Middle East and foreign policy in an interview with Spiegel. What caught my attention was he said the following:

We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad.

The trouble with Hitlerization is that it is based on historical determinism that is on the idea that history always repeats itself, that the future can only resemble the past and therefore we are not merely the heirs of our past, but its prisoners. With Hitlerization, the only solution outcome becomes war, confrontation for after all, how does one negotiate with Hitler without becoming Neville Chamberlain and having dirty hands. The point is that Ahmadinejad doesn’t have to be Hitler to be dangerous or a menace to the world that needs to be confronted and that making the comparison cheapens history in order to avoid making tough decisions or simply to avoid deciding by arguing that there are no choices to make. After all, it was not the past that made Hitler Hitler, but his present, the actions that he undertook by choosing to exterminate innocent groups of people and to dominate the world.

War is an honest not an ugly word

“A word is enough to raise a storm. Commentators' inkwells began to boil over and the West European governments declared their disapproval in a very undiplomatic manner.

By citing the risk of war entailed by Iran's desire to build the bomb, and the need to prepare for this in order to avert it, did [French Foreign Minister] Bernard Kouchner commit blasphemy, displaying his naivety and lack of professionalism?

He was promptly admonished by his counterparts, Sergey Lavrov in Moscow and [Massimo] D'Alema in Rome ("we must not talk about war now.") It was the same in Berlin, albeit less directly. But we must accept the fact that the apparently untimely "blunder" by the French Doctor, the new French foreign minister, expresses a long-held opinion.

[…] France's new "steadfastness" begins with a new language, rejecting circumlocutions and linguistic taboos: if there is a risk of war, it must not be concealed, but must on the contrary be identified, it must be spoken about clearly in order precisely to do everything possible to halt the escalation, before the "catastrophic alternative."

[…] When the wise man points to the moon, fools look at his finger. When Kouchner speaks of "war," many Europeans consider it a weighty word released like a pistol shot amid the subdued atmosphere of respectful negotiations.

[…] Has the deadlock in Iraq taught nobody anything? We think we know what we are saying when we talk about "guerrilla warfare," "Vietnam-ization," and so forth. We are mistaken. The Spanish guerrilla against Napoleon, the anti-Hitler resistance movements, and the anti-colonial insurrections primarily targeted foreign armies, secondly "collaborators," and occasionally the population in order to mobilize them through intimidation.” André Glucksmann, “You said 'war', Mr Kouchner, and you were not mistaken...”

Hannah Arendt and Complexity

Steven E. Aschheim has an impressive review of Hannah Arendt’s The Jewish Writings, which I believe in one of the essentials reading of the year. Aschheim’s review is both informative and thought-provoking because he doesn’t attempt to avoid Arendt’s complexities to make her understandable. By not acquiescing to the temptations of simplification, Aschheim which reminds me of my favorite Emerson’s famous maxim is that to be great is to be misunderstood. Sugary excerpt:

What is it about Arendt’s Jewish writings and persona that have rendered them so peculiarly divisive, and emotionally and ideologically charged? This too is related to her predilection to resist easy classification and simple self-definition, to question ideological platitudes, to provoke and to hold contradictory (some would say, perverse) positions. She incisively dissected the rise of modern political anti-Semitism – yet seemed to hold the Jews partly responsible for its emergence and success. She was ideologically and institutionally identified with the Zionist movement (it may come as a shock to recall that, in 1941, her later bête noire, Gershom Scholem, described her as “a wonderful woman and an extraordinary Zionist”) – and one of its most severe critics. She was one of the earliest and most concerned analysts of the “Final Solution” – yet, for many, her analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s banality and her indictment of the complicity of the Jewish Councils in the extermination process rendered her more of an enemy than a friend of the Jewish people.

The same complexity applied as much to Arendt’s personal life choices as it did to her philosophical positions. If her committed Jewish identity and politics seemed self-evident – the last chapter of her early work on Rachel Varnhagen is entitled “One Does Not Escape Jewishness” – Arendt always took care to challenge the non-reflective, self-celebratory nature of group affiliations. She took great pride in the complex and critical, perhaps even subversive, nature of her own intertwined commitments. Of her relationship to her second husband, the German radical and non-Jew, Heinrich Blücher, she wrote in 1946: “If I had wanted to become respectable I would either have had to give up my interest in Jewish affairs or not marry a non-Jewish man, either option equally inhuman and in a sense, crazy”. Her Jewish identification was strong and passionate – “I belong to the Jews”, she declared, “beyond dispute or agreement” – but was never absolute. It was most clear and decisive under conditions of persecution, where, as she put it, one had to “resist only in terms of the identity that is under attack”. “Politically”, she stated in 1946, “I will speak only in the name of the Jews”, but she immediately qualified this by adding, “whenever circumstances force me to give my nationality”. It is precisely this deep yet ambiguous involvement in existentially crucial Jewish matters, indeed, her partial “insider” status that still endow her, for many, with a troubling, even threatening, relevance. As a “connected critic”, a member of the family rather than an outsider or enemy, her arguments have standing and authority; they demand engagement rather than simple dismissal.

In one of his most important speeches, during the second round of the French presidential elections, Nicolas Sarkozy (yes, I admit it, I’ve got Sarko fever, but the first step on the road to recovery is to admit it) affirmed that he wanted to help France break from the heritage of 1968. This rupture was necessary because the heirs of 68 were responsible for the establishment of a culture of permissiveness, which resented work, order and discipline, and justified wrongs and evil by refusing to acknowledge its existence because they had neither read Camus nor Hannah Arendt. He was in fact making a statement about the legacy of Hannah Arendt, which he believed supported his ideology and his emphasis on moral clarity and individualism. I think that Sarkozy misread Arendt or rather choose purposely to ignore her complexity and her warnings against the lack of thought and of culture and that the fact that human beings weren’t prisoners of their past and their history. It is for that reason that Hannah Arendt liked to quote René Char who stated that“Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament” (Our heritage is preceded by no testament). In other words, just as Hannah Arendt is Hannah Arendt,  68 is 68 and 2007 is 2007 and tomorrow will be tomorrow. The key word as always is responsibility, the responsibility not of the few, but of society as a whole.

History matters

In this video, Richard Milton,  who has written a book on the Britain-Germany relationship, Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany - 100 Years of Truth and Lies, talks about the history of the relationship between those two countries. He highlights the transformations that it underwent throughout the course of history, which have made it less "special" than it once was.

Rape, feminists, and the law

“Rape isn't the only crime that's unresponsive to law enforcement. We don't imagine that prosecuting drug dealers will solve the drugs problem. We urge their potential victims to "just say no". We advise that those receiving emails from Nigeria that promise large sums of money in return for smaller upfront payments should exercise caution.

When our houses are burgled, we're hardly more likely than rape victims to see the intruder end up behind bars. So what do we do? We fit locks to our doors and windows. We keep our valuables out of sight.

To suggest any comparable behaviour in the field of rape is considered outrageous. Yet, why shouldn't women be encouraged to think twice before visiting footballers' hotel rooms late at night? Why shouldn't they be advised that to get themselves into a drunken stupor in the company of a frisky male could carry risks? Whatever the polite classes may feel, a large proportion of the population continues to see sense in such admonitions.

Feminists object that even to mention such things constitutes a shift of blame from perpetrator to victim. Yet, when we fit window locks, does this make burglary our fault?

The insistence of feminist activists that the courts must provide the only solution to rape is surely political. They want a demonstration that the state backs women against men. Yet, in perpetuating the idea that women have no part to play in securing their own safety, campaigners are doing them no favours.” David Cox, “Feminism’s Rape Fallacy.”

Starting a revolution by saying oui

Philip Gordon too seems enamored with the Sarkozy revolution, which to him means that France is saying not only oui to American power, but also to reality. Sugary excerpt:

"We've already turned the page," Bernard Kouchner, France's popular new foreign minister, likes to say. The page in question concerns the tensions between France and the United States, a historic rivalry that reached a peak several years ago over the invasion of Iraq. Now, under the unabashedly pro-American President Nicolas Sarkozy, Paris seems  to be signaling that France will no longer seek to constrain U.S. power as a matter of principle. Even as other European leaders keep their distance from the unpopular hyperpower, France is pursuing a revolution in foreign policy that could transform the transatlantic relationship. […] Still, Sarkozy has already demonstrated his willingness to do things differently and to take risks. He is gambling that French anti-Americanism is not as deep or widespread as is commonly assumed, and he may well be proved right. France's president, moreover, has enormous power over foreign policy. Sarkozy—with the assistance and political cover that Kouchner (a former leader of the opposition Socialist Party) provides—seems determined to use it. The next chapter in French-U.S. relations has yet to be written. But the page has definitely been turned.

I am now convinced that Sarkozy can walk on water. What else is there to say except “Santo Subito ?”

Reading without thinking

Nicholas Lezard writes the following on the death of the reader, the depressing fact that thought-provoking books aren’t selling well and I think that he is right on target:

So Jordan's "novel", Crystal, is outselling the entire Booker shortlist. Take away Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and she is outselling the other five combined by a factor of about 12 to one. The news has rather depressed writers, publishers and agents involved at the more literary end of the scale.

If I may shed some light on the gloom, though, I would suggest that we are not really comparing like with like. There isn't really, despite my using the word above, a "scale" of writing. Katie Price's book and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (the slowest-selling novel on the Booker shortlist) share nothing except the physical format of covers and numbered pages. No one who wants to read one is going to want to read the other. One is aimed at stimulating thought; the other one at its suppression.

This is a suppression that most people in this country are happy to connive in. Seven years ago, Philip Roth put it like this: "Every year, 70 readers die and only two are replaced." We are reaching the end of literary culture - rather as we have just about reached the end of poetry. It will take rather longer for the novel to reach the same atrophied, marginalised state as the contemporary poem (the last poet that Mark Lawson had on Radio 4's flagship arts programme Front Row was, I gather, Pam Ayres), but it will happen, sales of On Chesil Beach notwithstanding.

A meaningless day at the UN

Gideon Rachman writes about the day of the big three, Sarkozy, Bush, and Ahmadinejad at the UN. He analyzes their “performances,” which is I believe the appropriate term to call a reading of a speech in front of an audience just for the purpose of being applauded and receiving brownie points from the press. In other words, the contents of these speeches almost never matter unless they are bellicose, provocative, and vitriolic as was the speech Hugo Chávez gave last year. It is ironic, but the UN is never as mundane as when heads of state and of governments make their annual trip to New York to take the opportunity to grandstand and to reassure themselves and their home political base of their own importance. Sugary excerpt:

It was fascinating to sit through an entire Ahmadinejad speech and press conference for the first time. I thought he pulled off the difficult trick of being simultaneously boring and sinister. Boring because he goes on and on about religion. I don't know why this surprised me - it is the Islamic Republic of Iran, after all. But the religious rhetoric is usually wisely edited out of the compressed version of his remarks. Having to listen to it all in full, is a bit like being trapped on the doorstep by a Jehovah's Witness. On the other hand, I also found his performance sinister because it is clear that he is genuinely obsessed by Israel. These are not stray remarks, forced out of him. He can't keep off the subject.

[…] Sarko maintained his current tough line on Iran. But - for the rest - his speech was a bit of a disappointment. In fact, I thought it was in the worst tradition of windy, high-falutin' French rhetoric. Sample quote: The UN is "a dream of the human conscience against all who threaten to destroy humanity." It's a shame - I thought he was better than that. Maybe a diplomat wrote the speech.

Bush's performance was also a little odd. The speech was terse and well-delivered, apart from the usual problems pronouncing foreign names (Aung San Suu Kyi was a bit of a tonguetwister.) But he all but avoided the big international questions that clearly will dominate the rest of his term - Iraq, Iran and the Middle East peace process. Instead he talked a lot about development and malarial bed-nets. He has left it rather late to show the UN his softer side.

The New York Sun writes that there was a role reversal between Bush and Sarkozy for it was Sarkozy who took on the difficult task of adopting a serious and harsh tone on Iran. I thought that Sarkozy’s speech was fine, but that he was careful and that he was fighting his nature, which is too be direct and confrontational. He reminded me of the voluntary self-restrained Sarkozy of the debate with Ségolène Royal. Sarko didn’t want to seem too abrupt and too eager to battle, but rather as a president capable of providing steady, fair, and also tough leadership. The trouble is that when Sarko isn’t himself, he is boring, and painful to watch but again it is always safe to be boring on the international scene.

Jesus's gender and women priests

Monica Miller reviews Sister Sara Bulter’s The Catholic Priesthood and Women, which defends the Catholic Church’s ban on Women priest. It is an entertaining read, because it shows how irrational religious thinking can be. The critical passage of Miller’s review is where she discusses Butler’s use of the masculinity of Jesus to justify the exclusion of women from the priesthood:

As important as the fundamental reasons are for the all-male priesthood, these reasons must be doctrinally based on something. In the chapter that deals specifically with these reasons, Butler recognizes that doctrinally the male gender of Christ and the Apostles “is not arbitrary, but significant.” Thus a close connection does exist between the fundamental reasons or Church doctrine and the theological reasons. I would argue that, indeed, the doctrine and the theology overlap and begin to merge into one another. This merger is rooted in the fact that the priest acts in persona Christi. This is not simply a theological argument. It is the doctrine of the Church. Acting in the person of Christ means to act in his role as head to the Church. Eucharistically, Christ cannot simply be identified with the Church. He is the head that causes the being of the Church. Christ’s gender is a sign of his headship—his masculinity is a sign of his difference-in-relation to his people.

Butler is correct when she points out that in the Incarnation the Logos “assumed our human nature.” She argues that the assumption of human nature is the primary focus of the Incarnation and not the male gender of Christ. She makes it appear, however, that Christ’s masculinity was a kind of divine flip of the coin, since Jesus, to be human, had to be “characterized by sex.” Since he chose to be male, this is now a “fact of history” and this fact becomes significant for the economy of salvation—as if this is something the Church is stuck with and must make sense of theologically. Yet there are trinitarian, christological, and metaphysical reasons for Christ’s incarnation as a male that Butler does not consider—reasons that would help the book steer clear from making Christ’s male gender appear arbitrary.

Arbitrary or no, Christ’s male gender, as Butler recognizes, is constitutive of the economy of salvation. But this means we are not dealing any longer with merely theological reasons for the ban on women priests. After all, Christ’s male gender is as much a historical fact, as much a willful historical choice on the part of the Redeemer, as was his choice to call only men to be among the Twelve. Thus Christ’s having called only male human beings to be apostles, having called only male human beings to share in his priestly ministry, is preceded by the fact of his own masculinity in relation to the Church. Thus the “fundamental reasons” and the “theological reasons” are closely intertwined. If the Church believes she must remain faithful to an original gesture of Christ when he called only males to be apostles, she is even less free to dismiss the male gender of Christ in the economy of salvation upon which the meaning of that gesture depends. The ban on women priests is not simply a matter of the Church remaining true to a fact—Christ only chose men—but a matter of the Church remaining faithful to the fundamental truth of the relation between the order of redemption and the order of creation—an order the Church has no power to undo.

I’m so overwhelmed by the strength and the logic of this argumentation that I have nothing to say and that it leads me to agree with the Catholic Church on the issue of women priests. I mean one has to wonder why a woman would want to be a priest or even a nun for that matter if she has to fight such arguments.

Making Science more political

“Perhaps the tragedy, though, is not that science is too political – it is that science is not political enough. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, scientific conflicts are increasingly too important to be entrusted to the scientists. Public policy would be significantly better off if scientists were treated with greater scepticism and less deference.

Public debate would be far better informed if scientists were pushed to make their work more accessible, self-critical and contextually aware of findings in complementary technical disciplines. Politicians in democracies should not hesitate to exploit publicly the inherent uncertainties and legitimate disagreements in scientific analyses on sensitive issues. Highlighting science’s flaws – not unlike highlighting flaws in healthcare, national security and economic programmes – is good politics and even better policy.

Science as an enterprise may be objective; scientists as individuals are not. Anyone who has participated in peer reviews or research grant committees knows this. Scientists can be as vulgar, pigheaded and contemptuously dismissive of contrary evidence as any lawyer, civil servant, journalist or elite professional. Indeed, scientists who inject themselves into the white-hot centre of policy debate tend not to be famous for either modesty or understatement. They are, in every meaning of the phrase, “political scientists”.

[…] Politicians should cheerfully exploit this ugly fact. Scientists will be more credible and persuasive not if they are less political but if their arguments are more accessible, more testable and, yes, more humble. Then again, that is just a beautiful hypothesis.” Michael Schrage, “Science must be more Political.”

Written on the body

This video is a short excerpt of PBS documentary, Lumo, on African women and the scars of war, which they carry on their bodies. It is remarkable that we still live in an age where un corps de femme, the body of a woman is never really hers. It belongs to somebody else, to her family, her husband, her children, her society, or to other women who don't want to acknowledge that it is hers and that she has the right to use it anyway that she wants. Marking a female body isn't just a way to establish ownership over it; it is a way to remind her that she is not a being for itself, but a being in itself meaning that she has to accept judgment, condemnation, and punishment. De Beauvoir stated famously in The Second Sex that one isn't born a woman but that one becomes a woman. She was almost right. It is the act of becoming that causes the problem for after all, if a woman has to become herself then her body, everything rightfully hers is an instrument that she has to submit to someone/something to belong, to become une femme en autre, a woman among others. What is sad about this video is that it doesn't take much imagination to know visualize the remaining of these women’s lives and to understand that they are damaged goods. Their only purpose now is testimony, to show with their bodies that something terrible has happened to them and is happening within their society that has as much to do with war than with the need that combating forces have to find ideal victims that will make their savagery alive and thus, unforgettable.

Colonialism and useless apologies

“France not only, unlike Britain, did very little to integrate its colonies populations during colonial times, they also abandoned their colonies after they gained independence. And they supported the independent state dictators. Yet, Article 4 of the February 23, 2005 law states that “school curricula admit the positive role of France overseas, notably in North Africa”.
The law does, of course, not recognize France’s negative role in colonialism. It alienated local populations by not educating them, denying them citizenship, exploiting them and of course torturing them, and sometimes committing massacres, such as the May 8, 1945 massacres in Algeria. It also committed horrors during the Indo-China and Algeria wars of independence.
[…] An example of the economic negative effects of French colonialism was the agricultural policies in Vietnam. Thanks to new methods of irrigation, rice production quadrupled between 1880 and 1930, during the French colonial rule. Yet, the consumption of rice among the average Vietnamese peasant’s decreased, without substitution of other food. France then created an elite among the Vietnamese, and gave no land to the landless peasants. That scenario was similar in other former French colonies. The elite created by France is now the ruling elite in independent countries which are still oppressing their populations. And of course, France supports those elites.
France, if it refuses to apologize, should at least condemn dictatorship in its former colonial countries and encourage their democratization and economic development. They should acknowledge that the situation in former colonies is in part due to their colonial regime.” Akli Hadid, “France and its Colonial Past.”

The leadership question

John Vinocur writes the following on what he perceives to be Sarkozy’s France to forge its path to world leadership by addressing the Nato issue:

Enter Nicolas Sarkozy, embracing everything French that radiates ambition and promises power, but saying France's social model was a sham and its state apparatus and bureaucracy a dinosaur buckling at the knees.

That's been covering fire enough, aimed at French complacency, for Sarkozy's government to start shooting at the futility of a foreign and security policy that allowed France to flatter its individuality but increasingly robbed it of influence and the perspective of leading Europe.

Beyond a hard line on Iran, serious mistrust of Vladimir Putin's Russia and a more even-handed approach to the Middle East, Sarkozy's France has come far in defining its old failings.

[…] Clearly, returning to full membership in NATO, breaking with the ineffective, not-quite-honest symbol of France claiming a world role from its own private niche, would be the most direct way.

The move would plug up the hole of noncommitment to the NATO defense arrangements that virtually all of Europe wants and whose non-acceptance makes France an ultimately doubtful European political leader.

But it's one big gulp. It requires spitting out a 40-year-old national mind-set and burying the last big conceit remaining in the legacy of Charles de Gaulle.

Reverting to the old French prism, Morin described a "downside" in the process - "which is perhaps weakening our international position which could seem to be aligned."

Did you say aligned? Make no mistake, NATO is aligned. It debates issues, makes up its mind as a unit, takes sides and acts in common militarily. There are obvious obligations. And the Americans have considerable influence.

[…] From an American point of view, a big French role is a great plus if France, for its own reasons, has truly persuaded itself it will function most credibly from inside NATO ranks.

The United States, smilingly, can probably live with Sarkozy's now stated re-entry "conditions" of progress on European defense and a prominent French role in the NATO command.

Reading Vinocur convinced me that Sarkozy will not make the decision to have France rejoin Nato, at least not in the immediate future. He won’t make that decision for the simple reason that he doesn’t have to make it right now. Just by suggesting that France may do it and by talking about his admiration for America and about the New France that is different from the Old France, Sarkozy is already enjoying the benefits that the decision to have France rejoin would have given him. What I mean is that Sarkozy is going to hold off until the first disagreements surface between France and the United States and a real crisis comes along and until he has accepted the idea that style, words, and voluntary, spectacular, and perpetual movements aren’t enough to make France a world power that leads.

Is it ok to laugh?

The best post I read yesterday was Michael Moynihan on Katha Pollit’s new book Learning to Drive or rather on Toni Bentley’s review in the Sunday Times and her interview with Deborah Solomon. Moynihan makes fun of Pollit’s radical views and on Bentley’s reaction to it. Sugary excerpt:

Bentley succinctly summarizes Pollitt's argument:

Have you heard the latest? "Men are rats." This directly from the desk of Katha Pollitt, a longtime feminist columnist at The Nation.

Learning to Drive charts Pollitt's relationship with an unfaithful boyfriend, offers her thoughts on plastic surgery, and bemoans the yuppification of the Upper West Side. In one of many beyond parody passages, Bentley recounts Pollitt's attempt to crack into her boyfriends email account:

She relishes the moment when he will betray his new girlfriend (he marries her, fingers - his and ours - crossed) and attempts to read his e-mail by guessing his password: " ‘marxism,' ‘marx,' ‘karlmarx,' ... ‘belgium,' ‘chocolate,' ‘godiva,' ‘naked,' ‘breast,' ‘cunnilingus,' ‘fellatio.'"

One can only wonder why she didn't try "theworkerscontrolthemeansofproduction."

When Pollitt sees her ex and his new beau crossing Riverside Drive, she imagines running them both down, retiring as a prison librarian and "becoming a lesbian." To this, Bentley objects. Sort of:

It's not that I'm against killing unfaithful men - especially one like Pollitt's, who "walks out the door after seven years with a wooden spoon, a spatula, a whisk." It's the loss of self-respect that bothers me. Isn't there a better way for women to show their superiority?

After reading Moynihan, I had to have a laugh but then I realized that I didn’t know whether I was laughing because of Moynihan’s take on Bentley’s review or simply because the review’s itself was funny because of the lack of distance of Bentley to Pollit’s writing and Pollit’s to her own experience. Here is an excerpt of Bentley’s essay:

Pollitt often uses her considerable imaginative dexterity to soften and divert her even more impressive rage. She imagines, for example, that the “world-class womanizer,” his new girlfriend and one of his other girlfriends are walking across Riverside Drive, and she, her newfound driving skills still a bit shaky, runs all three down. “I could,” she reflects, “settle into comfy middle age, reorganizing the prison library and becoming a lesbian.” But in the end, this kind of “what if” mulling, which Pollitt indulges in frequently — the poet trapped in prose — is anticlimactic. Neither pure vitriol nor pure wit, it feels uncommitted, and one longs for a touch of either Elfriede Jelinek or Oscar Wilde to tip the balance. It’s not that I’m against killing unfaithful men — especially one like Pollitt’s, who “walks out the door after seven years with a wooden spoon, a spatula, a whisk.” It’s the loss of self-respect that bothers me. Isn’t there a better way for women to show their superiority? If not, maybe we aren’t superior, and who wants to consider that possibility.

I realize that it was Bentley's review that was funny because although it is true that distance isn’t a requirement to serious writing, but a lack of it tends to lead to extreme personalization that in turn makes the serious comical. That said Bentley’s review is great even though her own prejudices (which she doesn’t seem to be aware) and ideas about feminism are omnipresent, but then again, a review doesn’t have to be objective or neutral to be relevant and serious.

In her interview, Katha Pollit said two things, which caught my attention:

Just because you are part of a social-justice movement, which is how I think of feminism, that doesn’t mean you are some brick wall of impermeable stalwartness in every area. Feminism, for me, is not about presenting a facade of perfect strength to the world.

[…] To certain women out there, feminism seems to mean buying what you want instead of being what you want. Young women live these contradictions and everyone’s down on them because their skirts are too short. I don’t blame them if sometimes they just want to go shopping. Women don’t actually buy more junk than men.

These two quotes made me understand the tone of Bentley’s review because it is difficult not to find humor in something that takes itself so seriously that it stops being aware of its own contradictions and absurdity. Laughter is an appropriate response to the realization that something that demands serious analysis and that judges and condemns without  taking enough distance for self-criticism and self-analysis. I think that feminism has stopped to be about the “me” to become about the “them” because self-actualization is difficult and requires deep thoughts and a mirror. Self-actualization almost always lead to personal responsibility when judging others makes it easier to sustain the illusion and self-indulgent fantasy that women are all the same and shouldn’t be bad, dirty, victims, or in ruins because certain choices are unwomanly as if womanhood were a form of godliness. Feminism is in a coma, because it has become a religion.

Tough talk and strength

The Hindu has an editorial on France’s new tough talk on Iran, It states the following, which shows that tough talk on the international scene doesn’t mean much without real or perceived power to back it:

France’s strategic shift makes little sense when Iran has just entered into an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency that sets a timetable for resolving all the outstanding issues by November 2007. Teheran has actually begun to implement this agreement by responding to the IAEA’s queries on plutonium reprocessing. The Iranians have also agreed to clear any doubt about other aspects of the nuclear programme relating to its peaceful nature. In a report made public on August 30, the IAEA observed that it would be in a position to reconstruct the entire history of the programme if these outstanding issues were addressed. Logically, the sanctions in place can be lifted if this agreement is honoured in all respects and the international watchdog body is able to certify that the Iranian programme does not have a weapons orientation. Such a summation will not of course suit a U.S. that is going all out to deny Iran its due role as a significant player in West Asia. In advocating additional sanctions without waiting for the deal to work, Paris is acting as Washington’s weak-kneed surrogate.

Journalists and personal beliefs

“Journalists like to imagine they are endowed with the magical gift of transcending the limits of their personal loyalties and sectarian beliefs, gliding with liquid ease across freighted cultural boundaries regardless of who they are and how much—or how little—they may identify with their subjects. It’s a heartening conceit. But is it true? Isn’t it more likely that, as with most people, a reporter’s identity does play a role in determining what gets noticed and overlooked—and where the line between empathy and critical detachment is drawn? Perhaps not when the subject is, say, the hedge-fund market or the fashion world. But what of polarizing issues in which identity often does serve as an accurate gauge of a person’s loyalties? Or when the writer is a participant-observer directly entangled in the story being told? Shouldn’t journalists come clean about how such entanglements may slant their work? Or are assumptions on this score less warranted than the surface labels may suggest?” Eyal Press, “The Identity Trap: Does the personal make reporting predictable?”

Strangers, prejudices, and education

John Derbyshire writes the following in the New English Review about Robert Putnam’s study on diversity, which concluded that focus on diversity increases distrust within a community and thus hurts civic life:

Could it be, could it possibly be (the terrible, disgraceful thought occurred to me), could it be that Professor Putnam, with all the resources of Harvard University behind him, with all his massed banks of computers and his battalions of research assistants, their Blackberries clicking and tweeping away, with his piles of questionnaires and his multivariate analyses and his yardsticks and control groups and coefficients of regression—could it be that he has discovered something that ol’ Rudyard knew all along, a hundred years ago?  That when strangers come among us (or for that matter, when we go among them), we find it hard to fathom or to trust them?
If so, then it might also be true that (gasp!) smart kids need to be educated separately from dumb kids (who actually exist!) 
It might even be true (oh no!), as was once the universal belief, that mostly-inbred human groups develop group characteristics—of behavior, and attitude, and socializability, as well as of mere appearance.  Come to think of it, why would this not have been a universal belief?  Matters of breeding and inheritance are, after all, the most ancient human studies—think of all those “begats” in the Old Testament, medieval lineage obsessions, and characters in Victorian novels saying “His family are nobodies, you know.”  With the publicity over recent events like the sequencing of a human genome and the fuss about genetically-modified crops, we have somehow got the impression that the inheritance and propagation of characteristics is a new topic.  In fact it is the oldest of all:  Human beings have been accumulating knowledge about it since animals were first domesticated back in the Neolithic.

Derbyshire fails however to address the critical issue posed by Putnam’s study, which isn’t about the value of diversity, but rather about the ways to ensuring that it becomes a less divisive issue. It is fine to assert to Kipling’s vision of human nature is right, but the issue because whether human nature should stand in the way of progress. In other words, is it a good excuse to argue that people should be allowed to be intolerant because of nature and to allow that society should seeking to modernize or to improve itself because nature is not only always right, but can be changed with education and experience?

Cultural dislocation and writing

The Sidney Morning Herald has an interview with Nancy Huston. She talks about her latest novel Fault Lines, about her French and English background, and the influence that coming from different cultures had on her writing. Sugary excerpt:

When it comes to writing about conflict, being thrown from one culture to another, Huston believes she has an enormous advantage: her own history, "my very chequered past".

"It makes me suspicious of anyone who is really sure who they are and why. That's what I do best, shake up peoples' certainties."

One of the greatest shake-ups in her own life - her transition from English-speaking North American to French-speaking Parisian - happened quite slowly. "It wasn't a decision I made at 20 - I'll be a bilingual novelist. One thing led to another."

A French teacher at high school gave her a love of the language, literature and song. Then she went to Paris for her senior year of college and fell in love. It was 1973, a heady time and place for leftists and feminists. "By the time I'd fallen out of love, I'd started writing."

She had studied creative writing in the US, where she attended college, but found it much easier to write in French. "I don't know the reason, I suppose it was to do with the fact that my mother tongue was too emotionally fraught at the time. I preferred something more distant, more intellectual.

"You don't have the canon established in your brain, so you're not crushed by the enormous wonderful models on their pedestals. You're like a child with 20 to 30 years of life behind you. A very brilliant child, experimenting with sounds and shapes and words."

Her first novel, Les Variations Goldberg, came out in 1981, when she was at her most intellectual and most French. She had just started living with her husband, who was Bulgarian and wrote in French.

"I was in denial of my roots. No childhood, no mother, no problems. That worked for a number of years and then it stopped."

What stopped it? "Motherhood, for one thing." Then came a mysterious neurological illness, eventually diagnosed as a spinal-cord infection. "That brought me down to earth, the idea I was going to die. My legs were numb. There wasn't any pain, so I had time to think and take stock. It seemed my body was saying I'd frozen my roots. I decided to unfreeze them."

When Huston recovered from her illness, she set out to rediscover her mother tongue. She continued to write in French but began to translate her books into English. It was hard, tedious work, she says, but great quality control. "Translation is pitiless. You have a bad sentence, you could read it 20 times in the original, but the moment you translate it, you see what's wrong."

She also began to write books in English, notably Fault Lines and her 1993 novel Plainsong, another four-generation "stolen children" story set in Canada.

Her English originals and translations, though they won her fans overseas, also bemused readers. A Canadian journal included her in an article on "Ten Famous Canadians You've Never Heard Of" and commented: "Writers are a tribe. The trouble with Nancy Huston is we don't know exactly which tribe she belongs to."

I think that not knowing which tribe one belongs to or rather refusing to choose a culture or a language can only make one a better writer. To decide to write in one language when it is possible to choose a different one means to battle between different needs and having to find justifications for that decision with the quality of one’s writings.. When I choose to write in English, I constantly wonder if I would not express what I need to say better in French and the same thing happens when I write in French. This indecisiveness creates in me the desire to write well even though I’m never sure that I have made the right decision, that I have chosen the right language unless I feel good at the quality of my writing. However, since it is difficult for a writer to judge her/his own writing, the issue is never settled and restlessness follows.

Western divergences on Iran and Shame

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Yossi Halevi accuses Germany not only of enabling Iran, but also of betraying the lessons of their own history. Halevi’s accusations are based on Germany’s refusal to back tough economic sanctions on Iran that would forbid European companies to do business with Teheran:

In Berlin, it seemed to me that afternoon, the decision had already been made to learn to live with the Iranian bomb.

Inevitably, Germans and Israelis approach the use of force with very different sensibilities. World War II taught us opposite lessons: for Germans, to suspect power as immoral; for Jews, to regard powerlessness as untenable. Still, I expected greater understanding among Germans of their responsibility in helping to resist the Iranian threat, especially toward Israel. Germany, after all, is Israel's most reliable friend in Western Europe. Since the early 1990s, for example, Germany has on several occasions upgraded Israel's submarine fleet, offering it second-strike nuclear capability to counterbalance threats from Iraq and Iran. When the Iranian government sponsored its notorious conference on Holocaust denial last December, the German government sponsored a simultaneous conference on Holocaust remembrance.

Why, then, the German obstructionism on efforts to contain a nuclear Iran? Business interests, of course, offer one explanation. […] Still, however substantial, business interests alone can't explain Germany's refusal to seriously confront the Iranian threat. The men and women I met in Berlin are obviously concerned about the stability of the Middle East and the safety of the Jewish state, and recognize that a nuclear-armed and expansionist Shiite regime is a danger, ultimately, to Europe as well.

Perhaps another reason for German blindness on Iran is a misplaced sense of contrition. In insisting on engagement rather than confrontation with Tehran, Germans seem to believe they are keeping faith with the lessons of their history. All problems should be peacefully resolved; no aggressor is irredeemable. […] The message Germany is inadvertently sending the Ahmadinejad regime is: Continue to hold out because the West is divided and ultimately will abandon not only the military option but the economic one, too.

Germany’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is arguing that the United States and France are just grandstanding for American and French companies are doing business with Iran:

Several French companies in the automobile, energy and financial sectors -- including Peugeot, Renault, Total, BNP Paribas and Societé Générale -- have hardly reduced the level of business they do with Iran, according to the Foreign Ministry data. German exports to Iran, in contrast, have dramatically declined.

Even more explosive is the data that reveals US hypocrisy over sanctions. The German Foreign Ministry accuses American firms of bypassing the boycott against Iran, which has been in place since 1979, by creating front companies in Dubai to carry out their business. German politicians have long internally accused the United States of knowingly tolerating the practice.

The differences in how strictly sanctions are applied by different countries has led to "German firms being pushed out of the Iranian market," a high-ranking source in the Foreign Ministry told SPIEGEL.

I find this heated rhetoric on Iran not only unnecessarily divisive, but also more importantly worrisome and counterproductive because it divides the West unnecessarily when it needs to be united on an issue as important as the one of Iran and its nuclear ambition. I think that Halevi goes too far by using Germany’s past to shame it for taking a position that it believes sincerely, but perhaps erroneously, is in its interests. The challenge for the United States, France and Germany is to agree to disagree on the means without these disagreements become a distraction to the goal of not letting Iran become a nuclear power and to present a common front by not putting these disagreements to the forefront unless they are deal breaker. I don’t believe that in this instance divergences are so great that they have to fracture the united front for the issue is not whether to have sanctions on Iran, but rather on how to sanction Iran and the choice is not between applying sanctions and doing nothing.

The difficulty with politicizing the European Union

Olaf Cramme has an article in Open Democracy on the European Union. He argues that the EU must become a more political union to avoid the rise of populism and alienation in Europe:

In particular, current EU management thwarts the idea of European citizenship, a concept which demands that individuals must feel that they understand and share ownership of the core mechanism of their society. The Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul argues that "this sense of understanding implies that each of us has the self-confidence to wish to change our society for the better" (see The Collapse of Globalism [Penguin, 2005]). This, in turn, requires that citizens come to see political leadership as the ultimate expression of their belief in the reality of choice and change.

Technocratic dominance and management of Europe, in contrast, proclaims the inevitability of developments and their dynamics - and in doing so serves to drive individuals away from citizenship and, eventually, from the very idea of EU integration. Worse, the absence of choice magnifies the feelings of insecurity, leading to a political arena where false populism appears more and more tempting. The rise of demagogues across the European Union, and from different parts of the political spectrum, exemplifies this.

In Europe, only a few leaders seem to have recognised this dilemma. France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is one of them. When he made his first post-election visit to Brussels in May 2007 he hinted at his thinking on the role of the European Union in response to globalisation: "Europe has to protect its citizen, not to worry them. Europe has to prepare itself for globalisation - it can't just be overtaken by it. Globalisation can't be a Trojan horse in Europe" (see "Sarkozy to champion Europe in trade talks", Financial Times, 23 May 2007). At the European council meeting a month later, Sarkozy insisted on removing the principle of "free and undistorted competition" from Article 3 of the old constitutional treaty.

His motivation and intentions are clear. Sarkozy, despite a declared intention to liberalise the French domestic labour market, does not believe in the virtues of free trade and openness to globalisation. Rather, he regards protectionism as a solution to the unskilled-worker problem, and thinks that the European central bank should make stimulating growth and jobs a priority instead of fiscal and monetary prudence. This questioning of the merits of competition has secured him electoral support in France and won popular favour in other parts of Europe. But the larger point is that in projecting this view, Sarkozy is also saying that he wants a more political Europe - self-evidently one that reflects his analysis and worldview.

Does this mean the provisional end of European harmony? It certainly requires other players to take a firm stand on the issues in question and clarify their divergent positions. If this happened, the healthy result might be that clashing interests and perspectives might come more clearly to the fore and thus allow EU decision-making on how to tackle future challenges to be put to the test.

This is where Sarkozy's line of attack also has a constructive element. Europe, if it is to regain the interest of its citizens and include its citizens centrally in its deliberations, urgently needs a proper debate as well as choices about its political direction. The changes in favour of more democracy and subsidiarity, as envisaged by the "reform treaty", may be a step in the right direction; but of themselves they will hardly generate more enthusiasm for the union. Instead, decisions about a host of issues - managing the single market, the nature of social Europe, Europe's role in a multi-polar world, competition rules, economic redistribution - ultimately need a stronger political underpinning.

For Europe to become more political it has to choose what it is and that choice is difficult given the fact that it has different members with different interests and different visions of Europe and what it can provide for them. Moreover, European political leaders have to accept not to oppose to see the interests of Europe as a whole to their own national interests. The current feud between the European Central Bank’s (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet, who is a Frenchman, and Sarkozy is a good example of these tensions that exist between not only between national and European interests, but also between economics and politics. Sarkozy is criticizing the strong Euro and the ECB because he knows that more likely than not, France’s economy will not be able to grow for much of his term. Trichet and Europe are for Sarkozy the perfect scapegoats because a majority of French already fears that Europe isn’t representing their interests and is infringing upon their national governments.

Blaming the ECB is an effective way to shift responsibility from the lack of economic growth or for an economic slowdown from his government to a few European technocrats have weren’t elected by the people and who therefore have not interest in protecting them. Moreover, it is difficult to have a political European Union when there is no consensus on what the European Union is and when national political leaders are able to use Brussels a scapegoat for their own failings and their lack of political courage.

Sarkozy or the beauty of being a Frenchman in a hurry who has the courage to love America

The New York Times has an interview with Sarkozy, the Frenchman in a hurry as they called him. The interview made smile because the thing that I love about Sarkozy is his pro-Americanism even though I suspect that we are not in love with the same America. However, what struck was the fact that Sarkozy is still behaving as presidential candidate and not as a president for he seems eager to point the finger to some of his compatriots to explain why old France wasn’t so American friendly. Sugary excerpt:

Mr. Sarkozy, who has been accused of being too enamored of all things American, said he considered France and the United States to be on equal footing and somehow better than many others, because they believe that their values are universal and therefore destined to “radiate” throughout the world. The Germans, the Spaniards, the Italians, the Chinese, by contrast, do not think that way, he said.

Mr. Sarkozy defended his decision to summer in America, and not somewhere in France, saying, “I don’t see why I should have given up going to the United States because a small part of the French elite professes an anti-Americanism that in no way corresponds to what the French people think — in no way at all.”

He listed the things that appealed to him during his two-week vacation: the countryside, the shopping malls, the restaurants, swimming in the lake, jogging in the woods while his 10-year-old son rode his bike alongside him. “I loved the kindness and simplicity of the people,” Mr. Sarkozy said.

Sarkozy’s admiration for America is genuine and I think that it may be good for France to have a president willing to experiment with the Anglo-Saxon model, but I wonder if the French really want to live like the Brits or like the Americans and whether they accept it if Paris became as London or as New York, which means not only expansive , but cities where very few can afford to live. I think Sarkozy (I may just be too suspicious) is using his admiration of America to divide France between the elites who are too conservatives and who can’t stand America because they don’t want to modernize France and the rest of the French who love America because they want to live better and to get richer. I’m not sure that things are that simple for I believe that the young entrepreneurs and nouveaux riches in France love America and that the people are too suspicious of American power whom they view as empire and a rival of France. Nevertheless, by dividing France in a manner that enables him to its elites, Sarkozy can reassure the French that they are not blame for the sad state of France’s financial affairs, which his Prime Minister François Fillon has said that France was bankrupt. He can make the case that a few elites are too blame for they lied to them and made it impossible for them to work more, to earn more and to elevate France to the level of America. I think that Sarkozy has already adopted an old tactic that is used in American politics and that is not only to blame the elites, but also to denationalize them by asserting that they are so out of touch that they have forgotten what it means to be real citizens of their country.

Populism, Elitism, and democracy

“It is perverse but true that, in the current epoch, European elites secretly dream of a system that will deprive irresponsible voters of the power to undermine rational politics, and that they are more than ready to use the European Union to realize this dream. At the same time, most citizens are convinced that they have the right to vote but not the right to influence decision-making, which is why they oppose further EU integration.
In this sense, central Europe today can be compared to the France of 1847, before the great wave of national-popular revolution in 1848. In 2007, the major protagonists of European politics are elites who dream of a politically correct form of limited suffrage, while the people are convinced that they already live under a regime of limited suffrage.
The new populist majorities perceive elections not as an opportunity to choose between policy options but as a revolt against privileged minorities – in the case of central Europe, elites and a key collective "other", the Roma. In the rhetoric of populist parties, elites and Roma are twins: neither is like "us"; both steal and rob from the honest majority; neither pays the taxes that it should pay; and both are supported by foreigners – Brussels in particular. Anti-elite sentiments were an important element in central Europeans' motivation to support EU accession; now they are turning against the EU[...] The outcome is politics where populists are becoming openly illiberal, while elites secretly harbour anti-democratic resentments. This is the real danger of the populist moment. In the age of populism, the front does not lie between Left and Right, nor between reformers and conservatives. It is more the case that we are witnessing a structural conflict between elites that are becoming increasingly suspicious of democracy, and angry publics that are becoming increasingly anti-liberal. The fight against corruption, the "war on terror", and anti-Americanism are just three manifestations of the new politics of populism.” Ivan Krastev, “The Populist Movement.”

Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, and ridicule

This video doesn't make me laugh; it makes me sad. It shows how far some can take the idea that culture is everything and justify the unjustifiable. Let me explain what I mean. The president of Gambia is only able to surmount the ridicule of claiming that he can cure Aids because he and others believe that African culture because it is different from others allows him to make ridicule and debasing claims. What Jammed is saying with his behavior is that he believes that Gambians are simpletons and that he is allowed as their king to dominate without people who don’t share his culture questioning him because they cannot understand. I would be less sad if I could claim that Jammeh was just a fool and that Gambians were just like the people in the fable, that is too scared to tell to the King that he is naked, but I think that there is more here to the story. There is an issue of cultural and of difference and of whether asserting one's difference can ever mean that reason, which is claimed by too many people to be Western should be suspended in front of the prosperous. In other words, can Africans just claimed that Leopold Sédar Senghor can right when he self-righteously proclaims that 'negroes' couldn't be rational because they followed their emotions and enjoy the humorous and even satirical spectacle that Jammeh gives us because he accepts to be a saltimbanque and because ridicule doesn't kill.

The political shouldn't be weird

“ “Mainstream” Christianity turns the two most preposterous ideas imaginable – conception without gametes and resurrection from the dead – into planks of its theology and has the nerve to taunt Mormons about adding gold plates into the mix. By simple assertion it anoints the Holy Land as the Holy Land and mocks Mormons for finding parts of Utah and Missouri just as holy. Through sheer hypocrisy it lectures Mormons on the evils of polygamy, discounting the Crusades and the Inquisition as earthly aberrations.

All faith is weird. So leave it out of politics.” Giles Whittell, “Keep Virgin Births and Gold Plates out of Politics.”

Tom Ford, Paris, culture and fashion

Tom Ford has some interesting things to say about Paris, Fashion, and French culture (Hat tip: Jezebel). Ford was trying to contest Paris’s title as the capital of the Fashion and to argue that London is better. I’m not shocked by Ford’s words for I doubt that he knows much about French culture for he seems to be too preoccupied with himself to learn about anything else that has nothing to do with him and to him obviously fashion is culture and culture is solely fashion. Nevertheless, I wonder if Ford is totally wrong and that fashion can be deemed to be culture. Is it possible to limit culture to fashion and therefore, to argue that only cultures that are “fashionable” are valuable? In other words, although I think that it is possible to have fashion without culture and I think that Tom Ford illustrates this point perfectly, I wonder if it is possible to have culture without fashion especially in our world. Sugary excerpt:

"Quite honestly in terms of French culture, if you think about what the French are producing in terms of fashion or architects or painters or musicians, they are quite far behind what the British are producing, and yet when you think of fashion, you think of Paris," said Ford, who was in the capital to judge the Fashion Fringe award held in Covent Garden, central London.

Ford described Paris fashion week, which is home to the likes of Christian Dior, Chanel and Louis Vuitton as "a global showcase – but it isn't necessarily where talent is coming from. When you think of Paris you think of Karl Lagerfeld who is not French, and you think of Marc Jacobs who's not French and Stefano Pilati who's Italian."

Finding justifications for Faith

“It seems to me the “new atheists” (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, etc.) are too hard on “faith”—believing without evidence.  If you believe in God without thinking you have a proof of his existence, or even a reasonably good argument, then your belief is a matter of faith.  Should anybody take you to task for that?  I think not.

A person who was willing to believe nothing “on faith” would have a rather scanty store of beliefs.  He or she would be missing some beliefs I take to be very important.

For example—the belief that every human being matters.  Exactly why does everyone matter?  No doubt you could say a few intelligent things about it, but you’d soon find yourself not quite sure what the basis for the belief is. 

If you think about it long enough, you might start thinking maybe every human being doesn’t really matter.  I think you could find yourself completely perplexed for a while, but after all the perplexity died down, you might believe (I hope you would) that every human being matters. 

If that example doesn’t grab you, think about your own ultimate values.  What do you think is important?  Your convictions on those subjects probably have the character I’m talking about.  You’re committed, but it’s not easy to give the evidence and the arguments.” Jean Kazez, “About Faith.”

Dismissing Sartre

Richard Neuhaus uses Clive James’s criticism of Sartre in Cultural Amnesia to make the point that not only his philosophy isn’t worth much, but he was nothing more than a Communist sympathizer who collaborated with the German occupation of France. Sugary excerpt:

Sartre was a fervent communist to the end, denying or belittling the atrocities committed by Stalin, Mao, and their lesser imitators. As odiously, he made his peace with the Vichy regime and then, after the war, claimed to be a hero of the Resistance, setting himself up as a grand inquisitor, indicting intellectuals whom he thought had been less than heroic. James again: “Heidegger and Sartre were only pretending to deal with existence, because each of them was in outright denial of his own experience, and therefore had a vested interest in separating existence from facts.”

“Working by a sure instinct for bogus language, a non-philosopher like George Orwell could call Sartre’s political writings a heap of beans, but there were few professional thinkers anywhere who found it advisable to dismiss Sartre’s air of intelligence: there was too great a risk of being called unintelligent themselves. Effectivement—to resurrect a French word that was worked to death at the time—Sartre was called profound because he sounded as if he was either that or nothing, and few cared to say that they thought him nothing.” Now that’s polemics of a high order.

Two issues have to be addressed here. The first one is Sartre’s biography. It is indeed to that Sartre was not a member of the Résistance and that he was so enamored with Marxism that he refused to acknowledge the crimes of Stalin and the objectionable means that were used to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat. It isn’t possible to dismiss Sartre’s biography especially because it is possible to argue that given his intellect and his philosophy he should have know better than to remain on the sidelines of history waiting for others to save France and the world for Nazism rather than to act. The second issue is the one of the value of Sartre’s philosophy and whether his biography disvalues it, makes it irrelevant or even unremarkable. My answer would that although biography is always important, it cannot be the sole factor used to judge a philosopher’s or even a writer’s work.

Sartrean existentialism is in spite of Sartre’s failures one of the most important philosophies of the twentieth century precisely because in a time when so many were willing to blame God or their essence for their bad judgment and their failings, Sartre and others reminded them that existence preceded essence and that they couldn’t escape the obligations that came with the privilege of being free. It is sad that at the end that Sartre chose to become a Communist and to put ideological blinders on to be able to sleep at night without having his conscience remind him that the end can never justify the means especially when  one believes in choice and responsibility. However, at the same time, Sartre’s end as an almost blind Communist distributing flyers in the streets of Paris is touching and humanizes his rigid philosophy and especially his inflexible ethics, because they remind people like I who admire his intellect that it doesn’t save people from bad faith and self-deceit to find meaning within nothingness and chaos.

France and Nato

Denis MacShane argues in an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph the West needs France to rejoin Nato. I have to say that after reading MacShane, I thought not Nato again because what he is doing is rehashing old and unconvincing arguments that have made since De Gaulle made the decision to get France of Nato. I also thought that having MacShane writing an op-ed to argue for France to rejoin Nato is like having Jacques Delors writing to argue that the UK should join the Euro because it is in the interest of the West and of Europe. However, at the end of it, being the pro-American that I am I thought that having France rejoin Nato isn’t a bad idea, but what made it hard to be enthusiastic about the idea is that I couldn’t come up with arguments to justify such a course of action are that weren’t emotional. I think that it is difficult to make a strong case that rejoin Nato is in the best interest of France but again national interest cannot be the only thing that matters between allies especially when the alliance is valued by both parties. Still, because I believe in reciprocity and grand  and symbolic gestures, I wonder what would the US do for France and whether MacShane would ever argue that the Brits should make some gestures toward Europe such as joining the Euro because it would make Europe and thus the West more united. Sugary excerpt:

In the 1960s, America was the supreme military power outside the communist bloc. Today, America is a wounded beast.

Its soldiers are surrounded by a growing Islamist enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan. America's leaders are looked upon with dismay by pro-Americans and with open contempt by much of the political class in Europe.

While many Europeans hanker after the pleasure of soft power, the enemies of democracy have no compunction about using hard power.

Germany is the strongest defender of soft power and refuses to allow her soldiers to do any fighting in Afghanistan. Yet the arrest of German citizens trained by al-Qa'eda in Pakistan and ready to kill fellow Germans en masse shows that for jihadists, Frankfurt is as much a target as London or Madrid.

The lack of success of the occupation policies in Iraq is not appeasing Islamist armed violence. The former German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, called fundamentalist jihadi politics "the new totalitarianism".

The democracies failed in the 1930s to arm themselves against fascism. After 1945, the lessons were learnt. Nato sent an unmistakable message to Stalinist ideology that on the armed front democracy would defend itself.

De Gaulle had the luxury of pulling France out of Nato because the alliance had already stabilised Europe. Is the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, prepared to be as bold as de Gaulle and say the time has come for France to re-enter Nato?

It would send the clearest signal possible to the enemies of democracy that the new totalitarianism, to use Fischer's words, will not pass.

Churchill as a writer

Peter Luthersson has a good essay on Churchill in the new issue of Axess, which focuses on his work as a writer. Luthersson argues that Churchill’s literary work is not only valuable, but is so high quality that it is worth the Nobel Prize for literature. Sugary excerpt:

Churchill’s stylistic devices are seldom subtle, but are always effective. Thus his irony, as when the storm clouds are gathering in the summer of 1939: “In England, just as in 1914, care-free people were enjoying their holidays and playing with their children on the sands.” Thus his imagery, as when the Soviet Union and Italy go out in search of the prey left by Germany: “To join the Jackal came the Bear.” Thus his brutal directness, as when he finds cause to refer to “very stupid people”: “a category which is heavily represented in every country.” Thus his robust words of wisdom, as when he isolates the demands on leadership in war: “There is no room in war for pique, spite or rancour. The main objective must dominate all secondary causes of vexation.” Thus his emotional summing up, as when he is able to declare that Germany will never set foot on British soil: “Hope and within it passion burned anew in the hearts of hundreds of millions of men. The good cause would triumph. Right would not be trampled down. The flag of freedom, which in this fateful hour was the Union Jack, would still fly in all winds that blew.”

Yes, Winston Churchill is truly a worthy Nobel Prize-winner in literature, perhaps not on a par with the greatest—a Rudyard Kipling, a Thomas Mann or a William Faulkner; but much superior to the negligible prizewinners—a Sully-Prudhomme or a Dario Fo. From a literary standpoint he is an equal of the competent majority, a Hermann Hesse, a TS Eliot, an Ernest Hemingway, an Albert Camus or a VS Naipaul.

I wonder if Luthersson is judging Churchill as a fearless leader and thinker that can write and thus giving him special points for whom he is. However, at the same time, I don’t believe that it is possible to separate who Churchill is from what he writes.

America as a Christian Nation

“Of course, people define "Christian nation" in various ways -- ranging from a nation that reflects Christian virtues to a nation where the government promotes the Christian faith. But under any definition, the Constitution in no way establishes or creates a Christian nation.

Some might argue that teacher-led prayers or Nativity pageants in public schools are a far cry from the dangers of a Shiite (or Sunni) theocracy in Iraq. Perhaps. But the lesson of history is that when a majority uses the government to promote the majority religion, conflict and oppression inevitably follow.

[…] At various times in our history, that would have meant no religious freedom for Baptists, Roman Catholics or Mormons. Today it would deny liberty to any number of small or unpopular religious groups.

Fortunately, our founders understood that the great danger of majority rule is majority denial of fundamental human rights. That's why they wisely put some rights -- religious liberty first among them -- beyond the reach of majority vote.

The United States is not now and never has been a Christian nation in any official or legal sense of the term. It is precisely because we live in a secular democracy with First Amendment protections that Christians -- and people of all faiths -- have more freedom to practice their religion here than anywhere else on Earth.” Charles Haynes, “This is not a ‘Christian Nation.’”

Manliness is back

Tom Richmond gives the following interpretation of France’s new tough talk on Iran:

We could be seeing the first shoots of a new attitude towards American military dominance from France, which would be in stark contrast to their view on the invasion of Iraq. The desire to show unity against Iran, which was distinctly lacking across the Atlantic in the United Nations leading up to the conflict, could provide powerful leverage in negotiations. Alternatively, we may be witnessing the French president Nicolas Sarkozy attempting to stamp his authority on an international crisis, having been little more than a bystander in most issues until now.
Has France really set a new course in an effort to secure a peaceful solution to the disagreements about Iran's nuclear policy, or is Sarkozy just pandering to the Americans to start repairing old and very deep wounds - or could it be a combination of the two?

It is a combination of the two. If Sarkozy’s past shows anything is that he believes in strength, in toughness and that means that in my opinion that if given the choice between putting the money where his mouth is and looking weak, he will choose the former, but I could be wrong.

Consciousness, objectivism and religion

Onkar Ghate has written a series of articles on Ayn Rand and objectivism in the New Statesman’s faith column. His last article is very interesting and makes the following point about consciousness and religion:

At their root, the monotheistic religions say that a cosmic consciousness has primacy over existence. This consciousness decrees, and reality obeys. But in actual fact, existence has primacy over consciousness. The facts of reality exist and are what they are independent of any mind. The power of consciousness is not to create, annihilate or alter reality, but only to apprehend it. The facts of reality set the terms, which every consciousness must obey if it is to possess knowledge.

If the religious approach were correct, faith might be worth something. To believe something in absence or even in defiance of logical evidence—a virgin birth, say—might be a way to prove your blind loyalty to the supreme consciousness; only with proof of your submission, will you receive its sanction and enlightenment.
But if you understand that the religious approach contradicts the fundamental facts of reality, then faith is worthless. If you want to know the world, you need to use your own mind to grasp it, through careful observation and logical thought. You need reason.

Rand once observed that religion and philosophy address the same issues. Each seeks to offer us a comprehensive view of the world—of its nature and our place in it. They differ not in their questions, but in their method of answering: one by faith, the other by reason. Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do? Rand’s philosophy offers reasoned and unique answers to these.

Where am I? In a world that exists and is what it is, a world that’s firm, stable, natural, knowable. How do I know it? Only by means of my unadulterated reason. What should I do? Think rationally about all the values my life requires and about how to produce them, and then work passionately towards achieving them. The result? A profoundly personal joy, one that requires no external justification or sanction.

That explains precisely what the religious shouldn’t be public and that society should be secular. Once religion is placed at the center of a society and is the religious becomes political, denial of reality is inevitable. Reality becomes irrelevant since what matters is what ought to be. It is for this reason that societies that are non-secular are never democratic and free societies because human reality can never elevates itself to the level of the divine and human beings can never be trusted to make their own choices for they aren’t Gods.

Yet another French revolution

According to Roger Cohen, France is in the midst of another revolution, which is producing results, which he likes. This second French revolution according Cohen is breaking pompous (my characterization not his) French taboos that have plagued its modernization. Sugary excerpt:

The Ivy League Taboo. The passport to government office was always attendance of the swanky Ecole Nationale d'Administration, or ENA, where future ministers acquired the mind-numbing skill of saying they had seven points to make and remembering all seven without notes. Sarko loathes such Ivy-League clubbiness. He prefers an egghead-free government.

The bulk of this taboo-smashing is positive because it has stripped away paralyzing French hypocrisy, opened the way for unfettered French-American discussion and cleared a possible path to tackling chronic high unemployment.

The calculated use of anti-immigrant rhetoric is troubling and I'm worried by the loose talk on Iran. But I'll go on embracing Sarkozy while waiting to see if he's a revolutionary in action, as well as in words and style.

Reading Cohen’s observations made me realize how difficult it is for Americans to understand France and that it may be too demanding to ask that they do. Comparing Sarkozy’s 100 days to the French revolution is just not foolish and ignorant, but ideological and shortsighted. Let me explain what I mean. Cohen is describing France like a third world country that is experiencing radical changes that will change its bad, corrupted, and naïve ways to put it on the way to modernization. Cohen’s grand pronouncement shows of course that to him, France, before Sarkozy, was not only in decline, but paralyzed by its delusions of grandeur, which made it unable to grow up. It is probably be too unreasonable to expect Cohen to know French history and to understand that not every change is France is a revolution, that revolutions in France are about more than breaking taboos and that they never end well especially for their leaders who almost always lose their heads.

Books are becoming meaningless

“Books, I used to think, lay bare the essence of humanity. Contained within their pages were simple lessons about life, love and death. The best authors were godlike: they could expose the secrets of the human psyche, and evoke happiness or sadness at whim. Growing up thus affected, I believed the written word had untold power and beauty. I thought it could turn the minds of even the most intransigent people, by appealing to some common humanity. I thought authors could express the virtues of peace, goodness and liberty with such beauty that people would be forced to stop mid-breath. Wilfred Owen had only to write Dulce et Decorum Est (It is Sweet and Right), and the world would awaken to the horror of its self-destruction.

But after emerging from enchanted forests into the glare of adulthood, I find that I was grievously misled. I find that, despite all the lessons the great writers might teach us, wars and torture continue, and evil remains stubborn and blinding. The pen is not so mighty after all: there are too many languages, too many people holding pens, and never enough readers. In the real world, the written word is not an innocent counterpoint to war. Rather, the pen is guilty by association - its association with us strikingly diverse, flawed and value-laden beings. Nothing - not language, not the author - is unsullied by contact with imperfect daily life. And writing - in any language - means nothing to the starving and illiterate global masses.”  Bronwyn Lo, “The Awful truth: the Pen is not so Mighty After All.”

Apologists and the battle of sexes

PZ Myers has the best post I’ve read this morning on the battle of the sexes and apologists for gender inequities. It is worth reading especially for this excerpt:

[…] We already know that women experience a cultural wall that limits their ability to excel at the most remunerative endeavors — it seems to me that it's just as reasonable to estimate that female performance at the high end of the scale might be equivalent to male's; I can see where hemizygosity might lead to a greater frequency of aberrant pathologies, but not where it would lead to particular advantages in this situation.

But most of all what bugs me about the stupid speech is that it begins by deploring the idea of a "battle of the sexes", and then justifies many of its excuses with evolution, as if men and women are separately evolving species. It's absurd. Over half my genes come from my mother, and a slightly fewer come from my father. We evolve together, with an obligate mingling of alleles from both sexes at every generation. We both have equal potential, because it is the same potential — the only question is whether we're going to let bogus apologetics for inequities continue to limit the possibilities for half of us.

The world without the US

This video has a powerful message about how bad the world would be without America, which I don't want to imagine because there is no question that the world needs America as much as America needs the world. Nevertheless, I don't agree with the script of this commercial even though I agree strongly with its message that America has been and is a force for Good in the world. To me, a world without America would be a world where the weak and the poor couldn't even dream to one day become strong, famous, wealthy or simply better off than they are today.

Class still matters

“Class is different. It runs too deep; it allows us to connect the present with the past and to understand the malignancies of a modern economic system based on inequity and fear. So it is seldom spoken about publicly, lest a Goldman Sachs chief executive on multimillions in pay or bonuses, or whatever they call their legalised heists, be asked how it feels to walk past office cleaners struggling on the minimum wage. Just as elite power seeks to order other countries according to the demands of its privilege, so class remains at the root of our own society's mutations and sorrows. In recent weeks, the killing of an 11-year-old Liverpool boy and other tragedies involving children have been thoroughly tabloided. Interviewing Keith Vaz, chairman of the House of Commons home affairs select committee, one journalist wondered if "we" should go out and deal personally with our vile, mugging, stabbing, shooting youth. To this, the nodding Vaz replied that the problem was "values". The main "value" is ruthless exclusion, such as the exile of millions of young people on vast human landfills (rubbish dumps) called housing estates, where they are forearmed with the knowledge that they are different and schools are not for them.” John Pilger, “A State of Parallel Worlds.”

Extravagance and quality of life

Nicholas Wapshott is full of glorious praises for Sarkozy’s decision to go ahead with reforms of France's retirement and pensions plans. He asserts that he is breaking with old Europe’s illusions and delusions to embrace new Europe’s voluntarism and economic realism. Moreover, he uses the word extravagant to describe the French system, which is an ideological way to look at it since it implies that it does not reflect the French’s conscious choice about the way they want to live and the quality of life that they want to have, but simply their capricious and unrealistic refusal to adapt to the world:

Four months later, he is set to start putting that mandate into action. "I was elected to put in place deep reforms to modernize France, and those reforms will be completed," Mr. Sarkozy said on a recent trip to Germany. In a poll conducted in France this month, 68% said they favored reform of the special retirement schemes.

But it won't be easy. French workers have long derided the "Anglo Saxon economy" of free and open markets, preferring Mr. Sarkozy faces a more serious set of problems even than Prime Minister Thatcher confronted when she tamed the powerful British trade unions in the early 1980s, and it is by no means clear whether he has the courage and determination to press on with reforms in the face of strident opposition, as she did during the bruising yearlong British coal miners' strike of 1984–85.

The French system was largely installed in 1945, though some of the country's most extravagant working practices are much older than that.

The guiding principle, to reward those who work in dangerous jobs with early retirement and a full pension, has long been an anachronism.

Wapshott’s assertions are similar to the triumphant ones of Fukuyama in The End of History in which he make the staggering claim that there was one way for countries to succeed and that was to Americanize. I love the American way of life, but I also like diversity meaning that France to open to the world and reform, but to remain FRANCE. If Wapshott were right that would mean that political choices don’t matter for at the end, the market always win and that economics trumps politics. Thus, it would no longer be possible to choose quality over quantity and solidarity over individualism. It is true that socialism is dead but that doesn’t mean, I hope, that there is no alternative to neoliberalism and to the idea that any form of government plan or involvement within the market place is socialist and thus unacceptable.

Then Surrender Monkey, now girlie Cowboys

David Chandler apparently has something against France and Bernard Kouchner. In his most recent article, he argues that France has become more gun-ho than the United States. However that in this case, Kouchner’s and France’s readiness to whack Iran is nothing more than bravado for they know full well that they won’t be the ones doing the whacking. Sugary excerpt:

In fact, the foreign policy pronouncements of the new French government of Kouchner and Sarkozy have striking parallels to that of Blair and his foreign minister Robin Cook’s incoming Labour government in 1997. Kouchner, like Blair before him, is able to make grand statements of foreign policy mission in the knowledge that responsibility will have to be taken by someone else – the United States.

For Kouchner and the new French Sarkozy government, it appears that US problems in Iraq and divisions over Iran are an opportunity to stake a claim of French leadership. Like Blair’s approach to the Kosovo crisis in 1999, this activist foreign policy depends on the fact that the US has already talked up the threat and is the only country with the capacity to carry out the threats that are made by others.

[…] Kouchner’s confidence in taking a warlike stance over Iran stems from irresponsibility rather than responsibility. Free from any final decision-making - or any substantial military role if there is a conflict - Kouchner’s warmongering rhetoric can only increase the tensions in the region, further destabilising the relationship between the US and Tehran. Rather than a moral or ethical stand, Kouchner’s position seems both craven and parasitical, both exploiting the US position and willing to risk thousands more lives in a region already torn apart by Western grandstanding.

Chandler is partly right to argue that France believes that they can take advantage of the Iraq war to become a bigger force on the international scene. However, something deeper is going on here that has everything to do with the ways mighty powers use force for the argument that Kouchner made by talking about using force wasn’t a Idealist argument, but a Realist one. He implied that there might not be any other way to solve the Iranian crisis than war and this fact makes diplomacy unnecessary for any compromise would be unacceptable. Charles Bremner tries to explain to France’s new tough approach and has an interesting answer:

Unlike President Chirac, with his sanguine view of a multipolar world, Mr Sarkozy believes that the biggest international danger at the moment is the threat of a confrontation between Islam and the West. In his first big foreign policy speech he said: "We would be wrong to underestimate the possibility of this happening: the affair of the (Danish) cartoons of the Prophet was a warning sign of this."

If Bremner is right, then the rest of Sarkozy’s term will be anything, but annoying for he seems to believe into tough talk, but the question is whether he is ever going to be willing to do something that looks bad on camera and that makes him unpopular such as taking the initiative in the name of his vision of the world to take action alone or rather alone with the United States.

It just never stops

Spiegel has another article on Sarkozy and his “tense” relationship with Germany’s Angela Merkel (hat tip: Certain Ideas of Europe). Of course none of this is new, but I’m starting to wonder if the Germans as Adam Gopnik are ever going to learn to  love the man who stopped the Human Bomb. Sugary excerpt:

But the Germans and French are not just clashing over questions of style -- issues of substance are also leading to cracks in the European Union's most important partnership.

[…] It's possible that Europe's legendary Franco-German motor might shift into neutral for a while. Sarkozy has replaced consultations with a tendency to dictate. The implied threat for Berlin is clear: Either you go along with French plans, or Paris will go it alone.

And that could lead to the next showdown. Sarkozy wants to force the EU to impose extra sanctions on Iran. But instead of working with Germany on a plan of action as a preferred partner, Paris simply informed Berlin of its intentions via a diplomatic note, as if it were any other EU member.

[…] Now both governments are trying to avoid a further escalation of the Franco-German spat. "Relations between the two are really good," claims a Merkel confidant.

But Sarkozy will need some practice at sounding conciliatory. He told his cabinet last Wednesday that Merkel was "a woman from the east," in reference to her East German roots.

The Élysée Palace quickly tried to smooth over the gaffe: Apparently Sarkozy was merely trying to point out that growing up in East Germany meant Merkel did not have the "same affection for France as people from the neighboring Rhineland."

Feminism, porn and the freedom to be raunchy

Sign and Sight has an intriguing article on Feminism and pornography, which addresses serious issues about the anti-porn campaign instigated by some feminists. Throughout the article the question is whether porn can censured, outlawed or whatever else because it is demeaning to women and harmful to society. Sugary excerpt:

To effectively fight the breach of human rights that violent porn represents, you cannot sit back and twiddle your thumbs after putting an end to one or two particularly sadistic videos. You have to start with the pornographication of everyday life. Because both the mini skirt and the rape video – so the thesis of the anti-porn campaign goes – are manifestations of the as yet unbroken violent rule of men over women. The mini skirt worn as a sign of female self-determination, peroxide hair as a sign of female self-confidence, and female lust for sex and pornography are, according to this reading, more than just contradictions in terms. They are lies, self-delusions of the woman who has yet to find a way out of the immaturity for which men are to blame.

Many women see this extension of the pornography debate as passé and patronising. The repugnant hardcore videos which show the woman as unprotected even by animal rights, are an insult to every woman. But does this make it legitimate for Emma feminism to lay down the law on right and wrong expressions of sexuality? In the thirtieth year of the anti-porn movement, do women still have to be lectured by Alice Schwarzer that "purely genital sexuality" is unwomanly, that a "vaginal organism" is impossible and that "penetration" can often "impede female lust"? Women today trust these sort of views on the nature of femaleness about as much as the biological abracadabra of Eva Herman (who released a book last year encouraging women to get back to the stove, more here).
[…] And yet with the radicalisation of pornography, there is no denying the urgency of the need to reopen the debate. It goes much further than the venial feminist question-of-questions about whether penetration would only arise in a male society where it could be spread through male violence. What started out with coy articles about marital hygiene outbid itself continuously at breakneck speeds to become the gangbang videos showing mass rapes of women that end up even in the hands of school children – which are beyond the of reach of national youth protection laws on the world wide web.

I have to resist the strong urge to yawn when I read these types of arguments because they make the debate more complicated than it has to be. The key point here is that porn is not a woman to man issue but foremost a woman issue because the question that has to be asked is the following: to whom does a woman’s sexuality belongs to? To a man? To feminists? Or to herself? In other words, the trouble for feminists is not that porn is meaningless or that they have no arguments, the trouble for them is that they have failed to convince their main audience, women, that they should listen to their views on sexuality. It is for this reason that the porn issue is a minuscule one because the bigger issue once again is choice, that is whether these women are free to choose to become sexual objects, everything else to me is background noise.

One of the most intriguing books I've read in the last 5 years was La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M (the Sexual life of Catherine M), which is about the “raunchy” (not in the pejorative sense of the term) sex life of Catherine Millet, a highly educated woman who is  very open sexuality and who likes to have sex with a numerous partners. The book is not just erotic, but pornographic in the sense that it is raw, brutal, and delicate (the French word is fin) at the same time. The reader senses the writer who is also the main character is sophisticated, thoughful, and at ease with herself and her sexuality, and  that, thus, shame and victimization are not the issue. It is impossible not to imagine Millet having and enjoying sex in a manner that many would consider inappropriate, scandalous, and sinful. So what? Women must be free of all preconceived notions about their femininity and their sexuality to find their own sexual voice, fantasies, and to decide whether to fulfill them. Feminism’s first intent wasn’t to make women clean and pure, but to make them free and unashamed about their choices. In other words, the goal was to have more Catherine Millet that is women who know what they like and what they don’t like and aren’t afraid to express their tastes and to satisfy them, and less Edna Pontellier that women who have to fight against societal norms and expectations to express their true desires and who are end up by them.

Kouchner, Iran, War, and interventionism

About a week ago, David Chandler wrote a tough article in Sp!ked response to Bernard Kouchner (the French foreign minister) and David Miliband (the British Foreign Secretary) common article in the Guardian in which they argue for Europe to act together and resolutely to settle the Kosovo Issue. Chandler argued that Kouchner and Miliband were trying to use Kosovo to rehabilitate the idea of “liberal interventionism” that had been discredited by the Iraq war. Sugary excerpt:

[…] the problem that Kouchner and Miliband face is not in Kosovo but much closer to home. They want to ensure that the ideals of liberal interventionism can survive the disaster of Iraq because the governments they represent want to use their clout on the world stage to enhance their reputation domestically. Both governments are keen to bathe in the moral glow from the Kosovo intervention, seen as a success (at least from the point of view of the intervening states): ‘No European can forget the atrocities that took place in the Balkans during the 1990s. No European can forget the scenes of brutality, murder and mass deportation… no European should forget the tragic events that motivated the international community to intervene.’

Despite Kouchner and Miliband’s desire to build their careers on global moral grandstanding, they demonstrate the weakness of the British and French governments, rather than their strength. It is difficult to recapture the confidence of liberal interventionism of the last decade. In 1999, Médecins Sans Frontières, the activist humanitarian NGO which Kouchner founded in 1971, won the Nobel Peace Prize and Kouchner was appointed as the first head of the UN Mission to Kosovo after a lifetime’s advocacy for international meddling in other countries (4). But the Kosovo war marked the high point for the overt ‘right of intervention’ and the extension of international protectorates claimed by Kouchner.

Even before the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, international attempts to directly run statelets like Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor were creating as many problems as they were solving. Today’s moral grandstanders have few causes they are willing to commit to. The British and French governments may have made much of their support for the UN resolution on Darfur in August, but they were committing other countries’ troops to Sudan rather than their own. Similarly, going to war over Kosovo, eight years after the event, and urging their readers not to forget the ‘good wars’ of the 1990s, is no substitute for finding a genuine cause of their own.

While reading the article, I thought that Chandler’s obvious disdain for liberal interventionism was making him paranoid and unable to accept moral grandstanding does not make a point of view necessarily wrong.

Last weekend, Bernard Kouchner warned that France and the world to prepare to face the worst that is war, in the case of Iran. I was reminded of Ian Burama’s excellent review of Norman Podhoretz’s new book in which he wrote the following:

Podhoretz and the American neoleft have several things in common, apart for their shared enthusiasm for the Iraq war. Both Podhoretz and Paul Berman, for example, see Abraham Lincoln as the father of their revolutionary idealism. In Podhoretz's view, "it was Abraham Lincoln—the greatest Republican of them all, and the greatest of all American presidents—whose spirit hovered most brightly over the face of the Bush Doctrine's universalist assumptions." In a similar vein Berman, in his book Terror and Liberalism, claims Lincoln as the proponent of a worldwide democratic revolution. This tradition, in his view, distinguishes Americans from the "Europeans," who "cannot accept the notion of liberal democracy as a revolutionary project for universal liberation."

[…] There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the neoleftists when they talk about spreading democracy with American force. The idea of using US power to expand democracy is certainly more attractive than the kind of realism that promotes supping with despots in the name of stability—provided that democracy includes more civil liberties than the right to vote alone. And I share the belief that armed intervention by the US is justified if, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, it can prevent mass murder. It is the revolutionary zeal that I distrust, the trust in military solutions for political problems, and the reheated idea of Manifest Destiny. For zeal leads to the crude and schematic notion of a world absolutely divided into friends and enemies, where compromise is seen as weakness and politics are redundance. [Emphasis added]

I have a lot of respect for Kouchner; he is undergoing a metamorphosis that I don’t want to disparage precisely because of my respect for him. However, I was listening to Dominique de Villepin, the former French prime minister who gave that famous speech in the UN Security Council explaining why France was saying no to war with Iraq. Villepin talked on French TV yesterday about Iran. He stated affirmatively that although no option with Iran can be taken out of the table, but that war should never be the first option because it is also the worst option, which thus means that everything must be done to avoid it. I wondered what could explain the wide gap that exists between Sarkozysm, for after all Kouchner is Sarkozy’s foreign minister, and Gaullism, for Villepin is expressing a traditional Gaullist point of view. Sarkozysm not only believes in power and its expression, but also thinks that inaction is a dangerous sign of weakness. Gaullism has always believed that France is a great nation, which should always march to the beat of a different drummer and remind America that diplomacy is an instrument for the wise and the powerful and that negotiations are not a form of surrender.

At the heart of this issue are the conception of power and the morality of war. Kouchner seems to be coming to the belief that just wars are about just and noble goals, which not only make them justifiable, but which excuse pre-emption or their occurrence without doing everything  to avoid them. In order words, the use of force is only justified by a just cause and not also by the efforts deployed to avoid it. That would explain the fact that if Kouchner likes to insist on the fact that he wasn’t for the Iraq War, but never denies that he was not against it in his view because of Saddam Hussein and his crimes. Because I think that Kouchner’s ideas on interventionism are still in flux, I think that it is still too early to dismiss him solely as a moral grandstander in love with liberal interventionism as Chandler asserts. However, I have to admit that I am disturbed by the idea that a just cause is necessary to make a war just and to justify pre-emptive or preventive wars. Kouchner is too smart not to know that talk of war with Iran doesn’t help the situation, but only complicates it by raising the stakes by making it impossible for either party to make concessions without appearing weak and thus being humiliated by a compromise. The fact that Kouchner talked about war in spite of the misgivings that he should have had about doing so, shows that something has changed and that Sarkozysm believes in manly chest thumping.

Europe doesn't have to fear its Muslims

“Perhaps a few thousand European Muslims are tempted by terrorism. Native converts to Islam appear overrepresented among them. Europe must catch these people, without getting hysterical: rather more Europeans still die of smoking than from Islamic fundamentalism. Nor does history suggest that Islam is a uniquely violent religion. That proposition would have baffled anyone surveying the ruins of Europe in 1648 or 1918 or 1945.

Here are three suggestions to help European Muslims integrate. First, abolish housing segregation. It is hard to become British or French if you are planted in a ghetto where you never meet natives. Second, make immigrants learn the native language. It is the only essential business tool. Third, the authorities should not worry about changing people’s thoughts. People can support any cricket team, or believe whatever they like about gays, as long as they obey the law. The worst way to make people feel integrated is to keep demanding that they integrate.

We must not regard Islam in Europe as eternally indigestible. In Dreux outside Paris, I met a woman who worked in local government, spoke impeccable French and had histories of Christianity in her bookcase. Born in Casablanca to an illiterate mother, she considered herself of immigrant origin, but said her children, who spoke only French to her, were French “full stop”. “We have lives like everyone else’s,” she said. “We have a barbecue, some people don’t eat certain things. It’s a normal life.” That goes for most of the 16m.” Simon Kuper, “Europe can feel at home with 16m Muslims.”

The allure of new money

The Independent has a great article on the lives of Britain’s super-rich. It’s a fun read because it shows how wide the gap is between the super-rich and the rest of the people not only in Britain, but in the world. Sugary excerpt:

Forbes magazine (whose corporate jet is called Capitalist Tool) estimates there are 946 dollar billionaires in the US alone. A billionaire being, for those of us still struggling with the concept of millionaire, someone with assets of more than a thousand million. And Capgemini's World Wealth report for Merrill Lynch says the planet's 9.5m "High Net Worth Individuals" control assets of $37.2 trillion. At this stage, I get confused, but the interesting question is: what do the HNWIs do with their money? And there's a subsidiary question too. Do they enjoy themselves? We'll come to that at the end.

[...] Still, Rome is not yet in flames. And before it starts ' burning, there is some interesting fiddling to be observed. Ferrari is not boarding-up its rapidly expanding dealer network. They cannot keep up with demand: for many models there is a five-year waiting list.

[…] Conventional notions of luxury are exhausted, as Dana Thomas has pointed out in her recent book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster. The great Paris luxury brands – Hermes, Cartier, Louis Vuitton – were founded to cater to the French court, but now they are high-end mass-market for the airport trade. The small ateliers who produced these luxury goods have morphed into global marketing machines. Anna Wintour of US Vogue says this means that " more people are going to get better fashion", but it also means that the very rich are going to have to find more efficient ways to distinguish themselves. The laws of conspicuous consumption demand constant upgrades: if anyone can afford to purchase a Prada backpack, then this creates a new demand for a Cavalli cocktail dress at £20,000. A new generation of Very Light Jets (VLJs) will soon make private planes accessible to anyone who can afford the repayments on a big Mercedes. Expect demand for corporate airbuses to rise.

France, England, and terrorism

In this video, Jonathan Paris makes some interesting observations about the French and the British counter-terrorism efforts. I don't agree with some of his remarks, but they are thought-provoking.

Is every offense forgivable?

The best post I read this week was written by Julian Baggini of Talking philosophy. The post was about a program on British radio, which focused on the story of a mother who had forgiven her husband and taking him back after he had abused their daughter because the child told her that she didn’t want her dad to go away. Baggini takes on the story takes it away from the sensational to focus on the essential moral and philosophical, the most important of which is my opinion whether is moral not only to forgive pedophiles, but also to make them a part of one’s life:

But several years later, and after treatment, he’s back in the family house, and apparently everybody is happy.
But still, this seemed warped. Why?
Well, first of all I wonder why the mother still wanted to live as man and wife with a man who had sexually touched her daughter. That’s odd enough.
Then I was worried about the totally future-looking consequentialist nature of the couple’s thinking. It was as though what had happened in the past was in a sense irrelevant: all that mattered was putting things right in the future.
But this seems odd to me, and it perhaps reflects some unease I have over exclusively consequence-based thinking. The fact is that what happened cannot be just erased or cancelled out by fixing the future. We can’t just be amnesiacs about past wrong doings, can we? The world changed when the father touched his daughter, and it seems naive to think it could put back together again in something like its previous form.
Also, perhaps it is true that in this case it all worked out. But what a risk, surely? We have to act on what we can rationally expect is likely to happen, not on what is logically possible. Sure, I can imagine that this story is how they told it, but the mother was perhaps still foolish to hope it would turn out like this. (An extreme example of moral luck, perhaps.) Indeed, it worked out after the father was taken away, imprisoned and so on. What she had actually wanted was for him not to go away at all. So maybe it worked out despite the mother’s extremely forgiving attitude, not because of it.

Honestly, it is difficult for me to look at this issue any other way than emotionally even though I admit that it may not be the best way to look at it. Still, I wonder whether it is possible to make the kind of decision make by the mother in this case without putting some blinders on.  What bothers me most of all in this case is the fact that she asked her child who had been abused what she wanted to have happened thus putting on her the burden to make a decision that she wasn't equipped to make and that would have changed their lives. There are no easy answers, but the issue is whether even the most outrageous and painful acts forgivable once the people who can forgive forgive and chose to patch up their lives.

Omnipresence and Sarkozysm

“He is, of course, everywhere. Physically and metaphorically. He crisscrosses France almost daily, mingling with ordinary folk.

Where his stuffy predecessor Jacques Chirac was a prisoner of protocol, Mr. Sarkozy's informality is as refreshing as it is destabilizing to the French.

"They say: 'Monday, he's at the supermarket, Tuesday he's in the factory.' But what do you want me to do? Stay at the Élysée [presidential palace] awaiting clients and watching dust collect on the files," Mr. Sarkozy shot back at reporters in Strasbourg last week.

Even more jolting than his physical ubiquity - so overwhelming that there are calls for a National 'No Sarkozy' Day on Nov. 30 - is the president's finger-in-every-pie style.

It is unheard of for a French head of state to get directly involved in the daily affairs of government. The latter are usually left to the prime minister and his cabinet.

Not in Mr. Sarkozy's regime. L'état, c'est lui. As long as the right hangs on to a majority of National Assembly seats, Mr. Sarkozy will be the de facto head of government, too.

It is not just because he is a control freak that Mr. Sarkozy assumes this all-encompassing role. Just as in his dressing-room pep talk, there are echoes of Charles de Gaulle prodding the French to their manifest destiny - greatness - in Mr. Sarkozy's endless exhortations. It seems that for Mr. Sarkozy, the French must relearn to love work not to get rich, but to regain their dignity.” Konrad Yakabuski, “Sarkozy’s Rupture Engulfs France.”

Dangerous ideas, abstinence, aids and Africa

This video shows me how dangerous religious ideology can be.  It is about the efforts of Martin Ssempa, a minister of Uganda,  to convince a population already ravaged by Aids to stop using condoms to practice just abstinence. It would be laughable to see his efforts if they weren't putting in danger the lives of so many people. Instead if it is not only pathetic but sad.