The Republic of Dissent

When happens when ignorance makes Europe becomes a country...

No she isn't acting, but I honestly don't know what to say when someone doesn't know that France is a country!

Blasphemy and Metaphorical lashing

“The teddy bear affair is mad. You won’t find any culturally relativist defences of it here on spiked: it is monumentally illiberal to imprison someone for what she said, and lashes are a backward punishment for any crime, never mind the ‘crime’ of naming a toy. Yet I can’t help noticing some similarities between the Sudanese authorities’ wide-eyed overreaction to the teddy bear affair and the way in which speech and thought are more tightly policed here in Britain, too. Yes, there are huge cultural differences between Sudan and the UK – but the elites on both sides of the divide share one important pastime in common: the policing of morality.

Thankfully no one in Britain is given 40 lashes. Instead they’re given a metaphorical lashing. Those who offend public morality or ridicule conventional wisdom are not tied up and beaten, but they are beaten up in the press and political circles and are frequently hounded from their jobs. The difference in Britain is that the metaphorical lashers pose as the guardians of PC, liberal morality, keen to protect the public from outdated and offensive ideas, while in Sudan the literal lashers are closed-minded clerics who lose the plot over any inappropriate mention of Muhammad. Yet both have in common a deep intolerance of ‘unacceptable’ ideas and a desire to monitor and clamp down on blasphemy: whether it’s secular blasphemy against liberal conventions here, or literal blasphemy against archaic conventions over there”. Brendan O’Neill, “In Britain, Heretics get a Metaphorical Lashing.”

The desperate quest for purity

No comment is necessary.

Age, greatness, and literature

Edward Champion wonders why writers must become old before becoming old. He argues that young writers are in part to blame for the fact that not enough people pay attention to their work and are willing to call them “great” before they reach a certain age. Sugary excerpt:

The situation is more troubling for younger writers. Forget the dog and pony show and the fawning praise on the junket circuit: it's the books they come to bury. Melvin Jules Bukiet recently disdained a form of book that he styled Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Pay no attention to Jonathan Safran Foer or Dave Eggers, for their trite and gimmicky fiction comes from a detestable nexus operating somewhere in the vicinity of Park Slope. (Never mind that Eggers is based in San Francisco.) Whether one cares for these novelists or not, if this same argument had been made 30 years ago, we'd have to dismiss such stylistic innovators as Donald Barthelme, John Barth and Gilbert Sorrentino.

Even the celebrated American literary outlets are content to pass up striplings. With the exception of Denis Johnson and Edward P Jones, last year, the New York Times Book Review could not squeeze in any additional novelists under 60 into its distressingly male-centric list of runner-ups and multiple votes for the Best American Fiction over the past 25 years.

America has to do better. The time has come for this nation to recognise that literature needs to be a far more inclusive field. America must learn to celebrate its emerging talents. But the buck doesn't stop with reception. Maybe the Great American Novelists need to understand, as Mailer did so well, that contending with the cult of personality is a small price to pay to get people dancing about literature.

Writers today are evolving a different world than “old” writers in the sense that people not only read less especially in America and that literature is much more about marketing that it has ever been. These facts make it difficult for young writers to build a following and to be taken seriously for young writers unless they are able to sell their work as product. In other words, old writers not only have time on their side, but also the fact that they are tied to a past, which readers feel was better at “producing” great literature because books weren’t considered just a another product to be market and when people actually took and had the time to read more. It is always easier to say that something old is better or rather that it is great because it gives one the false sense that growing older is about getting better and that in the case of writing, talent isn’t everything and that it takes time and effort to become a literary giant.   It is far too alarming to coronate a young talent great because doing so leads to resentment and to the implicit admission that writing isn’t that different from anything else and it is possible to master it without time and effort because of some people just have and get “it” without much perspiration.

Defining human dignity

Via Normblog, an interesting attempt to define human dignity to refute with the view that it is meaningless:

(a) At Auschwitz and other death camps, the prisoners were made to stand out in the open completely naked, sometimes in freezing temperatures, assailed by biting winds, policed by armed guards with dogs and who had the power of life and death over them. This situation - described by one writer as a condition of 'radical nakedness' - is a paradigm case of what we call an assault on human dignity. It's not the only bad feature of it. These prisoners were altogether helpless, they were generally hungry and sometimes freezing, they knew they could be killed at the merest whim and they had no institutional or other protection against that. But either in addition to or in consequence of these several afflictions, their human dignity was denied.

Other examples could be cited from the same terrain: of people forced to engage in exhausting but pointless toil (shifting heavy rocks from one place to another and then having to shift them back again); of people being demeaned (by being refused permission to go to the latrines when they were suffering from diarrhoea); and so on. These, too, are examples of an attack on human dignity. What are we saying in saying that?

(b) One thing we are saying is that the human worth of those prisoners in the camps was being denied. Making them stand naked and vulnerable in the circumstances I have described was a way of announcing that anything - anything at all - could be done to them. There is a similar implication in the other examples: 'we can work you to exhaustion for no reason, you can be forced to shit yourself in public - you are beings of no value'. To put the same thing differently, the respect or status we normally hold to be due to people simply in virtue of their humanity has here been removed. Note that this is different from more particular kinds of dignity which may be thought to attach to individuals occupying particular offices or positions of authority, honour or privilege. I do not go into that. If the subject is human dignity, then whatever it is must attach to humans just as such.

Free society and secularism

Timothy Garton Ash makes the following point on the importance of a secular public sphere to secure the freedoms of a democratic society:

Among the liberal essentials is equality before the law, including equal rights for men and women. Among the essentials is also freedom of religion. Since a core liberal notion is that we must be free not just to pursue our own version of the good life but also to question and revise it, it follows that we must be free to propagate, question, change or abandon our religion. In a free society, proselytisation, heresy and apostasy are not crimes. This - and apostasy in particular - is not accepted in many versions of Islam, but it is a liberal essential on which there can be no compromise.

In order to secure these freedoms, we need a secular public sphere. But what exactly do we mean by that? To say "Enlightenment values" begs the question, "which Enlightenment"? The Enlightenment of John Locke, which claimed freedom for religion, or that of Voltaire, which aspired rather to freedom from religion? (I deliberately simplify a complex history.) A liberal order in which the devotees of all Gods are free to try their hand in the public square, on an equal footing with those who insist - correctly, in my view - that there is no God? Or a liberal order in which all gods are kept as far as possible out of the public square? (The French republican understanding of laïcité is closer to the latter, the United States' first amendment tradition to the former.) I'm more of a Lockean myself, but I don't think this debate is best pursued at the abstract, theoretical level of "which Enlightenment"? Better to tackle specific issues: faith schools, new mosques, the teaching of evolution, the hijab, Muhammad cartoons and so on.

We do, however, need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism. Secularism, in my view, should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life. Today's debate around Islam is bedevilled by a confusion between the two. Atheists must be free to say to Muslims, Christians or Jews: "Your mind would be much more free if you gave up your ridiculous belief in God." Believers must be free to argue back: "You would have a more profound sense of personal freedom if you did believe." But neither is entitled to demand that of the other as a condition for participating as a citizen in a free society. The public policy argument about freedom for religion and the private conviction argument about freedom from or in religion should operate on different levels.

The key question is how to maintain or to build a secular society without the pious claiming that religion is essential to public life and to the health of a society. In the US, when one watches the political debate, it is impossible not to realize that it is taken for granted that religious faith is part of the political discourse and that candidates are expected to talk about their faith and other personal matters. The point is that the barrier between the private and the public when it comes to religion is never solid and that in these times when citizens want and demand certainty, secularism becomes impossible to defend.

Looking for a fight

“Christianity is different from Islam because it allows you to question it. It probably wasn’t different in the past, but it is now. Christians — at least Christians in a liberal democracy — have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state. In Islamic doctrine such a separation has not occurred yet. This is what makes it dangerous! Islam — all Islam, not just Islamism — has not acknowledged that it must obey secular law. Islam is hostile to reason! […] You, here in the UK, are in danger. Of course you can’t ban Islam outright, but you need to stop the spread of ideology, stop native Westerners converting to Islam. You definitely need to ban the veil in schools, and to close down Muslim schools because that’s where kids are indoctrinated.’ […] ‘Islam is different from other faiths because it is not just a faith, it is a political ideology. Children learn that Allah is the lawgiver, and that is a political statement. You wouldn’t allow the BNP to run a school, would you?’ […] Yes, I am at war with Islam,’ she says, as she gets up to leave, ‘but I am not at war with Muslims.’ It’s a crucial difference.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The failure to mark recent history

Michela Wrong has a fascinating post about her stay in Kampala in a hotel that was used by Idi Amin to torture and to kill. She argues and I believe that she is right that the fact that marks of a violent past are being transformed into hotels is just a symptom of the fact that in Africa that very few monuments are build to remember recent history. Sugary excerpt:

The Nile Hotel was a starker building, with a stark past - as Idi Amin's living quarters in the 1970s. The dictator was said to keep the heads of his victims fresh in a fridge there, to be brought out so he could scold them while he dined. In the 1980s, under Milton Obote, Amin's even more brutal successor, it remained a place of horror. The opposition leader Kizza Besigye spent two months being tortured in Room 211. Unlike many of the hotel's "guests" of that era, he survived.

Staying there in the 1990s was a slightly creepy experience - probably why the Nile's rooms were so affordable. You wondered what had happened in your room, and whether the carpet stains were everyday grubbiness or something more sinister. Elderly Ugandans raised an eyebrow when I mentioned where I was staying, confessing they couldn't walk past the hotel without a shudder.

[…] You can understand why no one felt like saving the tatty old Nile; the violence felt very recent, very raw. But the commercial potential of this prime real estate was too lip-smacking to ignore. Yet a historic opportunity has been missed. The Nile could have been turned into a memorial to those who died in Amin's and Obote's ravages. Just as Rwanda has turned the schools and churches where its genocide took place in 1994 into museums and shrines, Uganda could have made the Nile part of a national attempt to come to terms with a largely unmarked past.

The same failure to mark recent history is seen across the continent, sometimes for obvious political reasons. History is written by the victors, and when that reality jars with the victors' vision of events, it tends not to get written up at all. But that explanation doesn't always apply. It would surely be in the Namibian government's interest to remind its citizens and foreign visitors of the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904-07. Instead, it is content to let the statues and museums built by the Germans tell their mendacious story. You would think Uganda's current president, Yoweri Museveni, widely criticised for failing to exit the political stage, would seize an opportunity to remind his citizens of just how dreadful life got under his predecessors. But no.

Even when there is political capital to be made, Africans rarely go in for plaques, museums, statues and commemorative sites. Maybe the traumas of the past hundred years are still too fresh. Maybe the leadership is too busy coping with the challenges of the present. Probably these artefacts simply feel, on a continent where history was traditionally relayed orally, like very western methods of passing on human experience.

I think that part of the problems is that it is easier for Ugandans and other Africans to remain silent on the recent past because there is no consensus on its meaning and its significance and moreover because it is a divisive issue, which would get in the way of the cohesion of most African states, which are made of different ethnic groups, which have one point or another have been at each other throats or have been complicit to the horrors of that past. In other words, it is easier to forget for the sake of national unity and to avoid reopening wounds, which would reemphasize the fact that no only African countries are young, but they were also baldy manufactured.

America and Christianities

In this videa, Garry Wills discusses his book Head and Heart, which discusses the place and the nature of religion or rather of "Christianities" in America. It is worth watching.

The value of culture for its own sake

“The political class should proclaim the value of culture for its own sake. Those of them who have cultural enthusiasms should bring them out of the closet, and the rest might at least pretend. This would be the right thing to do, and I doubt that it would lose votes. People do not, in the end, want their leaders to be exactly like themselves, and whatever they say, there is plenty of evidence that the public still likes a gent. All of us, politicians included, should cease to search for a "highest common factor" culture, and instead affirm that our culture is grounded in a distinct history: in Christianity and the Bible, Greek and Roman antiquity, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
The chief rabbi [Jonathan Sacks] is right to say that multiculturalism has been a disaster. For one thing, it is actually monocultural: it is the demand that all countries should be like America (though without America's devotion to nation and constitution). For another, it inhibits the robust and confident expression of the majority culture, although such robustness and confidence provide the best conditions for minority cultures also to flourish. The millennium dome has been so ridiculed that it may seem cheap to drag it up again, but its utter vacuity has been instructive. It would have been more popular and enjoyable, as well as more worthwhile, if it had celebrated high culture, taken pleasure in our history, and not tried to conceal whose two-thousandth anniversary was actually being marked. We should indeed assert the importance of historical memory, of ancestry and rootedness. This is something which immigrants do not share, but the answer is not to pretend that it does not matter, but to offer new citizens a kind of historical memory by proxy. That is more or less what happens in the US.” Richard Jenkyns, “Do We Need a Literary Canon?”

Abstinence and Seeing Tupac Shakur

A few weeks ago, I posted a video about a pastor in Uganda, Martin Ssempa who was advocating abstinence as the only protection against aids. Comments of that post came essentially from people who argued that abstinence indeed was the only solution and that it worked. Somebody even argued that condoms were a western thing and that the pastor was credible because he advocated African purity rather than elements of Western depravity. What surprised me is that nobody focused on the real issue, which was the fact that aids is an epidemic in Africa and that it is so precisely because people keep making these types of foolish arguments without even acknowledging that purity, religion and even what they believe aren’t the issue, and but the survival of millions of people is what is at stake not the preservation of the mythical African purity and the supposed innocence of its culture. In short, this debate reminds me of the one between those who still believe that Elvis Presley or Tupac Shakur to be hip isn’t dead and offer as proof that fact that they have seen him in Tombouctou or in Ulan Bator and those who argue that it isn’t true and that in any case it is irrelevant because bigger issues exist in our world to focus on the trivial or to attempt to make it sacred. The point isn’t that abstinence is bad or not a value worth teaching, the point is that it becomes  dangerous when it is used by extremists and fundamentalists to reject everything else that can save lives because purity becomes the most important thing when survival should be given the context and the urgency.

Gravitas

“There is a type of academic who positively enjoys sitting in meetings, delivering an opinion with what may be called gravitas. In this context, that Latin noun (pronounced with a long final 'a' or a short one) really means: "I expect to be heard with serious attention; this is my air-space and may it last for ever. I intend to make a ten-second banality last ten minutes." Gravitas characteristically, and for various evolutionary purposes, has a fat backside that gets bigger and bigger as speech at the other end goes on and on.

Only please note: Gravitas is gender-free, because sex doesn't come into it, whereas pomposity can enter anywhere. Academics commonly act as though they expect the adult world to feel like being Head Boy and Head Girl in Little School. […]

But now meetings seem more like asylums of impotence, where Gravitas can do little harm. This is less the case in the classroom. The other day, Gravitas wrote at the end of an undergraduate essay that the student—a good and lively young woman—had "insufficiently established her conceptual parameters". That is to say: Gravitas doesn't like unruly thoughts—thoughts that arise in the act of writing and don't yet seem to have a framework into which they can easily be fitted. (I think such thoughts are poetry, are thoughts. But Gravitas is really a social scientist, not a literature-lover, and the student hadn't read sufficient theoretical material.) Gravitas has all the inner life of a bicycle pump.” Philip Davis, “The Professors of Pomposity.”

Thanking God for anything

I just can’t find a way to agree with this, but I guess that it is easy to see the will of God everywhere when you want to believe that s/he exists:

Religion resists the oppressive efficiency of time management because there is nothing to measure. Atheists think that it's the fatal weakness of the God idea that it lacks empirical verifiability. But a world where everything is measurable and testable, and can be turned into a league table, is a world where competition can find its way into every nook and cranny of life. And this, in turn, allows no escape from the omnipresence of market forces.

Marx made the point that capitalism turns everything into a commodity - and thus people into objects. Christians would agree, but also see Marx's uncompromising materialism as being part of the problem. For in spite of Marx, this materialism has been conscripted into the service of capital and forms the bars of our cage. Which is why the Marxists failed, and why the only people offering a genuinely countercultural critique of western modernity are to be found in churches, mosques and synagogues.

Dumbocracy

“The problem today, with so much media, is that everybody's famous but nobody's interesting. We all know too much about everybody. How do you distinguish yourself from the crowd apart from being assassinated?... It's really difficult to maintain any kind of mystery and I don't think you can be an icon without mystery.

What's unfair is that because of the "dumbocracy", as I call it, people end up sneering at a lot of very talented people. Brad Pitt, for instance, is a very interesting man with all kinds of global interests, but he and Angelina are interviewed so stupidly you end up hating them. There are plenty of idiots like Britney Spears also... The worst reverberation of saturation journalism is that we actually don't end up knowing anything about anybody.” Tina Brown.

The new and the bad aren't always old

Steve Chapman makes the mistake of equating Chávezism with Communism:

Communism is dead in Russia, a shell of itself in China and just hanging on in Cuba. But Lenin's corpse has a rare reason to smile. A new workers' paradise is sprouting in Venezuela, under the direction of the sometimes clownish but always cunning President Hugo Chavez.
Most of the rest of the world learned the folly of autocratic socialism back in the 20th century, but Chavez prefers to repeat mistakes rather than learn from them. He has nationalized oil holdings, created new state-run firms, confiscated privately owned land and politicized finance, while endeavoring to take over telecommunications and power companies.
All this is part of his grand plan for "Bolivarian socialism" and "the formation of the new man." President Chavez does not dream on a small scale. "The old values of individualism, capitalism and egoism must be demolished," he says, and he is eager to get on with it, in spite of—or, maybe, because of—what else will disintegrate in the process.
In case you have lingering doubts about what sort of country he has in mind, Chavez offers a color scheme for his educational program: "red, very red." It is no coincidence that he is a close ally of Fidel Castro's Cuba. But his anti-Americanism endears him to noncommunist tyrants as well. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made multiple trips to Venezuela to embrace Chavez as "the champion, the leader of the struggle against imperialism."
[…] A phony revolution may nonetheless be a durable one. If the Venezuelans who go to the polls next month give Chavez what he wants, they are likely to discover a paradox: They can bring about dictatorship through democracy, but not the reverse.

Hugo Chávez believes in Communism as much as Vladimir Putin believes in democracy, which means as far as it serves his personal interests. Chávez doesn’t know anything about communism. He only uses communist ideology and rhetoric to try to root Chávezism into something that has a history and some meaning to his people because it promises them something new that has never existed probably because it cannot exist, the dictatorship of the proletariat although in this case, he is the proletariat as Louis XVI was the State. Thus, the mistake is to think that Chávez believes his rhetoric and that he is Che Guevara for he isn’t, he just another dictator with too much money that is trying to last and to shape history. As Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in an op-ed in Le Monde last week to approve Juan Carlos’s put down Chávez, Chávezism is about demagoguery, being uncultivated, and barbarism. Chávez believes only in himself and the benevolence of his power.

Excess of ideology and Paranoia

The worst thing I read last week was a post by Mark Stricherz on the On the Square. Its subject was what Stricherz called Secular feminism and what he considered to be its path to power.  Stricherz argues that Secular feminism has not only taken over the Democratic Party, but which has reached its apogee with the inevitability of the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Sugary excerpt:

Given her ideological roots, Hillary Rodham Clinton might be expected this campaign season to wage an insurgent presidential campaign. Instead, Clinton is running as the candidate of the party establishment, while her two rivals run as insurgents. Although she vows to end the Iraq War, she voted for the resolution that authorized it and has not apologized for doing so. Her position hasn’t been popular with the party faithful, but it hasn’t been a deal breaker. After all, she is the party’s presumptive presidential nominee for 2008. This is not surprising. She is a meritocratic elite in a minority party; a white, Northern, educated, affluent, and secular professional in a party run by white, Northern, educated, affluent, and secular professionals. The outsider has become the insider.

This dramatic rise of secular, white-collar women in the Democratic party is hardly limited to Rodham Clinton, whose ascendance was facilitated greatly by her husband. It also applies to her peers. Forty years ago, the candidacy of a secular feminist would have gone nowhere in the Democratic party. It would have been stopped by the Catholic bosses—John Bailey, Mayor Daley, and Mayor James Tate of Philadelphia. (Patrick Moynihan’s memorable line in Beyond the Melting Pot , that almost all the leaders of the national Democratic party in 1961 were Catholic, was still true in 1968.) Today the candidacy of a secular feminist cannot be stopped seemingly by anyone.

[…] Feminists’ first major victory was making the national Democratic Party a pro-choice party. They lobbied in 1976 for a plank that opposed a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. Their success had little to do with the popularity of abortion rights in the party; Carter lieutenants had sought to avoid any mention of abortion in the platform. Instead, their success was due largely to their superior organization and behind-the-scenes tactics. […] Despite the adoption of the plank, feminists viewed the party’s position on abortion as something less than a victory. […] How would feminists take over the platform and become insiders? They used the same underhanded, insider tactic that had gotten them into the party: quotas for female delegates. Only this time they upped the ante: Half of all delegates to future conventions must be females.
[…] For all their appeals to party insiders and fellow activists, feminists had failed to make their case to ordinary voters. This may not comport with our view of the feminist movement, which seems to be stuck in the early 1970s: women marching in the streets, their fists raised and shouting through bullhorns or on podiums. But the truth is that the feminist movement evolved. Feminists learned how to work the backrooms and manipulate and deceive people for political gain. They just never learned to broaden their appeal.

Hillary Rodham Clinton comes out of the same tradition. In an interview earlier this year with the New York Times, Rodham Clinton alluded to the insider tactics that her predecessors used. “I was rooted in a political approach that understood that you can’t just take to the streets and make change in America,” she said. “You can’t just give a speech and expect people to fall down and agree with you.”

It is difficult to take Stricherz’s arguments seriously because they aren't rooted in reality and because it is evident that he not only doesn’t know what feminism (few people do), but also because he defines it so broadly that it becomes everything that doesn’t match his traditional and  religious world view. However, to rebut Stricherz’s assertions, it is only necessary to make two simple points. The first is that there isn’t such a thing as secular feminism as there isn’t such a thing as religious feminism for feminism and religion are two distinct concepts for it isn’t necessary for a feminist to have a point of view on religion. The second point is that feminism are not a homogenous group and that they are too divided and that feminism is too abstract to lead to political power.  To just take the case of Hillary Clinton, if she is elected it won’t be because she is a woman, but rather she would have succeeded to convince voters that she is the most competent candidate and that her gender just alleviates or elevates faults within her that they would find unattractive or attractive in a man. I don’t like that narrative, but it is the only way that a woman can get elected in the United States precisely because feminism never really became anything more than an abstraction or rather never settled successfully the questions of its objectives, its means, its parameters, and its limitations. The most “coherent” feminists, especially in America, have remained intellectuals and academics never became successful politicians. 

Hitchens and Sophistry

Mark Sarvas accuses Christopher Hitchens of Sophistry. He laments the fact that, in his opinion, he has become in spite of his numerous gifts a propagandist and a fanatic. Sugary excerpt:

But in some ways that's apt, as Hitchens is no longer a thinker or a critic - he's a propagandist.  What else to make of his risible assertion that "A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen." 

The propagandist, after all, trades in his inciting soundbites even as he knows the truth lies elsewhere.  Like the cheap magician, it's all about the misdirection.  But a man of Hitchens's education cannot possibly be unfamiliar with, say, The Nuremberg Laws which were careful to distinguish mischlinge - Jews of mixed parentage - down to agonizingly specific degrees.  This assertion - which underpins much of Hitchens's racial "philosophy" - is something he frequently leans on and is so patently absurd - more sophistry from the master - that it scarcely requires repudiation.

Except that Amis and Hitchens both do require repudiation, most firmly perhaps for floating this insidious notion of a "thought experiment."  This was anything but.  This was the expression of a particularly ugly strain of racism from which Amis was clever enough to try to deflect criticism by prophylactically suggesting, in essence, "I don't really mean this, of course, but ... "  And that's total shit and he should not be allowed to get away with giving himself a very clever cover from which to spew this invective.  There were surely a lot of "thought experiments" taking place in interwar Germany, as well.  Here Hitchens goes so totally off the rails that it's clear that 9/11 and Islamophobia have permanently deranged him.

The problem with the notion of a thought experiment - aside from the sheer, calculating disingenousness of the thing - is that it also provides cover not just to Amis but to plenty of others who have, perhaps, experienced similar thoughts and feelings.  But instead of summoning our better angels to challenge ourselves on why such beliefs, though seductive, are finally simplistic and repugnant emotional responses, Amis creates a safe harbor for indulging in this kind of trash.  And Hitchens should know better than to deploy his considerable rhetorical gifts to, as the headlines of his piece has it, "defending the indefensible." 

But the sad truth I've come around to at last is that Hitchens no longer knows better.  He has been irredeemably and irretrievably twisted by world events and has drowned in his own Kool-aid.  The greatest loss is that, for all his considerable gifts, he can no longer persuade.  He aims his salvos to the like-minded rabble in the cheap seats, and walks off the stage patting himself on the back for his cleverness without converting a single mind.  This trait infects all his work these days - God is Not Great, while occasionally splenetically entertaining, will not sway a single undecided.  And isn't that how a true rhetorician or polemicist measures success?

I don’t share Sarvas’s indictment of Hitchens although I agree that he tends because of his passion and his absolutism to view the world in black and white and to be difficult to have a dialogue with because it will always end in a battle where there is no give and take. Nevertheless, I think that Hitchens is necessary in spite of his flaws because he constantly put on trial the status quo and conventional ideas, but forcing those who  are content to follow or too timid to rebel to at least think.

French hibernation

Graham Robb had a great article on Sunday in the International Herald Tribune on what he calls the French tradition to hibernate rather than to work longer hours as Sarkozy wants them to :

In the autobiography-manifesto that he published during his presidential campaign, Sarkozy wrote of "the harm that the 35-hour week has done to our nation: "What madness it is to think that the way to increase wealth and create jobs is to work less!" On Oct. 1, he effectively abolished the 35-hour week by removing fiscal penalties on overtime. The strikes and protests in France this month gave a taste of the unions' reaction to Sarkozy's measure.

Sarkozy's 19th-century predecessors would have been amazed that such comparatively small adjustments are treated as matters of economic life and death. They, too, were worried by the snail-like progress of the French economy, and wondered how to compete with the industrial powerhouse of Britain. But they were faced with something far more ruinous than unemployment.

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

[…] But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They "hibernated" even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region's economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: "These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately."

Sarkozy's campaign slogan, "Work more to earn more," would have meant nothing to most French peasants. After the Revolution, government officials complained that farmers were "abandoning themselves to dumb idleness" instead of undertaking "some peaceful and sedentary industry." Income acted only as a deterrent. The people of Beaucaire on the Rhône made enough money at their summer fair to spend the rest of the year "smoking, playing cards, hunting and sleeping."

Robb shows that how important a country’s history is and that Sarkozysm might fail because it has no sense of French history.

Building bridges

“ In order to perceive the interrelatedness of people and of populations around the globe in the first place, we need a cosmopolitan perspective. The common terminological denominator of our densely populated world is "cosmopolitanisation", which means the erosion of distinct boundaries dividing markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and not least of all the lifeworlds of different peoples. The world has not certainly not become borderless, but the boundaries are becoming blurred and indistinct, becoming permeable to flows of information and capital. Less so, on the other hand, to flows of people: tourists yes, migrants no. Taking place in national and local lifeworlds and institutions is a process of internal globalisation. […]
Cosmopolitanism, then, absolutely does not mean uniformity or homogenization. Individuals, groups, communities, political organizations, cultures, and civilizations wish to and should remain diverse, perhaps even unique. But to put it metaphorically: the walls between them must be replaced by bridges. Most importantly of all, such bridges must be erected in human minds, mentalities, and imaginations (the "cosmopolitan vision"), but also within nations and localities ("interior globalisation"), in systems of norms (human rights), in institutions (the European Union, for instance), as well as within "global domestic politics" which search for answers to transnational problems (for example energy policies, sustainable development, the struggle against global warming, the battle against terrorism).” Ulrich Beck, “A New Cosmopolitanism is in the Air.”

It's the hard knock life...

This is one of the last scenes of François Truffaut's L'Argent de Poche (Small Change) in which the school teacher explains to the students some lessons of life.

The EU and the nationalization of movies

“In other words; as long as EU continues to equalize the boundaries between nation-states and cultures, their cultural policy stays highly inflexible. To legally maximize a share of external financing (that is, non-European) as a premise for support from i.e. the fund named Eurimages, is an infertile strategy. Especially when the Hollywood majors are given the opportunity to have their projects financed by European investors – and even get public funding as well, as Luc Besson did with The Fifth Element (1997).
Consequently, the EU should refocus its cultural policy to match the global realities of present-day Hollywood productions. In a study asked for by the European Council, sociology professor Tony Bennett suggested that the cultural visions of EU had to make a cosmopolitan turn. Bennett's argument for this was that EU's cultural outlook was based on a conservative idea of a pan-European cultural heritage where large parts of contemporary cultural diversity in Europe were excluded. Hence it was necessary to raise the question of whether this vision of "Europeanness" was to be preserved or redefined.
Seen in light of EU's so far modestly successful anti-Hollywood strategies, I believe that the latter alternative emerge as the most progressive one. Instead of conserving the idea of culture as something being tied to the nation-state, EU has the opportunity to mould a cosmopolitan cultural policy. Other studies following Bennett's tracks support this conclusion.The efforts of tackling Hollywood cannot rest on a polarization between EU and the US, but must be understood as a matter of dealing with the relations linking different kinds of transnational networks – economic, political and cultural.” Hans Erik Naess, “EU and the Global Hollywood.”

Turkey day

The only thing that I hate about Thanksgiving is the turkey! It's a meat, which in my opinion is impossible to eat and to be thankful for anything. It doesn't matter how you cook it and how great or French the stuffing is, Turkey is a meat that you eat thinking about chicken. But to be serious and positive, Thanksgiving is a holiday that I love because it reminds me of the best of the America that I love.  I am thus going to pause (one of the most American thing about me is that I don't know to take a break) on this day just to take the time to meditate and to find the right questions to ask myself to end the year beautifully. Happy thanksgiving to all of you!

Chasing Chirac

Chirac has been placed under formal investigation for matters that happened during his time as the mayor of Paris (1977 to 1995):

Chirac apparently tried to soften the public impact of the hearing Wednesday. Le Monde said the former president had asked to be questioned in his own suite of offices along the Seine in Paris, as he was in July. But the judge assigned to the case by the French judiciary, Xavière Simeoni, insisted on summoning him to her chambers in the nearby Palace of Justice.

The two investigations are complex and may reveal as much about past political and business practices in France as about any decisions Chirac may have taken personally during his four-decade career as a politician.

In his article on the opinion page of Le Monde, he pointed out that he appointed many people while he held simultaneously the posts of mayor, member of Parliament for Corrèze, prime minister from 1986 to 1988 and head of the now defunct Rally for the Republic Party. Such overlapping responsibilities have been quite common in France, although periodically there is debate about reducing the practice.

Chirac said in his article said for the sake of efficiency, and to "devote myself better to Paris," he surrounded himself with special advisers, sometimes on temporary contracts. "I decided or authorized these because they were both legitimate and necessary."

What this shows is that the American system of government deals with the legal status of the president and that the Anglo-Saxon political culture is, as a rule, more severe on matters of ethics than the French one. In America, Chirac would have never been elected in 1995 or reelected in 2002. At the very least, he would have had to answer for these matters during his time as president and the voters would have had the chance to make up their mind and to decide whether they wanted a president that would had had spend most of his time answering to judges for. In the Anglo-Saxon political culture, usually politicians resign when they are placed under investigation or when there is a strong suspicion that they have done something wrong. In France, the president is a republican monarch and has all the power. He doesn't have to worry about the judiciary while in office. The great powers of the president lead to unaccountability and to the situation, which we have now when a former president is finally placed under investigation for things that happened before he was president after he has served two terms as president. Sometimes, France is too sophisticated and too nuanced for its own good.

Diversity, Talent, and Innovation

“For people who appreciate cultural diversity and want to live in tolerant, open societies, the cosmopolitan vibrancy of cities like London and New York is a big attraction. Diversity thus acts as a magnet for talent, which in turn spurs economic growth. In “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Richard Florida documents how “regional economic growth is powered by creative people, who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas.” […]The biggest economic benefit of diversity is that it stimulates new ideas, which are the source of most economic growth, which in turn pays for the good schools, hospitals and other public goods that we value.

The exceptional individuals who come up with brilliant new ideas often are immigrants. Instead of following the conventional wisdom, immigrants tend to have a different point of view and notice new details. As outsiders, they are more determined to succeed. Of Britain’s Nobel-prize winners, 21 arrived in the country as refugees.

Most innovations nowadays come not from individuals, but from groups of talented people sparking off each other – and foreigners with different ideas, perspectives and experiences add something extra to the mix. If there are 10 people sitting around a table trying to come up with a solution to a problem and they all think alike, then they are no better than one. But if they all think differently and bounce new ideas and reactions off one another, they can solve problems better and faster, as a growing volume of research shows.” Philippe Legrain, “Cosmopolitan Masala: Diversity Enriches Us All.”

French Strikes and the poverty of riches

Marc Steel makes the case that the French strikes are an example of the poverty in rich countries. Steel argues that strikers are expected to accept globalization without making too much of fuss, to just work more and get on the program without the rich having the same obligation. Sugary excerpt:

The argument to scrap these "privileges" goes on to explain that they cripple the economy, making everyone worse off. So presumably the French should be more like the British, because we've been far-sighted enough to have much worse pension schemes, and our working week is on average 2.63 hours longer than the French one. So obviously that makes us better off. But even we're lagging behind truly modern economies, like Burma, where there are no pensions and people are forced to work all day and night or be whacked with a stick. They're rolling in it, the jammy bastards.

Seeing as the new government in France is determined to smash the culture of unearned privilege, Nicolas Sarkozy must be familiar with the characters at the top of the French rich-list. The No.1 spot in this list is a surprise, as you would imagine it must be occupied by a train driver from Lille with lots of stubble, but it turns out that it's Bernard Arnault, chairman of Christian d'Or, who's worth $21bn. He must be in a really outdated union.

[…] Sarkozy represents the frustrated wing of French business that wants their country to be handed to the same City types, their one per cent. Whereas some of the strikers appear to have grasped that when a government proposes cutting pensions, closing 200 courts, cutting 11,000 primary school teachers and privatising parts of the university system, these aren't random flights of madness but part of a pattern. And surely any policy that says, "The way we run our railways is outdated – let's run them more like the system they have in Britain", can't be allowed to succeed.

I agree with the sentiment expressed by Steel, but I think that the solution is to focus more equality and equity. For the key issue is France is not the sustainability and the reexamination of the privileges of certain French workers, but rather the sustainability and the examination of all privileges so that the French can make a decision about what type of society they wish to have.

What to thank America for...

Sp!ked has an interesting lists of what to thank America for this thanksgiving. It includes the second amendment), Microsoft, mass production and mass consumption, and fast food. In thanking America for its love of stuff, Daniel Ben-Ami writes:

Stuff is good, but choices are even better. America has led the world in the creation of a mass consumer society. Many of the goods that we now take for granted - the washing machine, the fridge, the vacuum cleaner and, most importantly, the car - became mass consumer items in America in the 1920s. Europe did not begin to catch up until after the Second World War.

Such items, and many others of more recent origin, have played a key role in improving the quality of our lives. Where would we be without them? Imagine if we had to clean all our clothes by hand or travel everywhere on foot or by public transport. And what about more recent consumer items such as the personal computer and the mobile phone? And where would we be without the internet? We could still live and function without such things, but our lives would be impoverished.

Even more important than mass consumption is our ability to mass produce - indeed, the former depends on the latter. The fact that Europe, following America’s lead, has become so productive gives us many more real choices in our lives. The time we have to spend doing gruelling physical work or mundane domestic chores has been dramatically reduced. This leaves us with more free time and more energy to do more rewarding things, such as engaging in art or culture, participating in sport, or taking part in debates.

Well, that just shows that there are so many things to love about America. I will thank America this thanksgiving for two things, the first is its resilient optimism, and the second is its belief in impossible dreams. Those in these times of gloom and doom ate not only refreshing, but indispensable.

The art of reforming France

Agnès Poirier makes the argument that reforming France is an Art and that the question is whether Sarkozy has the talent to practice it:

The last few days have felt like good old strike season, with appointments at doctors cancelled, rendezvous missed and cycling turning sportive in deserted bus lanes. Many restaurants are closed in the evening for lack of clientele, theatre actors perform in front of handfuls of spectators, museums feel like ghost cities and shops prove far less busy than usual. All in all, not such an unpleasant experience, but for Christine Lagarde, the economy minister, France is losing €300m a day which is, she says, cataclysmic, sine annual growth may nosedive because of it.

Reports in the media (owned by friends of the president), have been all about "la galére" endured by the French, "taken hostage" by the strikers. The reality, though, of today's demonstrations throughout France is slightly more cheerful. After all, we like demonstrating. For us, it's like a jog in the park: refreshing and energising. Just look at recent demonstrations of student nurses and firemen on strike. By the way, in France, Firemen too have ways of demonstrating: noisily or naked.

President Sarkozy, who has been unusually silent in the last few days, will speak to the nation on Thursday and is likely to announce a package of measures to boost the "purchasing power" of civil servants. What he really doesn't want is for those two social movements, transport workers and civil servants, to unite in discontent into one massive national strike. He knows it'd be the end of him.

Sarkozy has one important thing going for him and that is that the French want him to succeed and to prove that they were right to believe when they elected him that all that France needed to get its mojo back was a willful and hyperactive man who is about doing and not thinking. The French public will thus be at his side if he avoids giving the impression that he is welcoming the confrontation with the strikers and that his reforms are unfair. I don’t believe that the current strikes will break Sarkozy because the strikers chose the wrong moment to strike. They are engaged in a struggle, which they cannot win because Sarkozy knows that he cannot back down and therefore will not back down and because the French are this moment are tired of fighting over reforms, which an increasing number of them believe are not only unavoidable, but also necessary. With the strikers will become more divided and will have to accept that public opinion is not on their side because they will look unreasonable with being unwilling to make sacrifices for the good of the country. In simpler terms, as long as the debate on the French pensions plans remains about fairness and that Sarkozy is able to make the strikers look unwilling to take on their share of the burden to reform France, he will. Thus, the biggest threat to Sarkozy isn’t the possibility that he will lose the current face off with the Unions, but rather that he will win so easily that he will get overconfident over his superpowers and believe that that he can reform France at will, without finesse, and without negotiations.

Self-importance, Anger, and politics

I almost never agree with Harvey Mansfield, but nevertheless, I like to read his books and to listen to him because he makes me think and forces me to express more convincingly the reasons why I don't agree with his views. In this video, he discusses, self-importance, anger, and the role that they play in politics, it is a good lecture, even though I am left wondering if all of his views aren't preconceived.

The attractiveness of women's suffering

Almost in spite of myself, I have to admit that I agree with Helen Rumbelow when she writes this:

They called it “fight night” and “smackdown in Las Vegas”, but this was no usual primetime American sporting event. It was the exciting spectacle of a couple of guys ganging together to beat up a girl.

As the mud continued to fly yesterday in the 2008 presidental race, this is the image that remains firmly in the public consciousness: Hillary Clinton being rounded upon and bullied by her male Democratic rivals in Thursday's televised debate. It was ungallant, unedifying... and utterly compelling.

Violence against women, although in this case entirely conducted through political metaphor, has the thrill of any great taboo, where our conscious disapproval vies with our unconscious fascination.

When our screens show women being hit below the belt, we say: “That's terrible. Quick, get the popcorn!” It is unclear whether the latest allegation that Mrs Clinton may be secretly preparing for a “dirty war” against Barack Obama is true, or a deliberate anti-Clinton smear by a Republican.

Whatever: the new, nasty tactics of Mrs Clinton's opponents are the best thing that ever happened to her. It is but the latest example of how, even though we don't allow women into combat, we enjoy watching them under fire. We love to watch women suffer. Being women, they, naturally, do it so beautifully.

[…] We're happy to let male stars alone in well-fed contentment, but women pay the price of their success through a ritual display of their wounds each time their agony is racheted up a notch, we crane our necks with interest in its effect on the lovely victim.

Psychoanalyzing Sarko

Via the New York Review of Books, William Pfaff has this interesting bit on Sarkozy trying to understand what he seems to believe is an important question, which is who is he:

Sarkozy the man is hard to assess since he is a person who has not cast a shadow.[10] He admits to having been driven by an ambition that originated when he was a resentful, fatherless, "foreign" boy, with brothers taller than he and better in school. "I am fashioned by the humiliations of childhood," he has said, although it is not apparent what these humiliations were or that they were so much worse than what his brothers and many other adolescents have survived. His physician mother worked hard to keep the boys in respectably middle-class circumstances, living modestly in a wealthy Paris suburb. He seems to have decided to become president when he was thirteen and first saw the President of the Republic—presumably De Gaulle, on some public occasion. He said, who is he? Told, he resolved to become that man.

He is treated today by commentators, biographers, and by himself in his campaign book as having been obsessed with gaining power ("supreme power" he says, as if becoming president of the French Republic were supreme power). But power to do what? One never finds out. Clearly he has the power to carry out his election program of eliminating obstacles to French economic efficiency. He has just announced an extremely ambitious program to create an ecological "New Deal" in France, and to make the country a world leader in dealing with such problems as global warming.

Beyond these tangible aims, what does he want to achieve? This is the blank in a personality otherwise dominated by politics and ambition.

It seems that he could as well be a Socialist, and do many of the same things he has proposed; thus he has declared an "open" government and appointed so many of his former opponents. He is certainly not an ideologue. American commentators and politicians who think he is a French version of Reagan, or a neoconservative, are fooling themselves. He is a French politician, wholly French in experience and formation, brought up to believe in central state power and responsibility, who does things that work and advance him and his career. He is a practical man. His interest is in power itself, not—so far as one can tell—because he has some personal vision about what to do with it.

Sarkozy is much too intelligent to be compared with George W. Bush, but he makes one think of Bush's joy at becoming "a decider." Bush is happy deciding, even though he knows nothing. Sarkozy knows far more, but still gives an impression of someone for whom the most important thing is to be the decider. His vulnerability is that he leaves little room for anyone else to decide. This can mean restlessness among a public that sees too much of him, as well as discontent and frustration in his cabinet and government (and above all in the office of the prime minister) and waste of talent. When some catastrophe arrives, as is to be expected, he risks being held responsible for it. There are times when a Fifth Republic president needs to dismiss a government and name a new prime minister.

I think that that the American tendency to psychoanalyze its politicians and to want to know as much as about them as possible has been globalized and it is dangerous because it is distracting and makes voters focus on fluff. Although it is interesting to learn about Sarkozy, in a way I don’t care who he is, but I care about what he does and what he says and that it is the reason why I can’t follow Sarkozysm in spite of the fact that Sarko is an interesting and even a sympathetic figure. I think that the first and most important thing that an electorate needs to know about its politicians especially national ones is whether they are able to do the job and how they intend to do it.

Prosecuting and convicting terrorists

My second favorite law professor, Kenneth Anderson has an important article on the trial of the Madrid Bombings verdicts. Professor Anderson argues that terrorism isn’t a different and therefore terrorist suspects shouldn’t be tried the same way as suspects of crimes with less victims:

We accept that freely, if not happily, in the case of ordinary criminality. Part of the reason we do so, however, is that we understand that the stakes are not as high in ordinary criminality as they are in the case of jihadist terrorists bent on suicide and mass murder. We accept—and should accept—a high standard of proof in order to protect the innocent in ordinary criminality, although a few minutes' conversation with any public defender will suffice to show that in reality, there are relatively few genuinely innocent criminal defendants out there. They exist and deserve all the protections Western systems of justice offer—and, as the Duke lacrosse case demonstrates—in our ordinary justice system, the prosecutor has too much power and too much discretion.

When the stakes get up to those of mass murder by people who cannot be deterred by threat of punishment, because they are in pursuit of heaven, then a different moral and prudential calculation ought to hold. If our Western legal systems are unable to find ways to draw differences, and apply different standards of evidence and procedure than those of ordinary criminality, then the result is likely to be what happened in Spain. Granted, the actual bombers barricaded themselves in an apartment and blew themselves up rather than face capture; but those in the dock included their handlers, controllers, planners, and suppliers. On any just calculus—and the extensive, but ultimately excluded, evidence—they should have been found just as guilty of murder. Yet the Spanish prosecutors were unable to secure more than three guilty verdicts of murder.

Spanish criminal justice is vastly more prosecutor friendly than the American system. It allows much more hearsay evidence, and really anything the judge deems of sufficiently probative value. The fact that numbers of defendants, even ones evidently culpable to an outside observer, were released for lack of admissible evidence, and that, if not for the fact that Spanish law permits something considered quite unacceptable in the American system under the First Amendment's freedom of association—conviction for membership alone, without evidence of action or activity—Spanish criminal justice would have obtained very few convictions—well, if one takes the obligation to keep terrorists from blowing up people, trains, and train stations seriously, then something is wrong.

I disagree strongly with Professor Anderson. Differentiating terrorists from other criminals is a red herring because it pushes the debate away from the central question, which is whether terrorists can be judged as common criminals, receive a fair trial, and still get convicted or whether in the case of terrorism, special rules are needed because the cost of a miscarriage of justice is greater. If the argument is that terrorism is different than other crimes, then why not just admit that all crimes are different and adapt the legal system according to what society feels is the gruesomeness of the crime and the threat that the accused to society? Why not have different courts and different systems for pedophiles, rapists, and serial killers? Why should the number of victims be the only exception for a different type of trial? Of course making exceptions would mean that we have a tailored made legal system that no longer recognizes the presumption of innocence. After all giving all accused the same treatment reinforces the principle that they may be innocent and that therefore they must be given the same opportunity to defend themselves no matter how great the accusations against them are. What the Madrid Bombings verdicts shows isn’t that Western legal systems are ill equipped to prosecute suspected terrorists, but rather Western anti-terrorist agencies don’t know how to build a convincing case against terrorism because their only priority is prevention and because they rarely think about prosecution.

The point is that most if not all of the emphasis, understandably so, is on stopping terrorism and not on prosecuting terrorists, which is in my opinion that is going to take time to learn how to find the right balance between the two. It is both premature and too pessimistic to argue that the Madrid Bombings verdicts is part of a worrisome trend that shows that changes to the judicial system are necessary when more than likely they simply show that prosecutors need to adapt and to learn the fine art of prosecuting terrorists in this new age by for example educated anti-terrorist agents about the rule of law. In conclusion, it is difficult not to admit that the nature of terrorism itself already changes the nature of the crime by increasing the burden on the jurors or the judges who have to decide the fate of the suspects. This fact is the one of the strongest arguments against Professor Anderson’s point.

Grief as a television sport

“Is it possible to begin to imagine what it must feel like to lose a child into thin air, and never to see her again? And then wait 16 years for an answer? I doubt it. As journalists, we dance with the facts, the thrilling sensation of such stories, but we don’t appreciate what it really means. Nobody does who hasn’t actually been in that situation. The reality is that losing a child in abrupt, unexplained circumstances dismantles you as a person; and we only need to see Kate McCann’s face to know the truth of this.

[…] We are hopelessly callous, we the public – and I include journalists – who watch these slow-motion tragedies of lost children unfold as if for our amusement. We who judge the parents for the way they look and the amount of pain they can articulate. But grief is not a television sport; and there is no external measurement for the way in which it kills people, both mentally and physically.” Melanie Reid, “How Tragedy has become the Ultimate Spectator Sport.”

The mirror always has two faces

Via the New York Times, this excerpt of an editorial lamenting the two sides of Sarkozy as if it expected with naïveté that Sarkozy would not be a complex figure:

The picture of a French president who jogs, vacations in New Hampshire and even seems comfortable around President George W. Bush is so unusual that it has earned Nicolas Sarkozy the nickname of "Sarko the American." That, along with France's toughened stand against Iran's nuclear appetites, won Sarkozy bipartisan applause in Washington this month.

It is certainly a relief to have a French leader who wants to improve relations with the United States. The two countries have plenty of common interests, including fighting terrorism, keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons and nurturing democracy in Lebanon.

[…]Last week, days after his return from Washington, Sarkozy addressed the European Union Parliament, where he offered a worryingly old-style French program for building protectionist walls around an economically and demographically exclusive Europe. His approach would discriminate against foreign companies and third world farmers. And, as he has previously made clear, he will do all he can to keep Turkey out of the European Union. If Sarkozy's ideas prevail - a realistic possibility - they would inflict long-term damage on France and Europe.

Many Europeans, like many Americans, feel threatened by globalization. But the challenge cannot be met with Sarkozy's misconceived ideas, including designating threatened European companies as nationally backed contenders, and giving them special legal and economic privileges. That approach will see sheltered European firms fall even further behind newer and more efficient competitors from India, China and elsewhere.

[…] It would be nice to welcome a new French-American alliance. But first, Sarkozy will have to resolve the conflict between his enlightened trans-Atlantic overtures and his narrow protectionist vision for Europe.

I have a big problem with the New York Times editorial because it is acting as if it is discovering that Sarkozy has these views and that he is against the Turkey’s entrance into the European Union. One gets the impression that the Times believes that Sarkozy’s love for America means that he will forget politics and just do what is good for America or rather that he will forget that he is the Right Wing president of France, a country that is trying to find its place within a globalizing world. My point is simple: the New York Times and other American newspapers have turned Sarkozy into a superhero that is revolutionizing France focusing on his image and his love of America while forgetting that politics and governing are about substance and about the results of specific policies. Sarkozy is a politician with a backbone. This means that he isn’t an empty vessel, which will be filled with new ideas because they look chic and proper even though he does love glamour and the lights of the cameras. I’ve always argued that the only things modern and American about Sarkozy are his image, the way he does politics, and his belief in force and power. The New York Times should accept this reality instead of holding on to the myth of super Sarko. Thus, the lesson here is a simple one, Atlanticism and a love for America aren’t a sign of greatness and of progressivism, but can be signs of conservatism and potent populism.

Defending liberal interventionism

“My former boss [Tony Blair) is fond of saying that the political divide that matters in the world now is not that between left and right but that between open and closed. The threat we face is from those that advocate isolationism, protectionism and nativism - and it is striking how the debate on immigration has taken off in Europe and in the US. The enemy are the people who want to divide us into groups, to turn people against one another and take society backwards. The only hope we have is that those who want openness, tolerance and progress still have the political will to fight that battle and resist the tide of Luddism.

I believe the idea of liberal interventionism will survive as the best way of defending our interests and the moral way of promoting our values.” Jonathan Powell, “Why the West should not fear to intervene.”

Getting the culture we deserve

Peter Aspden has an interesting piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that we get the culture we deserve even though we may not want it or we may despise it. His point is that culture doesn’t happen to us, it happens because of us. He used the example of the Spice Girls to make his point about our responsibility for our culture. Sugary excerpt:

The Spice Girls became international figures, despite producing a string of drippy ballads, opposite in tone from the zip and sassiness of their first hit, which showed how soon record company conservatism kicked in. A generation of commentators anxious to write seriously about popular culture expended thousands of words on the new phenomenon, but they made a fatal mistake: popular culture at the start had been serious, in intent and conception, and worked devilishly hard to be taken as such. Now it had largely been replaced by tat, but no one seemed to notice. The symbolism was paramount, and the results surreal. The Spectator really did want to know Geri Halliwell’s views on the single currency.

Most nastily of all, a new demographic was discovered, or should we say invented: the pre-teens. They copied the dead pouts and the crappy outfits, and pester-powered their way to commercial significance. They thought they were sexy, although they didn’t know what sexy was. Nor, it should be said, did the Spice Girls themselves, always too contrived in their moves to hint at the carnal mischievousness which is at the heart of cheap-and-cheerful pop (compare Sandie Shaw, Bananarama).

The Spice Girls managed a rarely sinister double achievement: they sexualised infants and they infantilised sexuality.

[…] Most western art turned its back on that kind of ingenuous entertainment around the time, perhaps, of the death of the Hollywood musical. In its place, we have installed the Spice Girls and their ilk (see their melismatic flailings every week on the ghastly The X Factor). They are inane, dripping with cynicism, dumbed down and hyped up. It is our fault. We seldom get the culture that we really, really want; just the one that we deserve.

Although I agree with Aspden on his main point about the fact that we get the culture we deserve, I don’t agree with him on anything else for the simple reason that he seems to be arguing that “crap” is new in culture and that “innocence” is necessary for a great culture. The temptation that too many people fall into when they discuss the state of popular culture is to argue that everything is new or that everything that is happening has happened before when the truth may be in the middle. What isn’t new is the condemnation of popular culture as vile, worthless, and raunchy. What in my opinion may be new is the increased fragmentation of culture caused by the increasing gap between those who have not only money, but also an education and those who do not. In other words, my argument is that people aren’t born with good tastes or bad tastes and that good taste is developed with exposure to different things and with knowledge. The dumbing down that is occurring isn’t because of a bad culture, but because of a less cultured, less knowledgeable, and less educated citizenry. Thus, the outrage of Aspden is misplaced and it shouldn’t be on the Spice Girls, but on societies and governments that believe that it is acceptable and even safer to have a population that is uneducated and therefore less demanding.

The value of Nonsense

“Nonsense is a retreat even from the usual diversions of literature: a wilful and gleeful shunning of the attempts to make sense of the world found in more normal books. Those prone to psychoanalysis might well even suggest that we enjoy such silliness because of nostalgia for early childhood, when we were all the happier for living in a world where a cow could quite easily jump over the moon.

On a more literary level, there's the sheer fun of seeing words freed from the shackles and chains of meaning. Nonsense verse and prose allows us to enjoy the words for their sound and the images they conjure alone.

[…] Finally, there's the more troubling interpretation that an awful lot of nonsense verse is, in its own way, an exploration of the darker parts of our psyche. I don't want to push this too far. I'm certainly don't want to suggest that the boat trip in The Owl and The Pussycat should be compared to Heart Of Darkness. (Actually, I do, but I know how pretentious that's going to sound ...) But there is something in the idea, I think, especially considering the way nonsense books hold up the ever-present possibility of sudden and random death, bizarre cruelty and madness. In a way there's an excess of sense rather than a lack of it ...” Sam Jordison, “I'm talking nonsense. In a good way.”

Tit for tat and sucker punches

The Sydney Morning Herald had two shorts articles debating the relevance of feminism, which I thought were fascinating and worth reading because they show there is no consensus among women about feminism.

The first one is from Lindyl Crabb who argues that feminism is dead:

Now, I pride myself on my education and I am no Supre-flaunting, cleavage-flashing bimbo. I aspire to graduate with a double degree and pursue a rewarding career in domesticity (just kidding, you can stop hyperventilating). But ladies, I don't want to see you without a bra on any more than your former boyfriend/male boss/poor unsuspecting man on the street does.

Feminists are in denial, forcing their insecurities on arts students such as myself who must suffer the shared anguish of "having" to wear high heels - God, why is life so cruel? Feminist theory attempts to encourage the notion that girls like me are lacking something, and are underrated. Yeah, thanks. Until now I thought my only problem was chipped nail polish.

But if society is never going to allow me to reach my potential, I should just give up while I'm ahead. The Stepford Wives tale is a feminist attempt at a horror story, equating beautiful housewives with genetically blessed Frankenstein's monsters. Likewise, verbally bashing fellow "sisters" who wear short skirts is not inspiring, it is alienating, and far more tormenting than reading Zoo Weekly could ever be (and that's really scraping the barrel).

Yep, that's girl power for you.

Feminism is dead, because instead of weeping over the pages of Vogue, girls are participating in sport, and staying out past 11pm, and getting breast implants.

The second article is from Sophie Kidd  rebutting Crabb’s charge that Feminism is dead:

I'm not denying that I have an innate obsession with fashion, beauty and (sometimes) boys, but I'm not going to become a Supre scrag, trawling the local Westfield, giggling at boys and hitching up my fluoro pink skirt anytime soon.

[…] I am 16. Recently my class was helping a teacher move heavy boxes from the office to the classroom. The boys were given two boxes to carry each, and when I asked for two boxes, the teacher said: "Let's let the boys take two. You can handle one, can't you? Will you be all right with one? Make sure it's not too heavy for you." I was disgusted. How demeaning. But what could I do? Of course, I questioned the authority, but that achieved nothing but more demeaning comments. No 16-year-old girl has a voice against the middle-aged man.

[…] We've been portrayed this way for centuries, and it seems society isn't changing anytime soon. If Hillary Clinton is elected as the next US president it may change outlooks dramatically. As a highly US-influenced country, Australia may see a change in attitudes towards women. Let's hope so.

Until then, feminism stays alive, Ms Crabb, and there's nothing you can do to stop us. It seems in your argument, you want the best of both worlds, "a charming wife", as well as a prospective arts student. I'm sure that's possible, but you wouldn't have that opportunity without the help of our feminist heroes. They made it possible for you to have your arts degree and not be discriminated against. Think about that next time you blame the feminists.

After reading those articles, which are both well written, I am left wondering whether feminism is too encompassing or rather too limited because it is based on a false unity that crumbles every time women disagree strongly. I mean what is one supposed to conclude when one sees an old woman letting the B word slip her mouth contently, easily, naturally as if it were an acceptable insult to characterize Hillary Clinton because she assumes that as a woman she has the right to do so. Doesn’t that prove that there can no longer be such a thing as feminism because in a way, the first feminists succeeded in making women more humane even if this humanization still lead to the refusal  to accept that a woman can be herself without her choices and her decisions affecting all womankind (is there such a thing?).

The good side of anonymity

Linda Grant had an excellent and thought-provoking article on Comment is Free at the beginning of the week on anonymity in cyberspace. She took the contrarian position that anonymity isn't just causing people to be mean and to cross dangerous boundaries, but to have a sense of community that they wouldn’t have otherwise when they take the time to get past first impressions and instant reactions. Sugary excerpt:

Often I would try to imagine the person behind the opinions. Who did we have here? An embittered old Trot with a couple of bad marriages behind him and a tendency to take a drink or two? Or spotty Tory boy, commenting in his bedroom while he was supposed to be studying for his A levels? The problem with Cif was that not only did you not know who someone was, but usually you didn't even know their gender, age, occupation. Was this person commenting on Africa a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle or a call-centre worker who has read an article on Wikipedia?

But why should it matter? It mattered, I thought, because by turning someone into nothing more than a set of opinions on a screen, you could first depersonalise, then dehumanise and then demonise your opponent. You were battling with vast realms of virtual enemies, whom you could invest with all kinds of evil intent (which is why the accusation "Nazi!" is so popular on the internet). The extrapolation from a few slightly badly chosen words, hurriedly typed, into a whole system of belief became a common sport - "Zionist neocon!", "Loony lefty".

I recounted last week the discovery that the son of my old boss, Tony Hall, turned out to be the frequent commenter known as "ishouldapologise" (in real life Phil Hall). Through him, I was able to regain contact with his parents, two of the most remarkable people I have ever met, who have spent all their lives devoted to Africa and its people, "gypsy journalists" they described themselves. It was a few months before Eve Hall's death from breast cancer, and I wrote her obituary for the Guardian when, two weeks ago, sadly, at the age of 70, she died.

I wrote about this experience last week on Cif and something remarkable happened. After a few comments on the issue of anonymity, suddenly people began to treat each other as people, not sets of ideas. Many offered their condolences to Phil Hall (ishouldapologise); he told them the names of the songs that would be sung at his mother's funeral on Saturday, and people posted Youtube versions. Some said they would light candles. Others began to reveal, painfully, their own experiences of close family deaths, of mothers, of fathers and of children, of their own battles with cancer. The most remarkable were the words of "sapient", in Australia, who wrote:

"This is hard to write even though anonymously ... today 9th Nov is the 20th anniversary of my son's funeral. My son was injured in an accident and lived for ten days. My only question was: 'Has he enough painkiller?' The doctor's answer was: 'We do not know.' He died on the 5th."

This harrowing image has stayed with me. I don't know who "sapient" is, and his or her name is immaterial. Whatever their opinions, I know that this is a person who was suffered a dreadful loss. Would it make any difference if their real name were printed next to it? If this is Jane Smith or Marcel Leland (whoever they are) it makes no difference. And as "sapient" pointed out, it was the anonymity that allowed the memory to be expressed. If anything has convinced me that the anonymity issue is a red herring, this is it.

I spent the last few days wondering rereading Grant’s article and wondering if she could be right. I have concluded that she is because I think that anonymity becomes less about meanness when one is able to get past the tempestuous and vile articles and comments written probably by someone choosing to vent, to react, and not to think. However, the more thought and feelings get into the process, the more personalizing anonymity becomes in the sense that you may not know the person name, but you know things about them, what they think and about what they feel. I think I am of course an example of Grant’s point or at least, if I hope that I am not. If I'm not, I will just try harder to elevate the debate and to make a distinction between being opiniated and passionate and being mean and intolerant.

English football, foreigners, and blame

Chris Dillow writes about the desire of England Sports Minister, Gerry Sutcliffe to have an inquiry to find out whether the high number of foreign players is affecting the performance of the English national soccer football team. In other words, Sutcliffe is wondering whether foreigners are taking the place of English players who could help their national team to win the world cup. As Dillow argues, the argument is foolish and shows that how easy it is to blame foreigners for everything even bad football results. Sugary excerpt:

But there's a question here that's not being asked: why is there so much fuss about the number of foreign players now? Why wasn't there a fuss two or three years ago, when their numbers were almost as great?
There are two reasons:
1. 2-3 years ago, people thought England were a good team, and their failure to get beyond the quarter-final of the 2002 World Cup or Euro 2004 was due to bad luck or bad management. Today, this illusion is shattered. Everyone knows the England team are bad, and they're looking for someone to blame. And it's an old and universal fact that foreigners can be blamed for everything.
2. Arsenal are a better team now. And their rivals, having no hope of playing better football, want to drag them down. Let's look at who's calling for a quota on foreigners.

Asked if he was in favour of the quota system, Gerrard said: “Yes, definitely, I am all for there being a rule change. “Something has got to happen otherwise there will be more and more foreigners and they will take over." 

In my opinion, England to win another world cup is just going to have to find a way to convince its foreign players to play for its national team. In other words, for once, England is going to have to follow the French example by offering citizenship to the best foreign players.

The past, the present, the future

This video is an excerpt from The Remains of the Day, the film based on the superb novel of Kazuo Ishiguro. In this excerpt, different European and American dignitaries are at a conference organized by a British Nazi sympathizer, Lord Darlington, whose ambitious goal is to avoid a second war with Germany. They all end it by making a toast saying that Germany wants peace and is a Friend not a foe, until the American dignitary, Mr Farraday played by the late Christopher Reeves, stands up and calls them all of amateurs who don't know anything about foreign policy. I think that it is a toast that could be made today even though I wonder whether Amateurism hasn't become the norm in the diplomatic arena.

Resistance is futile

“It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.” Slavoj Žižek, “Resistance is Surrender.”

Sex, Catholicism, and damage

Michèle Roberts, whose memoir Paper Houses was published earlier this year in French, has the most entertaining interview I’ve read in a while. She talks about sex and what she sees as the fundamentalism of Catholicism. Her interview is priceless so is her book and her other works. Sugary excerpt:

"At the age of 58 I feel I have a lot to say about it," she said. "All kinds of sex: sadomasochism, rape, prostitution, female desire in middle age, sex tourism and the commodification of sex.",

She is intrigued about what young men think when they split off the image of the sacred - in the form of their brides - from that of the profane when they go on stag-night expeditions to brothels. And she is interested in why young fiction writers are unable to describe emotion in relation to sex at all.

"They feel crushed by a great cliché and are terrified about appearing uncool, because that kind of sex is all about your being able to do anything at any time you want, there's no history, there's no memory, it's all cool, it's just all bodies," she said of her former students at the University of East Anglia. "So that for the students to write about feeling, in connection with sex, is the greatest taboo."

Nor does she blame them. "In this age, where all the boundaries have been broken down between private and public, maybe people need to keep a little tiny private place of sexual pleasure for themselves, and not ever speak about it," she said.

In her memoir, Roberts charts her own struggles with taboos, sexual desire, and a sort of "Mother Superior of the mind" whose disapproval undermined her creativity by telling her she was wicked and no good.

"I'm not the only woman damaged by Catholicism," she writes in her memoir. Christianity, she says, can be as fundamentalist as Islam; she sees it as particularly oppressive to women because it puts men in positions of power.

"In fundamentalist Catholicism," she says, "what you've got is a male-inspired religion that is very frightened of the body and particularly of women's bodies, and of women's creative power in terms of our sexuality, our capacity to give birth, to suckle, to nurture, and what you get is this set of rules: women's bodies are a source of sin and temptation."

As a writer she is as alive to the force of metaphor and symbol as to the power of belief. She considers the wearing of the veil by women in Muslim communities in Europe more an emblem of patriarchy than of culture - otherwise, she says, Muslim men would wear it too.

But in France the issue is more complex than elsewhere in Europe. "Faced with notions of French citizenship, which tends to mean white or passing for white, the veil has become a symbol of difference that immigrant communities are choosing to use," she said; it is worn as a flag of identity.

Witchcraft and African children

Via the International Herald Tribune:

The notion of child witches is not new here. It is a common belief in Angola's dominant Bantu culture that witches can communicate with the world of the dead and usurp or "eat" the life force of others, bringing their victims misfortune, illness and death. Adult witches are said to bewitch children by giving them food, and then force them to reciprocate by sacrificing a family member.

But officials attribute the surge in persecutions of children to war - 27 years in Angola, ending in 2002, and near constant strife in Congo. The conflicts orphaned many children, while leaving other families intact but too destitute to feed themselves.

"The witches situation started when fathers became unable to care for the children," said Ana Silva, who is in charge of child protection for the children's institute. "So they started seeking any justification to expel them from the family."

Since then, Silva said, the phenomenon has followed poor migrants from the northern Angolan provinces of Uige and Zaire to the slums of the fast-growing capital, Luanda. Two recent cases horrified officials there. In June, Silva said, a Luanda mother blinded her 14-year-old daughter with chlorine bleach to rid her of what she thought were evil visions. In August, a father injected battery acid into his 12-year-old son's stomach because he feared he was a witch, she said.

Angola's government has campaigned since 2000 to dispel notions about child witches, Silva said, but progress comes slowly. "We cannot change the belief that witches exist," she said. "Even the professional workers believe that witches exist."

Instead, her institute is spreading the word that children cannot be witches - and trying to teach everyone, from police officers to teachers to religious leaders, that violence against children is never justified.

"It is not easy to achieve results," she said. "But it is possible."

The city of Mbanza Congo, just 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, from Angola's border with Congo, has blazed a trail. After a child accused of witchcraft was stabbed to death in 2000, provincial officials joined forces with Save the Children, the global charitable organization, to round up and shelter street children. They reunited 380 of 432 children with relatives, the witchcraft report stated.

Eleven fundamentalist churches were shut down because of reports of child exploitation. Eight Congolese pastors were deported. Villages formed committees to monitor children's rights. The authorities say the number of children who are abused or living on the streets dropped drastically.

"It is very, very, very common in the villages," he said. "We know that some children have been killed. Police are far, and villagers take matters into their own hands."

His church runs the town's only sanctuary for children victimized as witches, a shelter barely bigger than a three-car garage with a dirt yard and spartan furnishings. Thirty-two boys, including Domingos, occupy bunk beds stacked a foot apart, their few clothes stashed in cardboard boxes underneath, toothbrushes hanging from the bed posts. No shelter exists for girls.

Since July, all newcomers have been turned away. "Children come here to ask for protection, but we have no space," the bishop said.

"To date, we have not found any special way to fight against this phenomenon."

Many of the shelter's boys describe pasts of abuse, rejection and fear. Saldanha David Gomes, 18, who lived with his aunt until he was 12, said she turned on him after her 3-year-old daughter fell ill and died.

Afterward, he said, his aunt refused to feed him and bound his hands and feet each evening, fearing that he would take another victim.

The saddest thing about such stories is that they show how difficult it is to overcome foolish traditions and cultural beliefs and that religion usually reinforces them by divinizing the unseen and the belief that not only evil exists, but also that it can be personify in a child. It is for those reasons that I’m strongly against the idea that our past should be our present and that the humane should be sacrificed or even brutalized for the divine.

Montesquieu, manners, and the omnipotence of women

“Though Montesquieu is best known for his theory of the separation of powers, which inspired our tripartite governmental structure, he endorsed other separations as well, like that between laws and manners. Fashions are part of manners, and for that reason, according to Montesquieu, not an appropriate area for legislation.

[…] Montesquieu writes that fashion is established by “the desire to please more than oneself.” When you follow a fashion, you indicate your malleability; you signal that you care about the assessment of others; you seek approval. Whose approval, though, are these young men seeking? Apparently not that of women. We hear often that the street style of dress emerged as an imitation of prison garb, but very few women could find this either sexually appealing or economically promising. Why aren’t young women telling these young men that they look like clowns? Young women seem to have lost the sense of their nature-given power to shape men’s behavior. Instead, they mirror the young men’s hopelessness.

Resorting to legal remedies, though, is an admission of moral collapse. It’s also unlikely to succeed. (Predictably enough, the ACLU has already denounced the anti-saggin’ campaign as “racial profiling.”) Montesquieu writes that “when one wants to change the mores and manners, one must not change them by the laws, as this would appear to be too tyrannical; it would be better to change them by other mores and other manners.” In part, we can trust in the ever-shifting nature of fashion itself. There are already signs that a sleeker look is in the offing.

[…] Perhaps this would be the moment for women to take a more active role as well. Were women to insist on courtship from suitors, the transformation would be even more dramatic, for it would reach to morals, as well as manners.” Diana Schaub, “What Montesquieu would say about ‘Saggin’.”

France and the Non to Europe

Certain Ideas of Europe has a post wondering if the French would vote non to the European Constitution if they had to do it over again. I think that not only would the French vote non , but they would do it by a stronger majority this time. There are two reasons for this increase of French Euroscepticism. The first reason is that Sarkozy had legitimated Euroscepticism with his criticisms of the European Central Bank, of the strong Euro, and by insisting that Europe needs to become more protectionist and more about identity. Mitterrand and even Chirac to a lesser extent all used the idea of European integration to make the French dream that they would not only be able to compete with the United States, but that they would become a member of superpower again. Of course, the technocrats of Brussels have always been easy scapegoats for national problems, but it was rare to hear French presidents criticize the EU because they knew that it was their machin (object). Sarkozy understands that the EU no longer makes the French dream and that he is everything to dream by showing the French that he intends to make France great and prosper even if it means weakening the EU or rather forcing it to follow French interests.

The second reason is that by drafting a new treaty after the French voted No, the EU has shown that it is willing to move forward with European integration without taking on the important and unavoidable task of convincing Europeans of its necessity. It is that kind of paternalism, which had been with the EU since it was a small organization focused solely on coal that frustrates the French and other Europeans because they feel that EU considers European integration too great to be left in the hands of the people.

The problem in short is that because the idea of European integration was oversold to the French as the solution of all of France’s problems, the French today are blaming the EU for not delivering and especially favoring speed and economical interests over everything else. Finally, as the video below shows, French politicians and European politicians don’t know how to talk about Europe to the people. The reason for this ineloquence and this inarticulateness is the fact that they don’t have a vision for it, they simply feel the responsibility to continue something, which de Gaulle and Adenauer, Giscard d’Estaing and Schmidt, and Mitterrand and Kohl dreamed of, and felt in their gut and their heart was necessary to avoid other bloody and divisive conflicts. In other words, the trouble is that very few European politicians are able to talk about Europe, the way Sarkozy talks about America.

Seeing ruthless dictators everywhere

Increasingly, it seems that there is no middle ground between being a Hitler and being a Democrat. What I mean is that the conventional world views is that the world or rather specific regions of the world are full of bloodthirsty dictators that want to dominate not only their country, but extent their influence. According to this worldview, little Hitlers, Stalins, and Pol Pots are growing everywhere and the international community should not ignore them, but should confront them. A good example of this worrisome trend is the column of Peter Tatchell in the Times of London today in which he presents the world of yet another dangerous dictator, Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda. Sugary excerpt:

Uganda is drifting towards dictatorship, just like Zimbabwe a decade ago. The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, is a new Robert Mugabe in the making, a budding tyrant who is subverting democracy and human rights (according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) through voter intimidation, hounding opposition politicians, detention without trial, torture, extrajudicial killings, media censorship, corruption, suppression of protests, homophobic witch-hunts, and crackdowns on universities and trade unions.

The point isn’t that Tatchell is wrong about Museveni who is indeed a ruthless man. The point is that it is easy to grandstand and to condemn dictators when they come from what are considered unimportant or rather irrelevant countries. After all, what is the difference between Museveni and Putin or rather what is the difference between Museveni and Musharraf? Are African dictators more barbaric than others because there is something in the African air or in the African genes that makes them more bloodthirsty? Either a dictator is a dictator is a dictator or people who love to view the world as black and white need to accept that shades of gray exists. This acceptance of complexity doesn’t mean that the intolerable should become tolerable, but it means also that there are no absolute and that the world is never going to be clean or at least not at once. In other words, Tatchell should learn about Uganda and then write a column about something more important than his outrage. He could explain why Museveni is leading Uganda and has been allowed to “Mugaberize” himself.

When European politicians sing, hell freezes over

When American politicians try to be cool and to act, to dance or to sing, it usually works because Americans have a native easy-goingness that makes it possible and that helps them avoid the ridicule because they aren't afraid of it. When European politicians try to be cool, it usually ends badly. In this video, Bernard Kouchner is singing with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steimeyer, a song about integration. They get an A for effort, but a D- for substance (it is hard for me to give Kouchner an F on anything). In other words, my advice to them is to only sing in the shower when nobody is there to listen to them

Ethical sex

Via the Sidney Morning Herald:

Drinking, dating, drugs and youth are familiar but often disastrous bedfellows. And this relationship is not eased by the conflicting messages young people receive about how to handle sex, drugs and dating.

Spiking a girl's drink might be viewed as a despicably low, predatory act, but spiking the punch bowl with vodka at the school dance still makes you a hero with the cool kids. Outfits that would be deemed too revealing for the beach are de rigueur for self-portraits on Facebook.

And the sex education offered at high school does not do much to give young people a helping hand, so to speak. At high school we were given the "heterosexual plumbing guide". It was this goes here, this operates when twisted half an inch to the right, this lever makes this work and then presto, it is all systems go.

We were left to work out the ethics of engagement ourselves. But gaining a sexual education and gaining a sexual ethic are two wildly different things.

Slipping Rohypnol into a girl's drink is a no-brainer. Dead-set wrong. But what do we think if a young guy asks a girl if he can buy her a drink, she asks for a gin and tonic, and behind her back he tells the bartender to "make it a double, mate"?

Do we consider this a form of drink spiking? Do we consider this ethical?

And say that this episode repeats itself four times that evening, so the girl thinks she has had four standard drinks, when in fact she has had eight, and say then the young guy pressures her for sex. She wakes up to a pounding headache, feeling used and confused as to how she got into the predicament. What do we think now?

Or what if a woman knowingly and voluntarily ingests a drug, legal or otherwise, to end up being intimidated into unprotected sex? Is this ethical sex?

Those are all great questions. However, I am bothered by the concept of “ethical sex.” I don’t think that sex and ethics mix. I can already hear the argument of people asking me about rape or about other form of sexual violence, but are they really about sex? It isn’t original to say that they aren’t about sex, but about power; nevertheless, it is essential to separate sex from ethics because using phrases like ethical sex raises within me the fear that one’s sex life should be appraised and approved by society.

International adoption, gender, and China

Jacob Sullum has a great article about China, little girls and international adoption on Reason. Sullum debunks what he believes to be myths fabricated by the Chinese government about international adoption and including the one that says that girls are not wanted and are most of the time abandoned by their parents. Sugary excerpt:

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say these girls are “unwanted” only because the Chinese government has made them so. Although the government’s oppressive, family-destroying policies have had the incidental benefit of bringing joy to the lives of adoptive parents in the U.S. and elsewhere, it will be a great victory for liberty when such heartwarming stories stop appearing on newsstands and bookshelves. These adoptions would not be occurring if the Chinese government did not try to dictate the most basic and intimate of life’s decisions.

[…] Given the barriers to adoption in China, its frequency, once informal adoptions are taken into account, is impressive evidence that, far from being unwanted in the country of their birth, China’s daughters are highly valued. It’s true that China’s strong patriarchal traditions, according to which sons carry on the family line while daughters become members of other families when they marry, mean parents are anxious to have at least one boy. Especially in rural areas, parents value a boy’s superior strength and expect sons, more so than daughters, to support them in their old age. These longstanding attitudes explain why boys are rarely abandoned in China and rarely end up in orphanages. […]

Even couples who give up daughters, leaving them in hospitals, in busy markets, at police stations, or literally on the doorstep of orphanages (as our daughter Mei was left when she was about 10 days old), may not be eschewing girls so much as trying to complete their families within the restrictions established by the government. Because of the one-son/two-child rule, Johnson reports, the typical abandoned girl is a second daughter.

Although I am for international adoption, it is impossible not to recognize their complexity and the ethical and moral dilemmas, which they pose. One of them is that one is about deciding what importance to give to the context and local culture during and after the adoption. The point that, as Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig has written, there is an irrational aspect to adoption, which makes it possible to consider children on both sides that is on the one of the those who desperately want to adopt and those who believe that no foreigners should adopt children from a different part of the world as commodities. What matter at the end, more than everything else, are the children and their well being.

Kouchner as a warrior

Doug Saunders wrote the best article I read last weekend in the Globe and Mail. His article focused on Bernard Kouchner and on what Saunders believes to be his mission to save internationalism. Sugary excerpt:

Bernard Kouchner, the man who invented the concepts of humanitarian intervention and the “duty to protect” and made them part of United Nations doctrine, who persuaded nations to stick their noses and sometimes their guns into the business of others, may be uniquely positioned to perform the judo-flip necessary to put the world's powers to work on this moment's gravest humanitarian problems. He certainly believes he is. Having spent 40 years close to both the dictators and the democrats who run the world today, he may have a reasonable claim.He also seems to believe, according to his staff, that he can do the contortions needed to keep his project's two worst enemies at bay: Nicolas Sarkozy, who could force him out of office at any moment, and the United States, which could ruin everything with a short-sighted spasm of violence, such as bombing Iran.
“I know the difficulties of doing this,” he explained recently. “Americans and Europeans today are listened to with suspicion as soon as we start talking about democracy and human rights. It is a terrible irony. The risk now is that the messenger may have killed the message, that the very name of human rights entails rejection and suspicion among the very people it should help.”
There are plenty of people, “realists” and others, who believe the world is better off if nations protect their interests and mind their own business.
But, if Mr. Kouchner rescues idealism from its current morass, it could make a huge difference in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where the world's last remaining tyrants are being protected by those great powers that have abandoned idealism altogether.
[…] Earlier this year, the former U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke described the dilemma for Mr. Kouchner and others: “The veterans of the European New Left, having succeeded in changing the rules for intervention through their arguments over the decades and their efforts in the Balkans during the 1990s, found themselves, like everyone else, up against a terrible reality in Iraq – a reality so desperate that it threatened to discredit the noble ideas that had led some of those veterans of the New Left, though not all of them, to support the original intervention.”

Kouchner is less worried about internationalism than about rescuing the idea of humanitarian intervention. I think that Kouchner believes that the Iraq war could have worked if the United States had had more helped and had been interested in nation building. The trouble with Kouchner is that his best traits are also his worst traits. I believe that Kouchner chose to become Sarkozy or rather Fillon’s Prime Minister because he wants to make his past is future by showing that intervention in international affairs isn’t a dirty word and that it is worst to be neutral than to be wrong when trying to achieve a just end. The only reservation that I have is that I’m not sure that the mixture of humanitarianism, idealism, moralism, and interventionism can be anything else than explosive or spectacularly sterile.