The Republic of Dissent

Ending my year of magical thinking

Okay, okay, I'm weak and human. My brain is so dead right now that it is leaking. I have hit a wall and I have to take a break from this blog to rebound and have a new beginning (does such a thing exist?). I feel guilty about taking a break, but so many things are going on in my life that I need to take a step back and make some important decisions. I'm thus going to take a long hiatus, stop thinking, work harder, and be bolder. I have to stop running away from life and embrace it (That sounds too cheesy). I will be back by January 24 or sooner if I'm unable to control my blog addiction (which is more than likely). Anyway, I will you all and I'm asking you to forgive my weaknesses. Have a great end of the year and a great beginning of 2008. See you in January.

Latin America and the West

Mario Vargas Llosa on Latin America and the West:

Is Latin America part of the West, culturally speaking, or is it something essentially different, like China, India or Japan? Latin America is an overseas projection of the West that, from colonial times, has acquired its own distinctive features. Those traits, without severing it from the tree from which it sprouts, give it a specific personality.

[...] Culturally speaking, Latin America is so many dissimilar things that only by fragmenting it and excluding a good number of those fragments that make up its reality could it be possible to determine a specific trait valid for the entire continent which, since the arrival at its shores of Columbus’ three ships, articulated its history with that of the rest of the world. Its diversity, compatible in its case with a subterranean unity that is its characteristic condition, is in good measure a consequence of the Western sources that nurture it.

It is for that reason Latin Americans express themselves in the main in Spanish, English, Portuguese and French. It is for that reason Latin Americans are Catholics, Protestants, atheists or agnostics. And those who are atheists or agnostics are the way they are based on what they learned from the West, as is the case for Latin America’s reactionaries and revolutionaries, its democrats and liberals, its traditionalist or avant-garde artists, its romantics, classicists or postmodernists.

[…] Those who have tried their utmost to distance Latin America from the West have been those Western writers, thinkers or artists who, disillusioned with their own culture, venture forth in search of others to satisfy their appetite for exoticism, primitivism, magic, irrationality and the innocence of Rousseau’s noble savage—and have made Latin America the goal of their utopias. This has produced excellent literary fruit, though, in general, catastrophic political confusion.

Reading slowly

I'm just finishing reading Zadie Smith's On beauty, which I'm enjoying very much. It's always interesting to hear writers talk about their books even though some don't do it very well. Zadie Smith, I must say, is great to listen to and in this video, she discusses On Beauty.

Voltaire and Antinomianism

“What we are really concerned about here is the question of how to deal with those in our midst who are antinomians — that is, people who believe the laws of God should trump the laws of man. Ever since we first built societies out of reason and mutual respect during the Enlightenment, the presence of religious true believers has been a problem. Should renunciation of spiritual authority be a prerequisite for membership in a free society?

Antinomians can be nothing more than charming nuisances, like William Blake, whose poetry was a long manifesto of antinomianism. Or they can be Osama bin Laden.

"What to say," Voltaire asked three centuries ago, "to a man who tells you he prefers to obey God than to obey men, and who is consequently sure of entering the gates of heaven by slitting your throat?"” Doug Saunders, “Do the laws of God trump those of man?”

You are what you read

I'm currently reading this article in the Guardian, which focuses on the reading habits of the Brits, the French, and the Americans during the holidays. For example, it points that Americans in general prefers to buy self-help books. This fact doesn't surprise me because Americans are so practical that they believe that anything can be taught and that there is a secret formula to having a successful life. The French on the other hand are more idealistic and prefer to believe that it is more important to learn philosophical principles rather than just the knowhow, which is meaningless if you don't understand the why of things. I agree with them. Sugary excerpt:

The Americans go for self-help books, the French buy unreadable philosophy books and the British buy books filled with trivia, which are often made up and generally aimed at being funny," Nielsen adds. "Those are the stereotypes, and they're not completely misleading."

In France, certainly, they buy a different kind of book. In amazon.fr's chart of the top 20 bestselling titles this Christmas is one by Schopenhauer. True, it comes in at 19, and it isn't the German pessimist's symphonic chef d'oeuvre The World as Will and Representation, but L'Art d'avoir toujours raison, a book on how to win arguments. But let's not spoil the story. As you know, Schopenhauer's most trenchant philosophical observation was that humans are eternally tormented by desire and it is only in the stilling of the human will - be it through disinterested aesthetic contemplation or ascetic renunciation - that one can elude the penal servitude of willing and, as he poetically put it in book three of his masterpiece, avoid our human fate, namely to be "constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion".

Defining forgiveness

“Forgiveness is not achieved unilaterally: it is the result of a dialogue, which may be tacit, but which involves reciprocal communication of an extended and delicate kind. The one who forgives goes out to the one who has injured him, and his gesture involves a changed state of mind, a reorientation towards the other, and a setting aside of resentment. […] Crucial in this process are the “narratives” which the parties recount to themselves, […] Each party’s narrative is both an account of the injury, and an allocation of blame; ideal and reality, exoneration and fault, are all woven together, and forgiveness can be seen as in part an attempt to harmonize the narratives, so that the story comes to an end in a new beginning. […] You don’t succeed in forgiving when you have shown no recognition of the fault, and you don’t recognize a fault if you regard it with indifference, and without the natural resentment with which one moral being receives the injuries inflicted by another. The one who forgives changes his whole posture towards the one who had injured him, and cannot do this without the other’s cooperation. Resentment must be felt; but resentment is a moral emotion, founded in judgement, and can, in the course of rational dialogue, be “set aside”. […] Forgiveness is unique to rational beings, and is a gift of metaphysical freedom. Only the accountable being, able to take responsibility for his own actions and mental states, can forgive or be forgiven, and this way of overcoming conflict has next to nothing in common with the peace of the “pecking order”, or the territorial settlements among badgers and bears.”  Roger Scruton, “What is Forgiveness.”

How to get personal

In this scene taken from François Ozon's 8 Femmes ( 8 Women), Isabelle Huppert sings one of Françoise Hardy's best song Message Personnel (Private message). What is surprising is how good Huppert's voice actually sounds if she were an American actress and a little bit younger, I'm sure that somebody would have persuaded her to make a music album. It seems that in America, everybody wants to be Leonardo Da Vinci and to be good at different things, the problem is that Da Vinci even in his time, was the exception not the norm and that doing too many things most of the times  means sacrificing greatness.

History and Integration

I agree with this:

What's interesting about sport is that it has always been ahead of the game. Integration through sport is nothing new. In the US it was black athletes who were the first to be recognized as Americans. In France too.
We're in the process of giving birth to something. But giving birth is always painful. And what will be born? Things can't go backwards, people are suffocating. Previously, those who suffered discrimination used to say nothing, because they couldn't see how it worked. They accepted what they had, and thought they were lucky. But young people born in France who feel completely French want to have a share in everything. Are we going to tell them that they are wrong to make demands, to tell them that they cannot have the same dreams or the same hopes? They are demanding the same rights.
And I think that this is a good thing for France. Discrimination means neglecting people who have a contribution to make. An intelligent approach would want everyone to be involved. But are we going to start thinking this way before it's too late?
What is happening in France is fundamental for Europe. After the riots in 2005, many people in Europe said: "The French model of integration has had it; we mustn't do what they have been doing." Even though we're more advanced. I'm lucky enough to be able to travel and I can see that France is light-years ahead of some countries. It's incredible. That's what I felt in Italy and today in Spain, for example.
[...] Yes. My friends are first and foremost French and, what's more, they don't even understand the kind of thing that people say about this. For example, why speak about "first, second, or third generation"? They're French. Why speak about minorities? Do the others see themselves in terms of a majority?
But – to get back to history – you would think from the way that some people's minds work that the population of France became fixed sometime way back in the past. In reality, even in the past it was not fixed. Nevertheless, it is only since the 1970s that people of different origins have really been living together. In mainland France it was long thought that slavery and colonization were justified by a "racial hierarchy". The whole culture, the whole of society was characterized by this way of thinking. And today we're asking all those people to live together and to believe that everyone is on the same level. But they haven't been taught to accept that, because the ideas of racial inferiority and superiority have never been challenged. The French population itself was not directly linked to the institution of slavery. But the state sanctioned, organized, and took advantage of slavery and the slave trade. Slavery is not just about colour: it is a system in which some people had interests and which the state controlled and assisted.

Gaddafi in Paris

Charles Bremner writes on Gaddafi's visit in Paris and the controversy surrounding it. Sarkozy is defending the visit by arguing that it is important to encourage Libya, which has changed its ways and forsaken Terrorism. I think that that long visit from Gaddafi (he is spending 5 days in France and even had the honor of visiting the French parliament) shows is that Sarkozy is a fan of Realpolitik especially when it is economically beneficial for France since Gaddafi is going to sign contracts, which are worth billions of Euros. Well all of this controversy just shows that a politician is a politician is a politician. The interesting is that Kouchner is staying silent and I have to say that I'm not surprised, but still a little bit disappointed but at the same time, I wonder if realism in foreign policy is the least dangerous ideology and if it isn't inevitable that at the end, all idealists and humanists have to become realists either by pure cynism or because they realize that they can't change the world with only noble sentiments.

Conscience and the guilt card

“But there is a contradiction in the position of some African leaders: wanting, in spirit, for Europe to treat Africa as an equal, yet wanting anything but that when it comes to formal trade deals.

Post-colonial rancour was a running theme of the summit, with Europe blamed for Africa’s underdevelopment and thus for the current wave of migration northwards. President Wade also gave Europe warning that it was in danger of losing the competition for the new Africa to China, which is rushing to pour billions into resources deals, no strings attached.

Guilt and fear: African leaders may extract something from the EU by pulling those strings. But they would do better with an argument based on the economics of trade and development — and only the poorest among them can make that.” Bronwen Maddox, “Africa must drop the Guilt Card to strengthen its Hand.”

Movies and Religion

Jean Kazez has a review of The Golden Compass, which she liked, which just shows that matters of taste are always because they are most of the times completely subjective. Her review is interesting because she gives the movie, in my opinion more credits than it deserves by interpreting its meaninglessness. Sugary excerpt:

A moviegoer could come away thinking Pullman [Philip Pullman the author of the book] is for witches and demons and multipe universes, talking polar bears and mysterious dust. The movie’s real theme, though, is truth. Good in the movie is lined up with free inquiry and the unimpeded search for the truth. Evil is the monstrous institution of the magisterium, which battles against the truth- seekers.

But wait, if the movie is pro-truth, why shouldn’t it be construed as pro-God, or even pro-Jesus. (Wasn’t it Jesus who said “I am the way and the truth”?) It will take any moviegoer a moment of honest reflection to admit the power of the movie’s message. All religions claim contact with truth, but they don’t empower members of the religion to be truth-seekers themselves.

I’m not just talking about the obvious cases, like the Roman Catholic church. I think the same is true even in the most liberal religious communities. The movie brilliantly makes children the target of the magisterium–it’s brilliant because children really are the crux of the matter. They don’t yet believe, and will ask challenging questions, if permitted.

This whole business of teaching children “truths” before they’re mature enough to make up their own minds is tricky. We do it all the time. We teach them all sorts of facts before they can verify them as facts. We teach them moral values before they can discuss morality. We teach them political attitudes before they are in any position to understand the pro’s and con’s.

Religion is a special case. For one reason, that’s because children are allowed to ask questions about all the other topics, but discouraged from asking questions about religion. In the middle of a religion class, even at the most liberal church or synagogue, a child cannot raise his or her hand and say “is there really a god”?

I wish that I had seen the same movie as she had or maybe I was too distracted by the images and the fact that the actors were using a dialogue that they themselves didn’t seem to understand to realize that the movie actually got somewhere or to something. There is something that I know for sure after watching the movie and it is that the book has to be entertaining, but isn’t good? I don’t know and I may never know because the movie didn’t make me want to read the book, it made me want to reread the last Harry Potter book.

Falling out of love with DC

I had a quiet birthday weekend, which is exactly what I wanted considering the fact that I'm in a transitional period at the moment. My most important realization during this short period was that I've fallen out of love with Washington, DC. It is becoming increasingly difficult to stay in the city without feeling  uneasy and dow. I started feeling this way in the summer, but I told myself that it had nothing to do with DC, but everything to do with me. which isn't false, but things haven't changed I've fallen out of love with the DC. But apart from my feelings for DC, the weekend was short and interesting, I realized also that I think too much. I don't know how to take a step back and just relax. I know that I'm going to have to force myself to learn how to relax because otherwise, I'm going to crash and burn out. That is what is happening to me right now, I'm a brain dead woman walking who is trying to persuade herself that taking a break from blogging isn't the end of the world. Anyway, enough personal talk, I'm back and that it's what matters. To talk about something else, I saw the Golden Compass last Friday and I was disappointed for two reasons. The first reason is that I felt that I was in an universe that was very beautiful, but artificial, insignificant, and meaningless. The second reason is that I expected a lot from the movie and that what I got was just a part of something, which is advertised as big. It was too obvious that the director saved some of the best scenes for last since the movie is supposed to be the first of three. I felt cheated, like I had paid for a full meal and just gotten the appetizer, which was intriguing, but just not enough.

Birthday break

I know, I know, I haven't been posting as much as I used to, but I've got a great excuse: my life is in a state of flux, I'm thinking about going back to New York, and I have a birthday coming tomorrow. I'm getting closer to the big 30 and it's scaring me not because I mind getting older for I was born old, but because I fear that I'm not getting smarter. There is nothing worse than being old and unable to lean from experience, especially from past mistakes. Anyway, I'm going to take some time off. The good news is that I will be back on Monday, but the bad news is that I may stop blogging, if I'm able to, for a few weeks  (4 at most) shortly before Christmas. I need time to stop and just to take a deep breath and exhale. Anyway, enjoy the weekend and please forgive me (that's the title of my favorite Bryan Adams's song) for deserting this blog more than I want to, but simply because I need to in order to keep my hunger for writing and knowledge intact. I'm brain dead right now and  I need to slow down.

Refusing to accept the cold

It's cold and raining in Washington, DC! I'm having a hard time accepting it. It was so beautiful for so long that I had banished the idea of winter from my mind, which explains why I just can't stand this harsh weather. Anyway, this is an excerpt of a movie that was out a few years ago named French Kiss with Kevin Kline who plays the role of the obnoxious, but sensitive Frenchman and Meg Ryan who plays the beauty and bold American. It is a movie filled with stereotypes, but enjoyable. I hope that it helps you supporting this cold weather.

Waiting for motherhood

“[…] the idea that young women are tossing back ecstasy pills and laughing in the face of fading fertility is ridiculous. A woman would have to be a blind and deaf hermit to be unaware of the facts about fertility or to assume that IVF is easy, cheap or guaranteed. As a woman in prime child-bearing age but with no plans to bear children in the immediate future, I have a message for all those Cassandra commentators who claim they're giving us a wake-up call. Let me assure them, we don't need it - many of us have long been awake, having a very dark night of the soul.

To delay consciously having children is often depicted as naked selfishness: you are too busy going off on minibreaks with a merry-go-round of boyfriends, finding your chakhras in yoga classes and engaging in other forms of what is sneeringly referred to as "me time" to do what is your biological imperative.

But surely having a baby - for which you're prepared neither emotionally or financially and which you don't have the time to raise properly because you are in the early days of your career and don't have the clout to bargain for time off - simply out of fear that you might not be able to have one later could equally be defined as selfish.

I know a lot of people who married in their mid-20s and, while some of them are still happily together, an astonishing number were divorced before they reached 30. Maybe modern society is working against biology on this one but personally - and I say that word with emphasis - I would rather have one child when I'm 39 in a stable relationship than four by the age of 33 without a father present, for the sake of both the offspring and, yes, selfish little ol' me.” Hadley Freeman, “Why I’m happy to wait.”

The advantage of being a small country

Via Gideon Rachman, an interesting argument about the advantages that there is for a country in being small in the globalized world:

Globalisation has opened up markets across the world. China and India are getting richer largely because they have access to the markets of the developed world, not because of the size of their domestic markets. Small countries can trade their way to success even more swiftly. Think of Singapore or Switzerland.

Small is also no longer synonymous with insecure.

In Europe, many minnows have enhanced their security by joining Nato. This is sometimes denounced as free-riding. Belgium or Luxembourg can afford to be small, secure and smug – because they are under the security umbrella, proffered by big and generous Uncle Sam.

But joining a collective security organisation is not an absolute necessity for a small country. Ireland and Switzerland are not members of Nato – and neither appears to be in imminent danger of invasion.

The fact is large countries are now less instinctively expansionist than they were in the days of empire. These days, invading and occupying small countries can be a massive pain in the neck – as the US has discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since the traditional disadvantages of being a tiddly country are disappearing, you are just left with the advantages.

Above all, small countries tend to be more homogenous. This makes them less prone to civil strife or dictatorship. It also means higher levels of social trust – which may be why small Scandinavian states are willing to spend so much on health and education and fare so well on human development indices.

Governments in small countries also find it easier to craft and implement policy – an advantage that might be replicated in the US by federalism. Small, homogenous countries should also be less tempted to waste money on pork-barrel projects, designed to buy off discontented minorities.

The size of a country is less of an issue than its geography. I would argue that neither Singapore nor Switzerland if there were African countries or located next to Russia or to India or Pakistan. In other words, location is more important than size.

The dark side of foreign policy

Tariq Ali has a great article in the London Review of Books on Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto. It shows how complicated Pakistan is and that the mirror has more than two faces when it comes to political dealings on the international scenes. It is a great read. Sugary excerpt:

What then is at stake in Pakistan as far as Washington is concerned? ‘The concern I have,’ Robert Gates, the US secretary for defense, recently said, ‘is that the longer the internal problems continue, the more distracted the Pakistani army and security services will be in terms of the internal situation rather than focusing on the terrorist threat in the frontier area.’ But one reason for the internal crisis is Washington’s over-reliance on Musharraf and the Pakistani military. It is Washington’s support and funding that have given him the confidence to operate as he pleases. But the thoughtless Western military occupation of Afghanistan is obviously crucial, since the instability in Kabul seeps into Peshawar and the tribal areas between the two countries. The state of emergency targeted the judiciary, opposition politicians and the independent media. All three groups were, in different ways, challenging the official line on Afghanistan and the ‘war on terror’, the disappearance of political prisoners and the widespread use of torture in Pakistani prisons. The issues were being debated on television in a much more open fashion than happens anywhere in the West, where a blanket consensus on Afghanistan drowns all dissent. Musharraf argued that civil society was hampering the ‘war on terror’. Hence the emergency. It’s nonsense, of course. It’s the war in the frontier regions that is creating dissent inside the army. Many do not want to fight. Hence the surrender of dozens of soldiers to Taliban guerrillas. This is the reason many junior officers are taking early retirement.

Western pundits blather on about the jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger. This is pure fantasy, reminiscent of a similar campaign almost three decades ago, when the threat wasn’t the jihadis who were fighting alongside the West in Afghanistan, but nationalist military radicals.

Culture as an Industry

Time magazine had a cover article two weeks ago written by Don Morrison which made the grandiose claim that French culture was dead because it doesn't sell anymore:

Once admired for the dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians, France today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace. That is an especially sensitive issue right now, as a forceful new President, Nicolas Sarkozy, sets out to restore French standing in the world. When it comes to culture, he will have his work cut out for him.

Only a handful of the season's new novels will find a publisher outside France. Fewer than a dozen make it to the U.S. in a typical year, while about 30% of all fiction sold in France is translated from English. That's about the same percentage as in Germany, but there the total number of English translations has nearly halved in the past decade, while it's still growing in France. Earlier generations of French writers — from Molière, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert to Proust, Sartre, Camus and Malraux — did not lack for an audience abroad. Indeed, France claims a dozen Nobel literature laureates — more than any other country — though the last one, Gao Xingjian in 2000, writes in Chinese.

I didn’t discuss it because I couldn’t take it seriously and because I thought that it was just another critical article on France written by a person who doesn’t know the meaning of culture and who doesn’t understand France. Agnès Poirier did take seriously and rebuts some of the arguments made by specifically that there is a difference between culture and industry. Sugary excerpt:

In France, 30% of all books published are translations, with a strong contingent of Anglophone authors. The reasons? The excellence of Anglophone literature as a whole and the curiosity of French readers for the outer world. In cinema, the French prove as eclectic an audience; they love a good American thriller as much as a three-hour drama by its latest enfant prodige, Abdelatif Kechiche. It's called diversity, the opposite of chauvinism.

Usually, the case against France turns to the subject of subsidies which make French culture weak as "they ensure mediocrity". Sure, French artists, if they can prove having worked for 507 hours in 10 consecutive months, are eligible to benefits which won't force them to slave in bars at night while preparing for auditions during the day. This generous system may sustain a few mediocre artists but it allows most to perfect their craft. Besides, this public bonus, helped by quotas, is regularly dealt to foreign artists. Masterpieces by directors such as Krzysztof Kieslowski and the Coen brothers would never have reached world screens without these art subsidies sans frontières.

In the end, these investigations have little to do with the fantasised death of French culture; they merely show the American inability to distinguish art from entertainment, culture from industry. It also barely disguises the American bitterness at Unesco's agreement two years ago, voted by a majority of 148 votes to two, on the right for any country "to protect and promote the cultural diversity of cultural expressions on their territory".

Targeting French culture, rejoicing over its apparent decline and glossing over its obvious achievements is in fact taking aim at a much broader villain: dissidence

Morality and the law

I disagree strongly with this:

It is important to distinguish questions about what the law is from questions about what the law ought to be. Whether torture is legally permissible is a factual question about the law. (Not all factual questions are easy to answer, obviously, and some answers to factual questions are controversial. For proof of this, see science.) Whether torture should be permitted by law, and if so in what circumstances, is an evaluative question about the law. If you want to know whether torture is legally permissible, consult an attorney who specializes in that type of law. You would not consult an attorney if you wanted to know whether torture should be legally permissible, for that is an evaluative question, and attorneys, as such, have no evaluative expertise.

Not all facts about torture are relevant to its moral permissibility. What makes a fact relevant is that it connects up to a moral principle. For example, suppose I am a hedonistic utilitarian. My principle (of utility) mandates that I maximize pleasure (or, put negatively, that I minimize suffering). This makes the amount of suffering inflicted during torture relevant. How much suffering torture inflicts, both quantitatively and qualitatively, is a factual question about which reasonable people can differ. Many facts about torture, such as where it takes place, on whom it is inflicted, and how many people administer it, are morally irrelevant and therefore of no interest to those who are interested solely in its moral status.

[…] One difference between law and morality is that law is practical. Law must attend to such things as efficiency. Laws are addressed to classes of people, not to individuals. You've probably heard the expression that hard cases make bad law. This is another way of saying that just because a given act is morally permissible doesn't mean that the law should permit acts of that type. Take euthanasia, for example. It may be that in a particular case, it is morally permissible for someone to engage in mercy killing. It doesn't follow from this that mercy killing should be permitted by law, for people might misapply the rule and end up killing those who don't want to be killed. The law errs on the side of caution, for practical reasons.

The reasoning just used in the case of euthanasia can be applied to torture. Even if torture can be justified in particular cases, such as when it is necessary to learn the location of a bomb, it might be dangerous for the law to allow it. Certainly we don't want torture to be routine, for that opens the door to abuses. The best policy might be to prohibit torture (having carefully defined it), while allowing as a defense the claim that it was necessary to save many innocent lives. This is only a sketch of an argument, but you can see how it might be developed. The idea is to create a strong legal presumption against torture, while allowing for the possibility of rebuttal in a court of law.

Torture cannot be separated from its moral and ethical aspects Comparing Torture to euthanasia is like comparing Eugenics to adoption because in some very few cases, adopting parents can choose the child that they want to adopt. The point is that once society allow itself to justify something because of its means, it loses any moral authority because nothing is ever morally reprehensible in itself. A government, which torture makes the point to its citizens that it values the accomplishment of objectives more than anything else does.

The revolution is over

Via the Age, Karen Murphy makes the point that the feminist revolution is dead. Although I disagree with her argument, I agree with her conclusion and wonder whether the mistake wasn’t to make feminism a revolution. Revolutions always fail when they are meant to be everlasting and when they fail to identify short-term goals to focus on grand designs. The trouble with grand designs and revolutions is that while they give people hope, they a insure that believers get disconnected from reality until they realize that they  can’t wait for paradise and learn to accept what they believe to be as Baudelaire would say l’insolence de la nature, the arrogance of nature or the conventional idea that difference justifies getting less since less  becomes more. Sugary excerpt:

Only 30 years, and the revolution is dead, not because of the enemy but because of ourselves. (After all, the plantation owners — read men — would be unlikely to send away willing slaves. Why would they?)

We just gave up, and now to describe yourself as a feminist has almost the same effect as if you had farted in a crowded lift.

And I blame women because winning equality and respect was always going to be our fight, wives and mothers, sisters, friends and colleagues, but we seem to have walked away before serious battle was even joined.

[…] Women can say no to sexualisation but they don't because the boys won't like them if they do, and besides, they say, they enjoy it.

Maybe they do, but at what cost?

The feminist revolution was serious, important, but now it's just a joke.

Let's face it — the sleazing of society, where pornography has become mainstream, could not have happened without female participation.

We hear so many stories now of men getting addicted to pornography, of relationships under threat, but nothing about the hundreds of thousands of women willing to demean themselves in the delusion that they are being glamorous.

It is heart-breaking.

Still, we do not have parity of wages, women are still over-represented in the low-paying, highly casualised workforce, still our female politicians are judged by their maternal instincts over their political ones.

And now we are meant to be some kind of weird amalgam of Linda Lovelace, Martha Stewart and the Madonna, while bringing in a wage, propping up the local school and operating as a psychologist, nutritionist and environmentalist.

And, by and large, we have done it to ourselves and to each other.

Years ago, when I first went into the world and embraced feminism as an equalising movement, not one based on hatred, resentment or superiority, my mother expressed doubts.

She said that she foresaw a time when women would be under more pressure, rather than less, with less respect rather than more, falling further behind rather than stepping out in front.

Then I thought her fearful and reactionary.

Now I think her wise.

I have no doubt that I will offend countless women by this story, but I don't care.

Countless women have offended me.

You would think that after millenniums of being treated as second-class citizens we could have put up a better fight. The revolution is dead — bring on the fluffy handcuffs.

The Blues, le cafard

I'm not having a good end of year , and I'm having an especially bad Tuesday. The weather in DC reflects my mood, which explains why it is supposed to snow tomorrow. The trouble with the end of the year for me is that I have too much things to think about including the fact that my birthday is happening just a few days before christmas. It is awful to be born at the end of the year because your birthday gets lost in the sugary mood of the holidays. Anyway, the video is a clip of the famous song of Charles Trenet, Que reste-t-il de nos amours? but I'm not sure that it is a good one to listen when one feels blue.

Going West for stories

“Like the US, Britain became a modern nation in the 19th century. That is when many of our national stories were formed. But what did we get instead of the broad sweep of the western? What is the British equivalent of the horse opera? The answer is the 19th-century novel, with its knowing looks and chilly drawing rooms, the chink of fine china, and tricky questions about social class and marriage prospects. The great moral dilemmas are there, but they vie for attention with awkward questions about lace and bonnets.

The western, with its open ranges and life-and-death territorial squabbles, was always going to have the edge in terms of grand dramatic gestures. Its myths have been told and retold, its characters imagined and re-imagined even when they started out as real people. It celebrates rule breakers and rebels. Its moral dilemmas are to do with right and wrong, justice and revenge, desperation and survival on an heroic scale. The western is one of the great mythological backdrops and has been since the Wild West was still a place where people lived.

Of course, transposed into costume drama, with added sex scenes and post-French Lieutenant's Woman meta-narrative and authorial doubt, even the dowdiest old book can seem modern and amusing. But British costume drama is stuck in historical limbo and even Judi Dench's pursed lips can't save it. Worse, the fact that our national stories are fixed in print gives us a problem that the Americans have managed to sidestep: if your back story is written down, you can't stray far from the plot.” Chris Routledge, “For Relevant National Stories, Readers must go West.”

Post-Socialism and materialism

Via Eurozine, Elena Trubina makes the following criticism of post-Socialist societies in Eastern Europe:

Places one lived and the things one used or cherished were objects of enjoyment and pride. One's very own house or flat promised a site of control in which it was possible to discern the traces of one's family history, preferences, and tastes. One's plot of land with one's very own apple tree and bed of strawberries worked as a vehicle of individualization much more successfully than volumes written on liberalism. Surely, in the twentieth century, the growing importance of one's private life as opposed to an alienated social existence was something that united the worlds across the Berlin wall?

[...] The modern self, argues American philosopher Amelie Rorty, is essentially defined by its property. The basis of the story of one's life and self-fulfilment is one's individual capacity to accumulate goods. Thus, one's personal capital is comprised of one's skills and talents and one's property. One can cleverly invest this or let it slip from one's hands, but the grammar of selfhood is based on the possessive adjective. Property and the means of gaining it comprise the focus of a person's rights; a forceful alienation of one's property jeopardizes a person's integrity.
[...]Things not only hold a person together, but also society. Could it be that our troubled relationship with property and things in the past simply serves as additional proof of this idea? One's efforts to get what one wanted, one's care about what one had, one's family stories about one's grandparents' luck and resourcefulness, one's own amateurish entrepreneurship could all this have prepared people for change and ensured the continuity of their experiences? The things people owned and came to own kept their life stories together. For one, people were able to buy the state apartments in which they lived, although their quality remains in many cases truly questionable. In the 1990s, millions became homeowners simply by signing a few papers. The fact that I own my place, by the way, always makes me feeling slightly embarrassed when friends from Vienna or Berlin tell me of their relationships with landlords and constantly rising rents. Do I really expect to find in them grateful listeners to stories about my former "material" dreams? By virtue of their location on the left of the political spectrum (whatever that means these days), they are more interested in hearing about the reasons for many Russian intellectuals' unwillingness to become politically active.

France and Race

Charles Bremner on France and Race:

So France is one of the few developed nations which does not ask for ethnic origin in the national census. There are no reliable statistics that can be used to measure discrimination or gauge diversity in education and the work place.

[…] Last summer the Sarkozy parliament passed a law that reversed the statistics ban. It allowed the collection of ethnic data in projects approved by the national agency for the protection of personal data (CNIL).

The new law was furiously opposed by some groups, such as SOS Racisme, which raised 90,000 signatures on an internet petition against it, including that of François Hollande, the Socialist Party leader. It was also strongly supported by other groups. "We are about to open the way to something fabulous," said Patrick Lozès, president of the Representative Council of Black Organizations. “We are going from just talking about equality as a moral standard to doing something to help achieve it.”

Then two weeks ago, the Constitutional Council threw out the law and upheld the old ban, saying that measuring ethnicity contradicted article one of the Constitution. The decision has been welcomed as a blow against racism while others deplore it as a set-back in the fight against discrimination.

Its immediate impact has been the suspension of a planned survey by two state statistical agencies (INSEE and INED) which would track the impact of ethnic origin on French citizens of African origin. Those involved have been voicing their frustration, saying the ruling, designed to uphold the noble ideal of the constitution, will block attempts to remedy discrimination.

[…] President Sarkozy himself carries some of the blame for the confusion because he has muddied the waters over race. On one hand he is in French terms progressive. The son of a Hungarian immigrant and part Jewish, he favours affirmative action, or positive discrimination, to balance diversity in work and education (There is no chance that the Constitutional Council will let this happen). Yet he has also played to the unhealthier instincts of white France by creating a new ministry of Immigration and National Identity, headed by his old friend Brice Hortefeux. His parliament stirred the pot further by adding the possibility of DNA testing for people seeking permission to immigrate to rejoin family members. The Constitutional Council upheld this at the same time as rejecting the change on ethnic data.

Sarko's hard line on last week's riots -- saying that they had nothing to do with any social malaise -- has further fanned suspicion among minorities and on the left that he does not understand the exclusion that they suffer.  He has promised a new approach to the plight of the banlieue, to be announced next month. All we know so far is that, as he put it, "this will not just be another attempt to throw money at the problem."

What disturbs me is the fact that Bremmer’s unsavory assumption that the banlieues is related to ethnicity and immigration rather than to assimilation integration and unemployment and crime. In other words, one would logically assume, after reading Bremmer, that France has problems controlling its banlieues because it is more multiethnic and multicultural than it knows and that the French youths get in the streets because they have foreign roots and look different than Sarkozy. The problem is in my opinion more complex in the sense that French youths are rioting because they have foreign roots or look different but precisely because to the contrary of Sarkozy who had a father who came from Hungary, people assume without even knowing their name that they aren't french and that they are lazy, uneducated, and potentially dangerous. They don't enjoy the presumption of Frenchness and for these reasons, they believe that the State doesn't treat them like every other citizen. The refusal of France to acknowledge its multi-ethnicity has made French society unwilling to accept that Francité, frenchness is neither about race, ethnicity, or religion, which means in other words that even those who don't have french blood can become French. The solution  to this problem starts with the realization that Integration means in part the acceptance that foreignness doesn’t pollute the French national identity, but enriches it.

How the West was formed

“Western culture was created a result of the synthesis of two great strains in the history of thought, Hellenism and Hebraism, as Matthew Arnold noted long ago. On one side are the ancient Greeks, who thought very deeply about sociology, politics, science and philosophy, but neglected religion, and on the other side are the Hebrews who thought deeply about the nature of God and morality and took religion very seriously. The record of their reflections created the most advanced body of religious thought the world has ever known.
When this religious thought, further enlarged by the last of the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, was subsequently Hellenized, the resulting synthesis created a body of thought that one might regard as a new social order, one intensely focused on individualism - individual salvation and individual self-realization. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, as part of the process of individual self-actualization is taken for granted in western society and yet this most basic aspect of western civilization is continually miscomprehended by the Muslim world because the goal of Muslim society is in diametric opposition to individualism. It focuses instead on the communal perfecting, defending and enlarging the system of Islam, which seems to have no other purpose than its own self-perpetuation.” Rebecca Bynum, “An Unfettered Mind.”

A loss for Chávez

Gene from Harry’s has an interesting post on Hugo Chávez’s defeat on a referendum, whose goal was to make it possible to run for president as many times as he wanted . Sugary excerpt:

I've never believed Chavez is uniquely evil among world leaders, or even among the very worst. I focus on him because of his inexplicably high standing among the "anti-imperialist" Left. They need to be reminded exactly whom they're supporting. I'll wait to see if the new kinder, gentler Chavez is for real. And if it is, I wonder how long some chavistas will continue to back him.

It is unfortunate, but true that too many people ant to believe that it is possible to achieve just means through unjust means. They use the fact that a country isn’t developed or Western as an excuse for the use “undemocratic” methods when their goal is either to achieve order (Musharraf is good example) or justice, which is supposedly Chávez’s objective.

Villiers-le-bel, rioting and the social compact

Mary Ridell writes the following on this week riots in the French Banlieue of Villiers-le-Bel:

Villiers-le-Bel, roads swept, bins emptied and order restored, looks as improbable a war zone as Sevenoaks. Nor do the clusters of boys now venturing back on to the streets resemble France's lost generation. They walk heads down, hoods up and most of them say, politely, they know nothing. 'Nous ne sommes pas d'ici,' is their catchphrase. 'We're not from round here.'

Today, France is asking itself many questions about belonging. What streak of estrangement or malice makes boys as young as 11 shoot policemen and burn classrooms? What lies beneath the skin of this ordinary town? A young man who has lived here all his life gives me his answer. It is, he says, 'une ambiance de haine'

Hatred is where it all began. The 1995 film, La Haine, with its themes of racism, violence and disaffected youth in a riot-torn Paris suburb, has been played out many times for real. In 2005, the riots sparked by the deaths of two teenagers fleeing police engulfed France. The latest outbreak, though more contained, confirms a pattern of growing insurrection. No French or British politician should ignore Villiers-le-Bel.

Fading flowers mark the spot where Moushin and Larami, aged 15 and 16, died. A piece of cardboard bears the words 'On vous aime' (we love you). The tragedy was inflamed by resentment that the crash, its cause still unknown, was being written off as a road traffic accident by police. As Interior Minister, Sarkozy disbanded neighbourhood policing in favour of a more heavy-handed system, including riot squads. There is, one young man tells me, a mutual loathing between youths and officers seen as agents of state oppression. 'La police, c'est l'etat,' he says.

There are other explanations for what's gone wrong: the creaky train line to the outside world, for example; the fact that the area's 5,000 inhabitants in 1955 have now risen to 27,000 today. Many of them are North Africans and the victims of the anti-immigrant policies that Sarkozy has belatedly modulated.

So far, so predictable. But there are also factors to shake the beliefs of liberal Britain. Villiers-le-Bel has schools that look large and modern compared with British counterparts starved of the funding they need to cater for an influx of migrant children. The Martin Luther King College, an edifice of steel and glass, appears far more prosperous than any London sixth-form centre. Sarkozy, for all his flaws, has invested something in a lost generation, but he has not bought them hope or work. People here are twice as poor as in central Paris; up to one in three is unemployed.

I haven’t written anything on the “riots” of Villiers-le-Bel because I didn’t have anything original to say. I didn’t want just to bash Sarko and to argue that it is his fault when it isn’t and when the problem is far too serious to demagogue it. Sarkozy took a firm stand against the rioters by decrying what he called “Voyoucratie.” He is right to be firm with people who burn and injured because nothing can excuse violence not even social discontent. The problem is that toughness is not enough because the problem isn’t just one of law and order, but also one of citizenship and social cohesion. It is hard to make that point because any explanation other than the one that French banlieues are filled with scum is regarded as proof of an attempt to justify the unjustifiable when it is merely an attempt to explain it and to go beyond the passion and the resentment to find solutions. I have always said that Sarkozy reminded of Giuliani because he believes that France is New York, that it is in need of tough love and it needs a superhero to fight crime, economic slowdowns, and everything else. The problem is that France isn’t New York and that superheroes view any obstacle and social issues as an existential struggle between good and evil. As Sudhir Hazareesingh wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, Sarkozy loves and welcomes confrontation:

"Je les ai tous niqués” was Nicolas Sarkozy’s quip on becoming mayor of the smart Parisian suburban town of Neuilly at the age of twenty-eight, against the express wishes of the Gaullist party hierarchy. A desire to “screw them all” has since become the trademark of this hyperactive, pugnacious, and tormented politician: first as Édouard Balladur’s henchman between 1993 and 1995, when he deployed all means to promote his mentor’s (unsuccessful) bid for the Presidency – including threatening to investigate the tax returns of politically unsympathetic journalists, bullying his ministerial colleagues, and spreading rumours about Madame Chirac’s financial dealings; from 2002, as Minister of the Interior, when as “Speedy Sarko” he made the fight against crime and illegal immigration his priorities, memorably describing the rioters of late 2005 as “racaille” (scum), and vowing to clean up their neighbourhoods “au kärcher” (with high-pressure hoses); and finally, in the run-up to the Presidential elections of 2007, when he likened his own party leader Jacques Chirac to the Bourbon monarch Louis XVI, flapping helplessly in Versailles as his people clamoured for reform. In her brilliantly evocative L’Aube le soir ou la nuit, written after following Sarkozy on the Presidential campaign trail for a year, the novelist Yasmina Reza summed up the candidate as “un amoureux de l’adversité”.

Over the years, France has tried to solve the problem by throwing money at the problem, using toughness or simply placating, the banlieusards, the inhabitants of those banlieues with fruitless compassion. It hasn’t work. The mistake was in my opinion the assumption that the problem could be solved from the top down and without stitch up the link between the citizens and the rest of society by recruiting people in the field and trusting them to make the right decision.

Secularism is better than democracy

Via the Times of London, Peter Watson argues that the West should be spreading secularism not democracy. I wonder if it isn’t a bit arrogant, paternalistic, and more importantly counterproductive to have such a language about democracy and secularism, to assume that it has to be taught and spread and that the West is always the teacher. Sugary excerpt:

Democracy, we tell ourselves, is a hallmark of “the West”, the treasure that the rest of the World envies and that accounts for the pre-eminence of Europe and North America in economic progress, intellectual dominance and moral freedoms.

But it's not the case when you examine the chronology. The rise of the West had much less to do with democracy than with the rise of secularism. The West's advance was chiefly related to the decline in the influence of religion that sought the truth by “looking in” to see what God had to say, and its replacement by looking out, deriving authority from observation, experimentation and exploration.

[…] At a time when the world is calling for elections in Pakistan, this basic truth is being overlooked. Forcing Pervez Musharraf, a dictator but a relatively benign one, and most importantly a secular ruler, into elections that radical or openly political Muslims might win, risks a replay of Iraq, where the West deposed a secular ruler, a brutal one it is true, but nowhere near as threatening as the risk that will exist if radical Islam gains the day.

The same is true of Turkey, which has elected an Islamic party whose Prime Minister, according to The Times's own accounts, is taking the country surreptitiously into an intolerant Islamic and inherently anti-Western stance. Look at what democracy has produced in Iran, Palestine and Zimbabwe.

The inconvenient truth is that the West should be exporting secularism around the world before it exports democracy. Democracy implies not just one person one vote but

no less important that the political process proceeds by rational means, by argument, by persuasion, and is based on knowledge that is as objective, as scientific, as one can make it. The objective knowledge has to come first.