meditations71

Steve Jobs in audio

2011-12-31T12:32:00.001Z

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

I've not before taken an interest in audio books. Just as I wouldn't substitute an e-reader for my unruly stacks of dusty books, the idea that books are to be read rather than heard (poetry being a different matter of course) has always made intuitive sense to me.

Nevertheless, for the Christmas holidays I decided to give the burgeoning phenomenon that is the audio book a try. Something contemporary, timely and focussed on a specific subject seemed sensible, so what I chose for my first audio book was the much heralded biography of the late design and marketing genius and co-founder of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs.

Written by Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of the Aspen Institute and previous author of biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, and running over 25 hours in its audio format (656 pages), the biography captures Jobs's 'mercurial' personality - a self-styled child of the counter-culture who makes it big in Silicon Valley - and the ways in which it informed his approach to computer design and marketing. The book provides any novice or serious computer geek with an entertaining history of the origins and evolution of the Apple brand, as well as the epic rivalry between two of the personal computing era's Greats - Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft - and the very different philosophies that underpinned and defined each of these brands. A recent review of the book, 'Who Was Steve Jobs' by Sue Halpern, has just been published in the New York Review of Books.

I've always found the story of Apple and the Mac and its related products fascinating. Indeed, I wrote most of my PhD Dissertation on what was then the new and exciting 'Bondi Blue' iMac G3.

And, in any case, what better book to be the first to listen to on one's iPhone?

What a people

2011-12-06T20:33:00.002Z

Famine, by Bernie Prendergast (charcoal)

I've experienced an increasing fascination with the Irish Big House novel. Perhaps it is my long-standing interest in the nature of settler colonialism in Southern Africa which becomes easily transported onto the nature of Irish settler society, and onto the fate of the Ascendancy. These were the Anglo-Irish, who created a world of their own. Amidst an alien people, theirs was a world itself alien to the land on which it was construed.

John Banville's Birchwood is a baroque, quirky, indeed quite mad, take on the traditional Big House novel. It entertains the decline, demise and possible resurrection of the Godkin and Lawless families' Birchwood house through one of Ireland's most devastating times. Travelling through the Irish country-side as the Great Famine begins to really bite, Gabriel, the Anglo-Irish heir and protagonist, who is at that time alienated from his home and its never-quite-secure surroundings and thus near death himself, surveys the broken peoples around him whom he has never really known. Even at this very nadir of an unfolding catastrophe, a hellish existence for most of Ireland's people, distinctions of class and deference in attitude remain:

The roads were choked with refugees, forlorn bands coming from nowhere and going to the same place, jettisoning in their wake a spoor of broken belongings. Their charity kept me alive. God knows what they thought I was, this crazed filthy creature perched on a starved nag. Perhaps they saw in me a celestial messenger of hope, anything is possible. I was not grateful for their kindness. I despised and loathed their misery, their helplessness. My accent impressed them. Some even called me sir. Sir! What a people!

technorati tags: John Banville Birchwood Big House novel Ireland Irish Great Famine Anglo-Irish Ascendancy Protestant gaelic settlers colonialism

End of the Western Model

2011-11-30T16:02:00.001Z

Rome, 2011

(From the Centre for Policy Studies blog)

The emergence in the early 1990s of India’s ‘Look East’ policy confirmed an important shift in thinking about the future direction and aspirations of major developing countries, in this case the former jewel in the British imperial crown. Looking East suggested that India would find its future destiny not primarily in relations with the West but instead with its economically and geo-strategically ascendant Asian neighbours. This thinking and embryonic strategy for a re-orientation of global relations was inspired by the successful post-colonial modernisation of Singapore, transforming that tiny country into one of the world’s most competitive and therefore successful economies under the guidance of its late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. To redefine strategies and aspirations, statesmen must first reconsider and, where necessary, discard existing assumptions about the global order and what constitutes models for success.

The terrifying spectacle of European powers decimating entire generations of its young men and laying its industries and cities, indeed its civilizational patrimony, to waste in the first and second World Wars, combined with the experiences of colonial subjects participating in these wars, cracked the veneer of European civilisational superiority. These experiences became an important catalyst for many nationalist and anti-colonial movements in Africa and other parts of the colonised world, leading eventually to the end of empires and the inauguration of a post-colonial order. Today, the economic crisis engulfing Western developed societies and which also threatens to implode the Eurozone, that supposedly towering achievement of post-European progress and a pillar of the wider EU project, is yet another watershed in global relations. It is, among other things, symptomatic of a permanent shift in the gravity of the global economy away from the West towards the East and the major emerging markets. These new regional powers comprise first and foremost the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and, somewhat peculiarly, now also South Africa). They may also come to include what Goldman and Sachs, whose then analyst Jim O’Neill coined the BRIC concept in 2003, now identify as the Next-11 (or N-11) countries with a potential for high and sustained economic growth transforming them into major emerging markets alongside the BRICS. These include, among others, Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia, Vietnam and Turkey.

In this context the Eurozone crisis, and the decline of Western economic fortunes generally, is turning into a global manifestation of the West’s increasingly apparent inability to retain economic (and moral) leadership and confidence in its political and socio-economic arrangements as constituting ‘best practice’ for guiding and governing, however loosely, the global economy and international politics. The notion of the West as exemplar, a manifestation of all that to which developing regions ought to aspire is fading fast. When asked about China’s reluctance to commit funding to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) designed to bail out the Eurozone countries, Jin Liqun, Chairman of China’s sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corporation, made blunt reference to something which is now a common sentiment across rapidly growing and increasingly cash-rich emerging markets. For Jin the source of Europe’s troubles is ‘the worn out welfare society’ and in particular ‘labour laws [that] induce sloth [and] indolence, rather than hard working’. Impatience with Europe, on account of its difficulties to contain and resolve the economic crisis and the very real risk of global contagion it now poses, was likewise evident in recent comments by Guido Mantega, Brazil’s Finance Minister, on the eve of the November G20 meeting in Cannes, voicing frustration at ‘the Europeans always [taking] too long to find solutions’.

The world is watching. The desperate attempts of Western countries to find new solutions for reversing declines in economic strength and political influence, and to somehow sustain mass consumption and high standards of living on the basis of profligate borrowing, public spending and redistribution, will have fundamental implications for the reshaping of global order. It may well be that sustained economic growth among emerging markets can rescue Western societies from self-inflicted problems, following the assumption that a rising tide lifts all boats. But the future will also be one in which the assumptions underpinning the twentieth century Western welfare state are no longer paramount. An increasingly crowded and competitive global economy is emerging, transformed by many new and able entrants. Only those Western states able to discard the ballast of unaffordable incentive systems, keeping them, as Jin would have it, ‘totally out of whack’, while at the same time encouraging increased efforts in areas where comparative advantages still exist, will have a chance of reversing their declining fortunes. If Europe and the USA now descend into wholesale social unrest, fuelled by populist extremism, labour militancy and an inability to compromise and reform, decline will simply accelerate as potential solutions become ever more elusive.

technorati tags: West civilization austerity protests Eurozone BRICS Jim O'Neill Goldman Sachs N-11 next eleven Look East EFSF Jin Liqun Guido Mantega G20 Cannes welfare state strikes

Emerging markets to the rescue

2011-10-27T22:31:00.002+01:00

To the rescue? BRICS leaders at 2011 Summit in Sanya, China

(From the Centre for Policy Studies blog)

What is notable in current debates about how the Eurozone economies, and the EU itself, might be rescued is not that there is discord across Europe and great uncertainty in global markets. What is remarkable is the range of states now included among the key actors whose involvement in any potential solution to the crisis is deemed crucial. Media and expert analysis of the EU agreement to substantially boost and ‘leverage’ the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), to recapitalise European banks and to impose a 50% ‘haircut’ on banks holding Greek debt – to thereby stabilise the imploding Greek economy and halt the crisis enveloping major Eurozone markets like Italy and Spain – focusses not only on concerns and reactions to this putative deal in developed markets. Reactions in the major emerging markets are deemed important as well, notably those of the informal grouping known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). China in particular is identified as a potentially significant investor in this new scheme to save Europe from ruin, however sketchy the details so far. Western media are also reporting on the response from Russia, India and Brazil, and the potential for these countries to become contributors to the European bail-out fund.

How the times have changed. Previous crises in the global economy saw those looking for solutions focussing squarely on developments in the core of the capitalist system, which until recent decades comprised the USA, Britain, Germany, France, Japan and a handful others. This focus on the developed world reflected half a millennium of steady Western ascent and eventual domination in the global economy. The thought, even a few decades ago, that decisions made in formerly colonised and peripheral regions would impact on the ability of major Western economies to solve their economic problems would seem far-fetched indeed. Never mind a suggestion that for any solution to be viable, the West would depend on the willingness of state and private sector actors in these developing regions to lend their support in terms of substantial economic investment and signalling of their confidence in Western countries’ willingness and ability to actually implement drastic measures to rescue themselves.

As already reflected in the G20 eclipsing the G7 as the key forum for global economic negotiations, it is no longer sufficient for a consensus to emerge between Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and Tokyo in order to resolve instability and crisis in the global economy. Without the participation of Beijing, Delhi, Moscow and Brasilia there can be no lasting resolution to a European crisis fuelled by decades of profligate public spending, mounting public and private indebtedness, increasingly volatile financial speculation, eroding competitiveness and unfavourable demographic developments. There is even some note taken of the reaction from Pretoria, representing Africa in the BRICS grouping of major emerging markets. All this is in the context of the West’s (outside the USA) eroding hard power and diminishing returns of its soft power (including the USA).

In this volatile environment, British conservatives and the Euro-sceptics among them must tread carefully. They would not want to, as Lord Ashdown cautions them, turn Britain into a ‘perfectly sovereign cork bobbing along in the wake of other people’s ocean liners’ (i.e., the BRICS). There is no doubt that repatriation of powers from Brussels, particularly in the sphere of domestic affairs such as controlling immigration and exercising sovereignty in judicial matters, would strengthen British sovereignty in accordance with conservative values and also popular demand. And if a lasting solution to the Eurozone crisis now inevitably means financial union, the idea that Britain can ever effectively lead in such a united Europe while not being a member of the Eurozone is difficult to envision. However, the EU and its economic future will remain central to British economic fortunes including its potential for renewed economic growth. While EU regulation imposes an economic cost on British business, and while much can be gained by focussing on strengthening Britain’s bilateral relations with key export markets such as the BRICS, there is no escaping the fact of the EU market’s centrality for British trade. The rise of the BRICS in what is becoming the emerging markets century adds a new important dimension not only to the future of the EU and the economies of the West, but also to the on-going debate about Britain’s role in Europe and the world.

technorati tags: Eurozone EFSF Greece banks EU Euro BRICS Ashdown Eurosceptics Tory Conservative Britain Centre for Policy Studies

Reporting from Washington

2011-09-25T03:36:00.000+01:00

The US Capitol Building, view from the southwest

In predictably over-optimistic fashion, I had anticipated daily blogging during my two-week stay in Washington where I am currently conducting research for a British Academy-funded research project on 'Anglo-American Conservatism and African Development'.

However, after a very busy week, with lots of impressions from America's capital and its politics, I am enjoying a slow night in the hotel with some time to blog, in addition to watching my LSU Tigers make a strong case for vaulting to No 1 in the College Football rankings next week and looking forward to the Washington Nationals take on the Atlanta Braves at Nationals Park tomorrow afternoon.

The political scene 'inside the Beltway' is both inspiring and exhausting, featuring genuine commitment and weary cynicism in equal measures. The Republican primary contest is dominating national politics coverage in media, and Perry seems to be shifting from hero to zero given his almost astonishingly inept debate performances. Romney is the obvious candidate, although the Republican voters seem mildly supportive at best. Obama is mostly on the defensive and Suskind's Confidence Men the talk of the town.

In addition to my research in the Washington corridors of power I've today had the great pleasure to attend the Front Porch Republic inaugural conference (co-sponsored by The Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown University), on Human Scale and the Human Good, at the lovely rural campus of Mount St Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, near the Pennsylvania border and the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield. Mount St Mary's, established in 1808, is the oldest Catholic college in the 50 US states, given that Georgetown is not located in a state but in the District of Columbia...

Returning to America and heading out on the highways, away from the big cities and into the hinterland one is reminded of just how different the scale of America is to life in Britain and Ireland. The vast distances and great expanses of space means that problems relating to scale and locality are especially complex in America, a country which, outside the older cities, is built around the car. This will require unique American solutions to sometimes overwhelming problems of dislocation and alienation in a somewhat restless society, always on the move.

I was in particular, pleased to see a conference schedule which combined presentations by scholars discussing Aristotelian ethics and Tocquevillian politics with intriguing presentations on organic farming and how you get English literature students to weed gardens, renovate houses and pick tomatoes with a smile on their faces.

Heading out of the city in my rented Jeep Patriot after a busy week on and off the Metro in Washington and the northern Virginia suburbs also reminded me just how difficult it is for a foreigner visiting America to understand the country if confined to coastal cities and public transportation. Enjoyable and convenient for sure, but you need to head out on the American highways behind the wheel of an American-sized car to get a true sense of this vast country.

That, and being reminded yet again just how badly Northern Ireland needs a dedicated Classic Rock radio station!

How Perry beats Obama in 2012

2011-08-15T19:49:00.002+01:00

I already noted in July 2009 (see blog entry here) that President Barack Obama's was likely to be a one-term presidency. While much has changed since then, and while the Republicans may not likely end up nominating the centrist challenger than I had then assumed, one must still wonder whether Obama can really expect to stay in office beyond the current term.

I've since been fairly confident that the one realistic Republican candidate to challenge President Obama in the 2012 presidential elections would be former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Following the last few day's developments, in the wake of Texas Governor Rick Perry's long-expected announcement that he is seeking the Republican nomination for President (and irrespective of Michele Bachmann winning the Ames [Iowa] Straw Poll), I am not so sure.

Perry's new campaign ad is a prime example of why, despite the Obama campaign's expectation to raise an unprecedented billion dollars to fund the presiden't re-election bid, would be a formidable challenger. It is nearly perfectly pitched, and makes several points that aim well beyond the primaries (where Perry will have to convince Republicans that he is the right candidate) to the potential national election battle against Obama (where Perry will have to convince enough independents that he is the right man for the job). For example:

- as compared to Obama's "exotic" background, a mixed-race heritage with an African father and a partial upbringing in Indonesia as well as an among conspiracy theorists much debated birth in not-quite-heartland Hawaii, Perry hails from small town Texas where, to paraphrase Sarah Palin, "real Americans" live;

- whereas Obama's background can hardly be called conventional (recall his highly educated parents) or "simple", Perry's is a hard scrabble, hard working background;

- whereas Obama was a "community organiser", Perry has served with honour in the US Air Force - Obama can never win the "patriotism" argument;

- whereas Obama is presiding over a crumbling economy, Perry boasts of governing a state that has created more jobs than any other since the "Great Recession" hit America just before Obama was elected president;

- no one right of centre in American politics need doubt Perry's conservative credentials, whereas quite a few left-of-center voters now doubt Obama's ability, indeed willingness, to stand up for liberal values (many of these are presumably now also thinking that Hillary Clinton would have made a harder bargain with the Republicans over key policies than have the President - hence the much-spoken of "buyer's remorse");

- unless the economy improves significantly by autumn 2012, which it is not very likely to do, Obama will be about as popular as was George W Bush in 2008, or even less so - and whereas Bush had finished his terms in office and could only be used instrumentally by Democratic campaigners to cast doubts on John McCain's campaing, Obama is asking for four more years.

See it for yourselves:

technorati tags: Obama Rick Perry Mitt Romney Michele Bachmann 2012 election president primaries Iowa Ames straw poll Bush McCain Sarah Palin buyer's remorse Texas conservative liberal Tea Party

Riots and British tolerance

2011-08-10T11:56:00.001+01:00

Andrew Gilligan, following his experience of being robbed in a Hackney street during the ongoing London riots, writing in today's Daily Telegraph:

Unlike Los Angeles or Paris, these riots are not happening in ghettos where nobody goes. They are happening amid the organic gastropubs and latte bars. Alongside poverty, inner London is full of the sort of middle-class progressives who agree with [former London Mayor] Ken Livingstone that the rioters "feel no one at the top of society, in government or City Hall, cares about them or speaks for them".

I predict a lot of those people, as they cower behind their sash windows, are revising their views tonight. The hardening of Liberal opinion in London is palpable, and is taking even the likes of [Mayor] Boris Johnson by surprise.

Presumably many Britons will reflect on these riots and end up feeling like they have, in the words of American "neocon" Irving Kristol, been "mugged by reality".

This is both understandable and disturbing (and nevermind Gilligan's unfortunate "ghettos where nobody goes" comment), partly because I have personally always felt that the UK - despite obvious problems - is representative of the very best a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society can be, more tolerant than any other (including Scandinavia and the USA) and certainly as good a place as any to live as a multi-ethnic family.

I very much hope that these riots will not fundamentally alter this positive fact.

technorati tags: London riots Britain multi-culturalism tolerance liberalism racism immigration Ken Livingstone Boris Johnson Andrew Gilligan Irving Kristol mugged by reality

New Class still kicking around

2011-08-05T10:49:00.001+01:00

Student activist and poet David Shapiro at Columbia University President Grayson Kirk's desk during occupation of university premises in 1968

Back to Drolet's fascinating American Neoconservatism, which I have now finished. In it, he devotes a small section to discussing the concept of 'The New Class', which initially constituted a Trotskyist and anarchist critique of the new bureaucratic class of administrators (apparatchiks), professionals and a related conformist 'intelligentsia' that emerged out of Stalinism and the megalomanicac worship of rationalism and secularism intended to forge a New Soviet Man and Brave New World.

Given the origins of many early American neoconservatives on the (Trotskyist) Left, it is not surprising that the concept of the New Class survied and was later employed in the neoconservative critique in the 1960s onwards of the emerging American counter-culture.

Before the neoconservatives however, Schumpeter suggested that the demise of capitalism would not be a result of the efforts of workers, but of intellectuals with a vested interest in challenging the status quo in terms of the existing societal (and moral) order, at whatever cost. Thus Drolet:

Steeped in th culture of modern rationalism, and eager to avoid jobs that would leave its intellectual and financial appetite unsatisfied, the intelligentsia tends to adopt egalitarian anti-capitalist views out of self-interest...

And Schumpeter:

The intellectual groups cannot help nibbling [at the foundations of capitalist society] because it lives on criticism and its whole position depends on criticism that stings.

A range of scholars, who become representative of what Irving Kristol called the 'neoconservative persuason', weigh in on this phenomenon as the American counter-culture movement gains in strength.

According to Seymour Martin Lipset and others, academics become the most 'subversive' members of the New Class because, in Drolet's summarisation of their argument:

- they are statistically more likely to adopt more radical views than any other social groups [just compare with the 'working class'];

- their work has direct impact on public policy, and

- the student market is steadily increasing [notably from the 1960s onwards in the USA].

Given continued high levels of ideological homogeneity in US (and also in the UK) institutions of higher education, notably in the social sciences and humanities where the large majority of university professors identify with the Democratic Party and/or the liberal Left (a balanced survey of evidence here), it is not difficult to see how the New Class became the New Establishment against which neoconservatives have directed their ideological mobilisation.

Although with the emergence of the anti-establishment Tea Party - which has as complicated, indeed confused, a relationship with conservatism as with neoconservatism, and is in any case not an intellectual movement - one can't help wondering whether neoconservatives have helped facilitate the emergence of a tiger of a movement that they won't (and wouldn't want to) be able to safely ride...

In any case, the seminal account of the impact of this New Class on America's educational values, and on its society and culture more generally, remains Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

technorati tags: neoconservative New Class Trotskyist rationalism criticism Schumpeter Drolet American Neoconservatism Lipset academia radicalism dissent Allan Bloom Closing of the American Mind Irving Kristol Tea Party

Preaching to the choir

2011-07-23T19:38:00.000+01:00

As I am getting back into the swing of things, as regards American politics, I am increasingly reflecting on just how much the tone of national politics seems to have changed since I left the USA, almost eight years ago. To be sure, there was disagreement, vitriol and polarisation during the Clinton years (which constituted my 'formative years' in America, although I first arrived in the country when Reagan was still president) and the early years of the GW Bush presidency.

But since the election of Obama things certainly seem to have gotten worse. Obama's persona, the emergence of the Tea Party and ongoing economic crisis coupled with what I suspect is a stronger sense among Americans of their country's relatively declining role in global affairs all seems to contribute to a harsher political climate.

At the moment, the polarisation and inability to compromise even on the most pressing issues of the day is of course played out in the circus surrounding the need to increase the country's debt ceiling by 2 August. Something that now is still hanging in the balance.

Gary Wills writes thoughtfully on this, and in particular the don't budge an inch approach of the incoming class of Republican Congressmen, in a recent New York Review of Books blog, 'Edmund Burke against Grover Norquist'.

Not only are today's Republicans taking a very different approach to political compromise, and the need to increase debt ceilings and even raise taxes when necessary, than did President Reagan who still remains a political idol for many on the American Right. They also fit very poorly into a longer tradition of political conservatism, even in the purely American sense. And if we speak instead of a greater conservative tradition in Anglophone countries that derives from Edmund Burke, today's Tea Party activists and conservatives in Congress seems to be very far removed from conservatism indeed.

In the words of Burke, reflecting on the danger of politicians signing pledges on various issues which means they cannot compromise or change their views according to need and events (i.e., be pragmatic), 'What sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion'?

Instead of compromise, we increasingly get polarised groups of politicians preaching to their on choir and little of that which needs to get resolved can be dealt with constructively.

technorati tags: Obama Congress Republican Tea Party Grover Norquist Edmund Burke Gary Wills polarisation debt ceiling Reagan conservatism instruction pledge

On bitter arguments and ideologies

2011-06-30T00:43:00.001+01:00

Preparing myself for some long-awaited field research 'inside the Beltway' in September, I am currently reading Jean Francois Drolet's intriguing book, American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of a Reactionary Idealism.

It is well known that the early leading figures - founders? - of neoconservatism had their political origins on the American Left, and in particular among the so-called 'New York intellectuals' of the early post-war decades (e.g., Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz). These were generally intellectuals who had defended orthodox liberal American values, including the New Deal (which traditional conservatives had vociferously opposed) but then became increasingly disillusioned with the ability of the liberal establishment to stand up for liberal values in the face of sustained attack by counter-culture and radical Left forces from the mid-1960s onwards.

Recounting a well-known if to many still a surprising social scene out of which these neoconservatives emerged - these the predecessors of the GW Bush administration's leading 'neocons' - Drolet provides a rather entertaining picture of the milieu in which political consciousness was formed:

Like many New York intellectuals... neoconservatives had been student radicals associated with the Trotskyist and socialist movements at the City College of New York. Gathering in a small section of the cafeteria called Alcove One, they honed their theoretical and rhetorical skills through bitter arguments among themselves and with the Stalisnist communists of Alcove Two.

One wonders if there were food fights, too?

Factionalism is of course nothing new and existed long before the establishment of fault-lines in the CCNY cafeteria:

technorati tags: Drolet neoconservatism neocons George Bush Irving Kristol Daniel Bell Seymour Martin Lipset Nathan Glazer Norman Podhoretz Trotskyist liberal socialist CCNY factionalism ideology New York intellectuals People's Front of Judea

Gearing up for 2012

2011-06-18T23:32:00.000+01:00

Mud wrestling at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Activity on this blog has slowed down but with the shape of the 2012 US Presidential election campaign ever so slightly coalescing, this may be as good a time as any to get some more politics-oriented posts up and running again. And, courtesy of the British Academy, I am heading back across the Atlantic for some 'inside the beltway' research come September which is yet another good reason for sharpening my focus on American politics.

So what's out there, beyond the scholarly literature, for keeping abreast of current events in American politics? The two key newspapers of record of course, The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as some good quality commentary in The Economist and The New York Review of Books.

Because the US currently has a Democratic President it is particularly interesting to try and figure out what is happening with opposition politics in Washington and throughout the US. And the Republicans find themselves in a less than pleasant situation at the moment. Besides Obama being likely to rack up a billion dollars for his re-election bid, the field of Republican contenders beyond the 'establishment' candidate Mitt Romney is hardly inspiring (as the recently held Republican debate in New Hampshire made clear).

On the difficulties facing the Republican party, and those now claiming (perhaps not very convincingly) to adhere to an American tradition of conservatism, I find David Frum's FrumForum of particular interest. Frum's persistent critiques of the Tea Party, Republican party politics and the increasingly agitated populism characterising 21st Century conservatism in America is insightful and bound to have resonance among those 'within' who are increasingly despairing at where the GOP is heading.

Frum, a former economic speech-writer for President George W Bush, is a foreigner too (well, he's Canadian) and perhaps that perspective helps.

Matt Frei's Americana podcast on the BBC is yet another enjoyable (foreigner's) perspective on American society, culture and politics.

Then there's FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's New York Times blog which is very good on the numbers (he's a baseball fan). Silver is presumably American, although I am not sure if he has made his birth certificate available for public inspection.

Any other suggestions for insightful/enjoyable/unmissable outlets on American politics - please email or post.

technorati tags: Obama Democrat Republican 2012 election campaign Tea Party conservative populist David Frum FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver Matt Frei Americana Mitt Romney

Bowing to history

2011-05-18T21:45:00.004+01:00

President Mary McAleese & Queen Elizabeth II, Irish War Memorial Garden

Queen Elizabeth II's current state visit to the Republic of Ireland is the first ever visit by a British monarch to the country. The last visit, by King George V in 1911, took place when all of Ireland was still a part of the United Kingdom.

The two first days of the visit have seen the Queen and Ireland's President, Mary McAleese, share the stage at momentous and historically significant events at Áras an Uachtaráin, the Garden of Remembrance, the Irish War Memorial Garden at Islandbridge, Croke Park and Dublin Castle.

At tonight's banquet, held in the Queen's honour at Dublin Castle (the old seat of the British administration of pre-independence Ireland), the Queen gave her one scheduled speech of the four-day visit. The speech contained no apology or regret (although the latter is implied, but not as exclusively pertaining to the British), and there will inevitably be a debate about whether it should have done so, but constitutes a sensitive recognition of these two islands' - Britannia and Hibernia - intertwined and complex histories and a positive vision for conciliation and a shared future.

Even as a relative newcomer to life in these islands, one cannot miss the historical significance of this visit and of the Queen's words:

A Uachtaráin agus a chairde (President and friends).

Prince Philip and I are delighted to be here, and to experience at first hand Ireland’s world-famous hospitality.

Together we have much to celebrate: the ties between our people, the shared values, and the economic, business and cultural links that make us so much more than just neighbours, that make us firm friends and equal partners.

Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as it was yesterday when you and I laid wreaths at the Garden of Remembrance.

Indeed, so much of this visit reminds us of the complexity of our history, its many layers and traditions, but also the importance of forbearance and conciliation. Of being able to bow to the past, but not be bound by it.

Of course, the relationship has not always been straightforward; nor has the record over the centuries been entirely benign. It is a sad and regrettable reality that through history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss.

These events have touched us all, many of us personally, and are a painful legacy. We can never forget those who have died or been injured, and their families. To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all. But it is also true that no-one who looked to the future over the past centuries could have imagined the strength of the bonds that are now in place between the governments and the people of our two nations, the spirit of partnership that we now enjoy, and the lasting rapport between us. No-one here this evening could doubt that heartfelt desire of our two nations.

Madam President, you have done a great deal to promote this understanding and reconciliation. You set out to build bridges. And I have seen at first hand your success in bringing together different communities and traditions on this island. You have also shed new light on the sacrifice of those who served in the First World War. Even as we jointly opened the Messines Peace Park in 1998, it was difficult to look ahead to the time when you and I would be standing together at Islandbridge as we were today.

That transformation is also evident in the establishment of a successful power-sharing Executive in Northern Ireland. A knot of history that was painstakingly loosened by the British and Irish Governments together with the strength, vision and determination of the political parties in Northern Ireland.

What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favour of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today. I applaud the work of all those involved in the peace process, and of all those who support and nurture peace, including members of the police, the Gardaí, and the other emergency services, and those who work in the communities, the churches and charitable bodies like Co-operation Ireland. Taken together, their work not only serves as a basis for reconciliation between our people and communities, but it gives hope to other peacemakers across the world that through sustained effort, peace can and will prevail.

For the world moves on quickly. The challenges of the past have been replaced by new economic challenges which will demand the same imagination and courage. The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.

There are other stories written daily across these islands which do not find their voice in solemn pages of history books, or newspaper headlines, but which are at the heart of our shared narrative. Many British families have members who live in this country, as many Irish families have close relatives in the United Kingdom.

These families share the two islands; they have visited each other and have come home to each other over the years. They are the ordinary people who yearned for the peace and understanding we now have between our two nations and between the communities within those two nations; a living testament to how much in common we have.

These ties of family, friendship and affection are our most precious resource. They are the lifeblood of the partnership across these islands, a golden thread that runs through all our joint successes so far, and all we will go on to achieve. They are a reminder that we have much to do together to build a future for all our grandchildren: the kind of future our grandparents could only dream of.

So we celebrate together the widespread spirit of goodwill and deep mutual understanding that has served to make the relationship more harmonious, close as good neighbours should always be.

technorati tags: Queen Elizabeth Mary McAleese King George Aras an Uachtarain Garden of Remembrance 1916 Easter Rising Croke Park war memoria Islandbridge Dublin Castle Britannia Hibernia British Isles Republic of Ireland United Kingdom tricolor union jack

Céline's grim war

2011-03-26T17:35:00.000Z

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Céline delivers that kind of raw, undiluted, hits-you-right-in-the-face prose which is not only stimulating to read, even if only in small doses, but which also makes me personally regret needing to rely on translation. For anyone seduced by sentiments of pro patria, the opening of Céline's Journey to the End of the Night is as good a reminder as anyone's of the horrors of modern warfare. No chivalry here. It is an account as brutal and vivid - well, nearly so - as is Ernst Jünger's in Storm of Steel, but without Jünger's appetite for it all. Celine's account, as his attitude towards much in life it seems, is rather than of the one who is sick of it all.

But Celine´s prose is so fundamentally corrosive of any sense of hopefulness, or even of faith in mankind, that it positively asphyxiates one's soul if dwelt upon for too long. He just won't let you forget:

The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in their way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human vicsiousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That's work enough for a lifetime.

I can think of no bleaker vision of (the end of) earthly life than this.

Céline's Journey is but another confirmation (along with, for example, Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March) of my belief that those last days of summer before the onset of the Great War, the centenary of which we will soon mark, was the time when Europe finally lost its way, never to wholly recover. Oh, to be able to turn the clock back to the summer of 1914 and do it all differently.

technorati tags: Celine Journey to the End of the Night Ernst Junger Storm of Steel war WWI world war 1914 Joseph Roth Radetzky March pro patria

Poet without politics?

2011-03-24T16:46:00.002Z

Berryman and daughter

Having enjoyed the Oklahoma-born and Ivy League-educated John Berryman's poems, and in particular his collection The Dream Songs, I have never paid much attention to his political views, whatever they may be. Indeed, even Berryman's harrowing auto-biographical novel, Recovery, is fairly devoid of any commentary that can be construed as politics. Hence I was surprised, and a little intrigued, to read in an article by Lewis Hyde, entitled 'Alcohol and Poetry', the following description of Berryman:

He had no politics except patriotism and nostalgia. He refused to read at the first antiwar readings in Minneapolis [he was a Professor at the University of Minnesota]. He wrote the only monarchist poem (Song 105) to come out of the sixties.

A curious, and somewhat surprising, description of Berryman's politics indeed and one which makes me recall, although I am not quite sure from where, the notion that the alcoholic is inherently conservative (socially, politically?).

Song 105

As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative'—teaching at The Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote—
Gone with the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No'
and we sat down with War & Peace.

As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'

Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr Nixon,
whom never I liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.

technorati tags: Berryman poetry Dream Songs Recovery alcoholism Lewis Hyde monarchist conservative nostalgia patriotism confessional

Zubek memorial

2011-02-27T18:34:00.001Z

Professor Voytek Zubek (1951-1998)

I was very pleased to note some time ago that thanks to alumnus Eduardo K Perez, the Department of Government at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has established the Voytek Zubek Memorial Endowed Scholarship in memory of the late Professor Zubek who was my undergraduate teacher and whose inspiration was in many ways responsible for me pursuing a graduate career in Political Science.

A native of Gdansk, Professor Zubek was an impassioned and effective teacher with that deep sense of irony regarding the pursuit of, and attachment to, power that those who, like himself, had experienced life and its limitations behind the Iron Curtain could so strongly convey. Having fled his native Poland for America as a political refugee in 1973, Zubek was a firm believer in Eastern Europe's role as part of a capitalist and democratic Western world even if that belief was tempered by a realistic concern about the degree to which the communist authoritarian stamp on Eastern European societies would hamper their future prospects and transitions. Zubek studied law at Copernicus University in Poland and conducted his doctoral studies at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

I received my BA in Political Science at UAB in 1996 and took government classes from Zubek in my last two years of the undergraduate programme. It was through Zubek's courses on Eastern European politics that I developed a keen interest in political institutions and, in particular, the nature of political transitions and processes of democratisation. Thanks to Zubek's guidance and writing in support of my abilities, such as they were, I managed to secure a Carleton Graduate Fellowship with the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University, where I studied for my MA under another expert on Soviet and Eastern European politics, Professor William Clark.

Later on my interests shifted, towards political economy, Africa and an increasing interest in the theoretical underpinnings of comparative politics. But the early lessons imparted by Professor Zubek, and the sense of passion about politics that his whole persona manifested, have stayed with me ever since and for that I remain grateful.

technorati tags: Voytek Zubek memorial scholarship Eduardo K Perez political science government UAB Eastern Europe Poland Soviet Iron Curtain communism democracy capitalism LSU William Clark

Trying times

2011-01-27T10:03:00.000Z

Abraham and Isaac, by Rembrandt (1634)

Heritage, by Chaim Gouri (1960)

The ram came last of all. And Abraham
did not know that it came to answer the
boy's question – first of his strength
when his day was on the wane.

The old man raised his head. Seeing
that it was no dream and that the angel
stood there – the knife slipped from his hand.

The boy, released from his bonds,
saw his father's back.

Isaac, as the story goes, was not
sacrificed. He lived for many years,
saw what pleasure had to offer,
until his eyesight dimmed.

But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring.
They are born with a knife in their hearts.

technorati tags: Abraham Isaac Rembrandt Chaim Gouri Binding of Isaac Genesis bible Torah trial father son heritage

When the guard dogs break free

2010-12-14T23:03:00.002Z

Joseph Roth (1894-1939), travelling to Frankfurt, 1926

Few authors manage to capture interwar Europe like Joseph Roth. His Radetzky March stands alongside works like Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as one of the finest works of literature in its understanding of modern European civilisation - a civilisation at the precipice.

I've just read The Wandering Jews, Roth's masterful journalistic account of the disappearing culture and life of the Eastern European Jews. It depicts their lot as wanderers westward in the wake of the Great War and the uprooting and reorganisation of eastern and central Europe following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Treaty of Versailles. Despite leftist leanings, and initially a far too rosy view of the new opportunities for Jews as citizens of a post-revolutionary Soviet Union, Roth was essentially a royalist who lamented the fall of the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary, the 'only fatherland [he] ever knew', and feared the rise of dangerous nationalisms emerging in the void left by empire.

My edition of The Wandering Jews, written based on Roth's travels in the 1920s and published in that decade, contains an additional preface written for the 1937 edition of the book, some five years following Hitler's coming to power in Germany and two years following the enactment by the Nazis of the so-called Nuremberg Laws which entrenched discrimination against Jews and stripped them of German citizenship. Reading Roth's retrospective musings, written just over a year before the eruption that became known as the infamous Kristallnacht, and two years before his own death and the beginning of the second World War which resulted in the demise of European Jewry, is chilling indeed. Oh to think, in this context, of Germany as the 'land of unlimited opportunity' for European Jewry, and to contemplate the horror of what happens when the thin veneer of civilisation is scratched too deep and the 'guard dogs [break] free'...

Many years ago [...] there was no acute problem affecting the Jews of Western Europe. What mattered was to persuade the Jews and non-Jews of Western Europe to grasp the tragedy of the Eastern Jews -- and especially in the land of unlimited opportunity, by which of course I mean not America but Germany. [...] Most German Jews regarded themselves, despite an abundance of clearly threatening evidence of anti-Semitism, as perfectly good Germans; on High Holy Days, at most, they thought of themselves as Jewish Germans. They took great pains either to take no account of latent anti-Semitism or to overlook it altogether. In the case of many or even most Western Jews, they attempted to replace the lost or diluted faith of their fathers with a willful blindness, which I describe as a superstitious belief in progress. Some of them unfortunately gave in to the temptation to blame Jewish immigrants from the East for the expression of anti-Semitic feeling. [...] One does not want to be reminded by some recent arrival from Lodz of one's own grandfather from Posen or Katowice. This is the unworthy but understandable attitude of an insecure middle class just scaling the steep ladder into the echelons of the upper middle class, with fresh air and scenic views. At the sight of a cousin from Lodz, one may easily lose one's balance and fall.

In the attempt to reach that ledge where, under certain circumstances, aristocrats, Christian industrialists, and Jewish financiers were prepared to claim that they were all equal, and emphasized their equality so vociferously that no sensitive ear could fail to grasp that what they were really emphasizing was their inequality, the German Jew tossed his coreligionists the occasional sop, so as not to be hindered in his personal ascent. [...] There were some German Jews [...] who not only imagined that everything would be fine but for the arrival of Jews from the East, but who actually helped sic the plebeian bailiff on the helpless strangers, as one sets a dog on a tramp. But when the bailiff took power, and the janitor took over the "state apartments", and the guard dogs broke free, then the German Jew was forced to see that he was more exposed and more homeless even than his cousin in Lodz had been a few years before. The German Jew had grown arrogant. He had lost the God of his fathers and acquired an idol instead: the idol of a civilizatory patriotism. But God had not forgotten him. And he sent him on his wanderings, a tribulation that is appropriate to Jews, and to all others besides. Lest we forget that nothing in this world endures, not even a home; and that our life is short, shorter even than the life of the elephant, the crocodile, and the crow. Even parrots outlive us.

Roth's final verdict seems bleak indeed:

Pious Jews may be left with the consolation of the hereafter.

As for the rest, it's "vae victis".

Man Without Qualities?

2010-12-03T12:51:00.001Z

Paul Krugman's withering criticism of President Obama in today's New York Times opinion pages is not merely a cricitism of the specific decision to implement a pay freeze for US Federal workers, but about a steadily increasing sense of frustration and disillusion among the President's prominent supporters.

That most crude and unkind political commentator, Ann Coulter, wrote some time ago that Obama was elected merely as a 'fashion statement' for America's liberals and self-styled progressives. In other words, he was not a man of substance and proven ability (a theme going back to criticism of his lack of executive experience and vague image as a 'community organiser'), but someone whose background and persona projected the kind of image which his supporters, primarily among young college students, saw as a befitting image to crown the sense of achievment that the page had been turned on the Bush era for good. All of a sudden, those Bush billboards, asking 'Miss me yet?' do not sound as outlandish as they first did.

The problem is that the President's friends and foes alike seem to have taken the measure of the man, and are not impressed. Indeed, it seems hard to think of any president in recent times who has lost support so fast? It is true that Reagan had become vastly unpopular two years into his presidency and then managed a sharp reversal to win re-election by a landslide in 1984. But the sense of disillusionment surrounding Obama (and the sense among his opponents that he's fundamentally weak, a loser) seems quite different. And Obama obviously faces challenges - some of them to do with racist and xenophobic undercurrents in American society - that Reagan did not.

Boosted by the largest swing of seats in a Congressional election since 1938, the Republicans are scenting blood and have decided on what seems to be a strategy of total confrontation with the White House in every policy area. Moreover, independent voters who were crucial to Obama's win in 2008 have shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans to the tune of 36 percent between the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections.

It is perhaps ironic that at a time when the Republican Party seems to have fallen foul of what Medvetz describes as 'maximalism' (the pursuit of an extreme ideological agenda, rather than centrist position respectful of core ideological values) the White House should fail to capitalise on this and is instead running behind events and thus facing the real risk of electoral defeat in 2012.

technorati tags: Obama Krugman Coulter Reagan White House pay freeze fashion statement Medvetz maximalism 2012 independents Bush Miss me yet Republicans Democrats

Who are the scoundrels?

2010-11-30T11:28:00.002Z

Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa at his coronation in 1977

Development economist William Easterly (NYU) directs another thoughtful broadside against the hypocrisy underpinning the international aid and developmet regime in 'Foreign Aid for Scoundrels' (New York Review of Books). The proverbial elephant in the room of international aid is the consistent practice by Western aid donors to fund dictators. The amount of Western aid going to dictators and otherwise authoritartian governments has remained fairly constant since the early 1970s, which means that the end of the Cold War did not end such practices which obviously contradict the official rhetoric of support for freedom and democracy. But the new 'war on terror' and our interest in keeping key regimes on 'our side' does not explain the continued giving of aid to dictatorships either. In some cases it is simply a matter of constant aid flows being used to secure the continued existence of aid agencies themselves. They exist to give aid, and so give aid they will.

As Dambisa Moyo argues in her though-provoking Dead Aid, these reliable aid flows in effect prop up dictatorships and thus prolong theoppression and corruption that prevent many poor countries to embark on sustainable developmental trajectories. However theoretically and empirically thin by comparison to standard academic tracts on development, Moyo's argument constitutes perhaps the most constructive and potentially redefining intervention in a long-standing, and largely stagnant, scholarly and political debate on how to better promote development.

If the UK government is going to stand fast on their somewhat surprising commmittment to protect international aid and development funding (DFID Business Plan - Vision) while at the same time embarking on a comprehensive programme of deficit cutting and related austerity measures, they have an excellent reason for redefining the reasons for giving aid and to then redirect that aid in light of Moyo's and Easterly's arguments.

technorati tags: William Easterly Dambisa Moyo Dead Aid DFID development dictators foreign aid Bokassa

Remembrance Sunday

2010-11-14T13:57:00.000Z

Poppy field

I listened to this famous World War I poem recited by two girls this morning, and this very type of image, of a field running blood red with the flowers of remembrance, was what immediately came to my mind.

In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae (1915).

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori...?

technorati tags: World War Great War 1914 1918 Remembrance Sunday Armistice Day In Flanders Fields pro patria mori Horace war peace poppies

Intellectuals or men of sound character?

2010-11-08T11:32:00.000Z

Disraeli Measuring the British Lion, engraving by John Leech in Punch (1849)

In a chapter on 'Derby's Conservatives' in the second edition of John Charmley's A History of Conservative Politics Since 1830, the author notes a long-standing suspicion of 'intellectuals' and preference for men of 'sound character'. Apparently the assumption is that there is some inherent trade-off between these two types. Regarding the controversial author and Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in this context, Charmley writes:

When [Edward] Stanley wrote about Disraeli's 'disadvantages', they included his 'superior ability and power'. Harold Macmillan was apt to comment that he had had to live down the reputation of being an intellectual in order to become the [Conservative] party's leader*, and it is hard to think of any other party in which being called 'too clever by half' would be considered devastating put down, as it was when 'Bobbety' [Robert Gascoyne-Cecil], fifth Marquess of Salisbury applied those words to Iain Macleod. The best compliment a Conservative can be paid is to be called 'sound'. [Stanley] Baldwin, who was pre-eminent in that, if in no other quality, spoke for the party as a whole when he told Lord Birkenhead (amongst whose many great qualities no one would have included soundness) that the country preferred 'second-class intellects with first-class characters to first-class intellects with second-class characters'; there were plenty who would have considered the ascription of even a second-class character to 'Dizzy' [Disraeli] too much of a compliment.

These sentiments fit quite well the stereotype of the Left preferring intellectuals who can think the big, abstract thoughts required for pursuing systematic change whereas conservatives prefer pragmatists focussing on problem-solving tasks in any given context and with an aversion to abstract intellectualising of politics (one reason why, in the British context, the Thatcher era of 'radical' conservatism with a strong neo-liberal streak in its economic policymaking fits so awkwardly in the longer tradition of Conservative British politics). It is, from this point of view, also to be expected that, in recent times, the Labour Party would appoint a man with a PhD in History to manage the country's finances (Gordon Brown) while the current Conservative government would opt for a man with a less heavy-weight academic career and a brief career in the private sector before moving into party policy work (George Osborne).

*The former Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who was wounded three times in World War I and reflected on that experience with the comment 'I love wars', was famously injured during the Battle of the Somme and, laying injured in a trench with a bullet lodged in his pelvis thought it a good idea to spend his time there reading Aeschylus in the original classic Greek.

Beware the angry little man

2010-10-27T23:35:00.000+01:00

The 1934 Nuremberg Rally in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will

Klaus Mann, writer and son of one of Germany's literary giants, Thomas Mann, wrote an in retrospect most disturbing account of the day, in 1932, on which he happened to find himself seated next to Adolf Hitler in a Munich tea room called the Carlton.

The pastry was fairly good at the Carlton. He stuffed himself with strawberry tartlets, which I am rather fond of myself but couldn't touch for months after having seen him swallowing three of them. I found him surprisingly ugly, much more vulgar than I had anticipated. There were only two things that puzzled me while I studied, with cold, disgusted curiosity, his unappetizing features: first, what was the secret of his fascination? Why and how did he manage to make people lose their minds? And, secondly: Of whom did he remind me? He resembled someone whose picture I must have frequently seen. It was not Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin is engagingly attractive. No, the great comedian does not have Hitler's fleshy, nasty nose. Chaplin looks like an artist, whereas that gluttonous rat over there looked - like a gluttonous rat. He was flabby and foul and without any marks of greatness, a frustrated, hysterical, petty bourgeois. It was a most unpleasant experience to have him so close to me, but at the same time it meant something like a relief. For I was positive that he had no chance to conquer Germany. "He is not to be our dictator," I felt with a sort of malignant satisfaction. "You have no chance, silly little mustache. Don't fool yourself Shicklgruber [a reference to the illegitimate birth and original family name of Hitler's father]: you are a washout. Five years from now, nobody will remember your name..."

A year later, Hitler and the Nazis swept to power in Germany.

Mann, having served as a Staff Sergeant in the US Army during the war, committed suicide in 1949.

technorati tags: Klaus Mann Thomas Mann Hitler Shicklgruber Nazi demagogue Chaplin dictator Riefenstahl famous last words

Allan Bloom versus the 1960s

2010-09-25T14:43:00.001+01:00

Hippies, or barbarians at the gate of Bloom's ivory tower?

During the years of my university education in the United States, largely coinciding with the Clinton-era 1990s, I was taught in large part by a professoriate whose formative years were the 1960s. The 1960s were, in comparison to the largely complacent 1990s, undoubtedly an era of great social upheaval and transformation. To the degree that the 1960s were discussed, the era was largely depicted in a positive light: it was an exciting time to be young, to be a student and to participate in the great changes American society then underwent, changes that were seen as just, progressive and for the greater good.

My own experience being taught to a large extent by the 'children of the sixties' was, I hasten to add, an experience which, with very few exceptions, I found rewarding and positive in most aspects of intellectual development.(The 1990s may not have been so conducive to moral development, but that is a different matter.)

Thus I find it intriguing to read in Allan Bloom's controversial The Closing of the American Mind his chapter entitled 'The Sixties', which constitutes an uncompromising critique of the moral and intellectual content of the 1960s in terms of the universities. To put it mildly, Bloom saw the 1960s as an unmitigated disaster (and one which is perhaps too coloured by his negative experience of the 1969 black student protests at Cornell University, the so-called Straight Hall takeover).

Rejecting the notion that the 1950s were somehow an era characterised by (intellectual) conformism and rigidity, and political McCarthyism (Bloom recognised the threat posed by McCarthy but insists that the universities found their autonomy threatened more seriously by the radicalism of the 1960s*), whereas the 1960s were an era of great intellectual achievments stemming from the effects of cultural change. He writes:

About the sixties it is now fashionable to say that although there were indeed excesses, many good things resulted. But, as far as the universities are concerned, I know of nothing positive coming from that period; it was an unmitigated disaster for them...

The sixties were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the [cultrual/radical] movement... This was when real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.

It was, for Bloom an era where high culture finally became crowded out of even the universities to make way for an increasingly vulgar popular culture. An era hugely damaging to intellectual and cultural standards, the 1960s were morally corrosive as well.

The practices of the late Roman empire were promoted with the moral fervor of early Christianity and the political idealism of Robespierre... Never in history had there been such a marvellous correspondence between the good and the pleasant [which was, of course, an illusion].

Perhaps most controversially, Bloom links the 1960s in the USA to the 1930s in Germany:

The American university in the sixties was experiencing the same dismantling structure of rational inquiry as had the German universities in the thirties. No longer believing in their higher vocation, both gave way to a highly ideologized student populace. And the content of the ideology was the same - value committment. The university had abandoned all claim to study or inform about value - undermining the sense of the value of what it taught, while turning over the decision about values to the folk, the Zeitgeist, the relevant. Whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the princple is the same.

Whatever the merits of Bloom's criticism, it certainly is interesting to consider for those of us who escaped much of the 1980s 'culture wars' (when his book was written) and had our own formative experience at university in an era when the 1960s were generally looked back upon in a more positive light.

Allan Bloom

*On McCarthy, Bloom writes that "the McCarthy period was the last time the university had any sense of community, defined by a common enemy. McCarthy, those like him, and those who followed them, were clearly nonacademic and antiacademic, the barbarians at the gate".

technorati tags: Allan Bloom Closing of the American Mind 1960s culture wars Cornell Straight Hall intellectualism morality populism radicalism McCarthyism

The Pope challenges Britain

2010-09-16T22:15:00.000+01:00

Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Benedict XVI at Holyroodhouse

Today Pope Benedict XVI arrived at Edinburgh for what is the first ever Papal state visit to the United Kingdom.

Despite a British media which, from the BBC to the tabloid newspapers, has been desperate to stir 'controversy' the first day of the Pope's visit was characterised primarily by the fact that the faithful turned out in their tens, if not hundreds, of thousands to see the Pontiff and hear his message. From the meeting with Queen Elizabeth II - Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which emerged independent of the Roman Catholic Church through the rejection of Papal authority during the reign of Henry VIII - at the Palace of Holyroodhouse to the open-air Mass at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow, the day was by all accounts a success.

There will be the inevitable protests along the way, from those led by Northern Ireland's Ian Paisley to Oxford's Richard Dawkins. More interestingly, in what is undoubtedly one of the Western world's more secularised societies, the Pope's rather obvious suggestion that there is emerging today an intolerant, 'aggressive' form of atheism which seeks to shove religion and faith out of the public sphere and into the closet, so to speak, is considered almost an impertincence in media and by the chattering classes.

The Pope confronted this issue head on in his address to the Queen, noting that:

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.

technorati tags: Pope Benedict Queen Elizabeth Edinburgh Holyroodhouse Bellahouston Park Mass atheism humanist secularism faith Roman Catholic Ian Paisley Richard Dawkins Henry VIII Anglican Church of England

Irish autumn reading

2010-09-06T09:30:00.000+01:00

Having previously been acquainted primarily with Irish writers like Swift, Wilde, Joyce and Beckett, I found Flann O'Brien's (born Brian O'Nolan and also writing under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen) first novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds, something quite different and it immediately became one of my favourite books by an Irish author.

Some time ago I picked up what was his third novel (published in 1941), An Béal Bocht in Irish, and translated into English as The Poor Mouth. It was initially placed on the back-burner, among a whole stack of newly acquired books waiting to be read. Last night, as the weather was turning windy, rainy and distinctly darker, with autumn loudly announcing itself, I picked up the book and read the translator, Patrick Power's, most interesting preface to the book. He writes:

The key-words in this work are surely 'downpour', 'eternity' and 'potatoes'.

Surely, then, this is the time to begin reading!

technorati tags: An Beal Bocht The Poor Mouth Flann O'Brien Brian O'Nolan Myles na gCopaleen Irish Gaelic Gaeilge rain potatoes poverty eternity Patrick Power At-Swim-Two-Birds

Newman's enduring Church

2010-09-04T15:58:00.001+01:00

Pope Benedict XVI delivering Urbi et Orbi blessing at St Peter's, 2010

Reading Cardinal Newman's masterful Apologia Pro Vita Sua on the eve of his anticipated beatification, I am especially mindful of how religion remains acutely part of a particular confluence of current events. Pope Benedict XVI is making a first Papal state visit to Britain later this month. In the wake of scandal, segments of a secularised Britain are up in arms. There is renewed intellectual opposition to the old faith, and to religion in general. Never mind Richard Dawkins's bluster, Stephen Hawking now claims that we do not need God to explain the origin of the universe - a judgment the finality of which he had previously not been willing to assert.

The memoirs of Tony Blair, who some have called Britain's most famous convert (to Catholicism) since Newman, have just been released amidst renewed controversy surrounding his role in the Iraq War. Blair suggests that a politician cannot always allow himself to be completely honest, which is an interesting point in the context of Newman as the accusations of falsehood and cunning are ones that have been levelled against Catholics since the Reformation, and which of course prompted Newman to write his Apologia in response to his accusors and in which he defends his conversion to Rome. Moreover, Scott Appleby and John McGreevy argue in the New York Review of Books that ways in which Americans viewed Catholics as a fifth column, an enemy within, in times past are now resurfacing in the worsening anomosity against Muslims (here).

One episode of Newman's Apologia in particular comes to mind, concerning the supposed 'lure' of Rome and Catholicism:

[T]hus I shall account for that phenomenon, which to so many seems so wonderful, that I should have left 'my kindred and my father's house' for a Church from which I once turned away with dread; - so wonderful to them! as if forsooth a Religion which has flourished through so many ages, among so many nations, amid such varieties of social life, in such contrary classes and conditions of men, and after so many revolutions, political and civil, could not subdue the reason and overcome the heart, without the aid of fraud in the process and the sophistries of the schools.

Who will we cherish and mind a thousand years hence, the secularists or the saints?

technorati tags: John Henry Newman Catholic Pope Benedict beatification saint Richard Dawkins Stephen Hawking church Rome protestantism Reformation secularism Tony Blair convert Apologia Pro Vita Sua Muslims

The artist and the shopkeeper

2010-08-16T21:11:00.012+01:00

Igor Stravinsky, 1959

Tonight I went to see Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky at the Queen's Film Theatre. I won't say too much about the film itself, a somewhat dull affair which portrayed Coco as thoroughly distasteful, Katerina Stravinsky as fundamentally decent and Stravinsky himself as generally hapless and predictably torn between two women and his passion for his music. (What relation to reality these depictions have, I do not know.)

The ultimate putdown moment in the film comes when Coco suggests a shared passion for creation between her and the composer, only to have him bluntly reply that, '[y]ou are not an artist. You are a shopkeeper'. For some odd reason it made me recall Kaiser Wilhelm II's Napoleonic dismissal of the English as a 'hateful, mendacious, unprincipled nation of shopkeepers'.

What made the film worthwhile for me however, was the spine-tingling reenactment of the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's controversial, and at the time incomprehensible, ballet The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The audience's reaction was a near riot, but the captivating dancers, and in particular the nearly demented trembling of the pagan girl who dances herself to death, made me want to hurry home and listen to the work in full courtesy of my excellent Sony recording with Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra. There are few other premieres I can think I'd rather have attended than this moment when Stravinsky catapulted Europe's chattering classes into modernity.

African dancers of the Compagnie Heddy Maalem performing The Rite

By the way, does anyone else think that Mads Mikkelsen (Stravinsky) looks a bit like Freddie Mercury?

technorati tags: Stravinsky, Coco, Chanel, Mads Mikkelsen, Freddie Mercury, Rite of Spring, Le sacre du printemps, Kaiser, Wilhelm, shopkeepers, Heddy Maalem, Boulez, Paris, ballet, QFT

The European 2010 World Cup

2010-07-03T21:35:00.001+01:00

Johan Cruyff and Franz Beckenbauer in the 1974 World Cup final

This was to be Africa's world cup. But while South Africa certainly has done a good job hosting the tournament so far, it is increasingly looking like yet another world cup in which 'established' footballing powers dominate.

Going into the quarter-finals there was a possibility that all of the remaining four teams advancing to the semi-finals would be Latin American (the favourites Brazil and Argentina, Uruguay and, as an outsider, perhaps also Paraguay). Instead the final four are three European teams (Holland, Germany and Spain) and Paraguay, the latter being the only team advancing to the semi-finals by facing a non-European team (Ghana). It thus looks very likely that we will have an all-European final in Johannesburg on the 11th of June, just as the 2006 final in Berlin was all-European affair (with Italy winning over France on penalties).

This wasn't supposed to happen. Media have talked much of a changing world order in football. At times, the supposedly fading fortunes of the 'old' footballing powers in Europe have even been linked to greater economic, political and social global shifts away from the West. South Africa's Mail & Guardian speaks of the world cup as a 'symbol of a new postcolonial world order' and according to the New York Times, Europe's 'best are crumbling' and European power is 'diminished'.

This was to be not only the first world cup hosted on African soil, but one where the 'emerging powers' of football - African, Asian and so on - would shine. At the very least, the old 'colonial' powers of Europe would get a good kicking from the rest of the world.

Then with all African nations except Ghana exiting the cup in the group play (including, for the first time ever, a host nation), South African and Western media have seemed almost desperate in their attempts to wish the Ghanaian Black Stars ahead. But this has been analysis based on emotion rather than clear thinking.

What remains a fact is that the African (and Asian, Oceanian and North American) teams remain distinctly second rate. The misplaced expectations and hyped analysis are of course not the fault of African players and fans, but a problem stemming from wishful thinking by football's chattering classes (certainly outside Europe) and their attempts to seize on some kind of 'postcolonial' footballing zeitgeist.

It is true that Ghana were inspirational, played their hearts out and provided great excitement to the very end. The cup had certainly not lost anything from them having managed to move on to the semi-finals (they would have been the first African team to do so). And indeed Africa is rich in individual talent as is evident for anyone following European club football. But the continent's national teams are still some distance away from being genuine contenders at the very top level. This shift may eventually happen, of course, but progress has been slow since that initially hopefuly moment when Cameroon was the first African team to reach a quarter-final in the 1990 world cup.

At worst, (Western) media have come across as almost condescending to and/or belittling Ghana and the other African teams in their borderline fawning coverage of their efforts, where efforts and abilities have been exaggerated in ways that have been neither truthful nor helpful to African teams and their fans. More constructive would have been a hard-headed analysis of why national teams outside the core of European and a few Latin American powers still cannot break through the top barrier, and what the world cup 'outsiders' can do to improve their lot for future tournaments.

At times one has, in fact, had to be forgiven for not getting the impression that 'anyone but the Europeans' was becoming the spirit of the cup coverage. Nevermind what nations have actually played the most entertaining and quality football. Much has been made of the spirit and flair with which Brazilian and Argentine superstars can dazzle on the pitch, but hasn't it rather been the Germans and the Dutch who have provided the real excitement? It is true that the English disappointed, the Italians were amazingly weak and the French a plain disgrace, but they are not the sum total of European football - something which says quite alot about the continent's enduring footballing strength.

My prediction is now that we will indeed have an all-European final, matching Germany against Holland in a long overdue return meeting following these two teams' hard-fought final in the 1974 World Cup, from which the Germans emerged victorious and the world's star at that cup - Johan Cruyff - went home emptyhanded.

technorati tags: football soccer world cup South Africa Ghana Black Stars Germany Holland Oranje Cruyff 2010 Europe Africa post-colonial Bafana

Johnson's Young Author

2010-07-02T00:31:00.000+01:00

Samuel Johnson (oil on canvas) by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1775

The Young Author, by Samuel Johnson

When first the peasant, long inclined to roam,
Forsakes his rural sports and peaceful home,
Pleased with the scene the smiling ocean yields,
He scorns the verdant meads and flowery fields:
Then dances jocund o'er the watery way,
While the breeze whispers, and the streamers play:
Unbounded prospects in his bosom roll,
And future millions lift his rising soul;
In blissful dreams he digs the golden mine,
And raptured sees the new-found ruby shine.
Joys insincere! thick clouds invade the skies,
Loud roar the billows, high the waves arise;
Sickening with fear, he longs to view the shore,
And vows to trust the faithless deep no more.
So the young author, panting after fame,
And the long honours of a lasting name,
Intrusts his happiness to human kind,
More false, more cruel than the seas or wind!

Toil on, dull crowd! in ecstasies he cries,
For wealth or title, perishable prize;
While I those transitory blessings scorn,
Secure of praise from ages yet unborn.
This thought once form'd, all counsel comes too late,
He flies to press, and hurries on his fate;
Swiftly he sees the imagined laurels spread,
And feels the unfading wreath surround his head.
Warn'd by another's fate, vain youth be wise,
Those dreams were Settle's once, and Ogilby's!
The pamphlet spreads, incessant hisses rise,
To some retreat the baffled writer flies,
Where no sour critics snarl, no sneers molest,
Safe from the tart lampoon, and stinging jest;
There begs of Heaven a less distinguish'd lot--
Glad to be hid, and proud to be forgot.

del.icio.us tags: Samuel Johnson The Young Author Joshua Reynolds poetry writing literature authors

BP, Obama and Transatlantic relations

2010-06-15T12:40:00.002+01:00

Brown pelican covered in oil

There's no reason for underestimating the degree to which the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and subsequent massive oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana has become an ecological disaster of enormous magnitude and a tragedy for the Gulf environment and wildlife, the people who live there and all those who depend economically on the region's attractiveness. The continuous oil lekage will undoubtedly cause extensive damage and the cleaning operations, once the leak is eventually stopped, will clearly constitute one of the world's largest environmental rescue operations ever undertaken. The financial liabilities will stay with BP and its shareholders, including pension funds, for a long time to come. Indeed, the rescue effort already mounted by BP, involving thousands of workers, an armada of ships and aeroplanes and already costing more than a billion dollars, is presumably the most comprehensive ever staged.

In this context, the response by US President Barack Obama, and several of his close political appointees, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, has been perplexing and counterproductive. At this time, the emphasis should be on stopping the leak and then to clean up and compensate those who have suffered directly as a consequence. Following that, there will presumably be a long process of determining why the accident, in which 11 oil workers died, happened and to what degree BP and the other companies involved (including US companies Transocean, which owns the rig that exploded, and Halliburton, which carried out some of the safety work on the rig) have been guilty of negligence and the like.

There is, however, no need or justification for the increasingly hostile - some would say, and arguably with good reason, xenophobic and anti-British - rhetoric that has emanated from the White House as domestic political pressures to 'deal with' the disaster mount in the US. President Obama's hostility makes little sense, and indeed his actions have been un-statesmanlike in some instances. Just because people want a scapegoat, there is no need for the President to comply in this regard. Rather than kicking BP, it would make sense to do everything possible to help the company deal with the crisis. BP owes those affected a huge amount to, in beleaguered CEO Tony Hayward's words, 'make this right'. And the company knows this full well, as its actions so far make quite clear. But the White House is not entitled to a 'blank cheque' or for this disaster or to simply dictate to a private company how it uses its resources, not merely to respond to the disaster at hand but beyond that to what it pays its shareholders and the like.

A recent FT Editorial notes:

While Mr Obama has every right to ask BP for a large cheque, he is not entitled to a blank one. Moreover, Mr Salazar’s idea [to make BP financially responsible for laid-off oil rig workers due to a US government moratorium on offshore drilling] contains more than a whiff of discrimination, especially when combined with the stress that has already been placed on BP’s Britishness. Picking on foreigners is an odd road for the US to travel down. The US is by far the largest holder of foreign corporate assets in the world.

While some of the ranters and ravers (there is, indeed, a lot of that going on too) in media and the public may be excited about the notion of BP going bust - some like to speak about a 'corporate death penalty' - this will do nothing to help those affected by the oil spill, the thousands of workers employed by BP in the US, the economies of both the USA and UK which benefit from BP and so on. And ruining BP will do nothing to mitigate our collective dependence on oil and persistent pressures to engage in ever more complex and thus risky drilling to get oil to market at acceptable costs.

And for those who see the disaster as an opportunity to 'bash Britain', a bit of historical context is warranted. Christopher Caldwell writes in the FT:

Governments can address such disasters without recourse to all-out witch-hunts or constitutional abuses. In 1988, of course, the Piper Alpha platform, operated by Occidental Petroleum, a US company, exploded in British waters due to poor safety precautions, killing 167 people. It was the most deadly oil disaster ever. History leaves us no record of Margaret Thatcher urging her public to distrust American accents or to ignore the British constitution in the interest of vengeance against foreign corporations. This incident is virtually unknown to Americans. There has not been a single recounting of it in any US newspaper since the Gulf explosion.

It is in this context well worth keeping in mind that the Gulf disaster did not only involve BP, a company that has not been 'British Petroleum' since its merger with the American oil giant Amoco in 1998, but also American companies (as noted above and below). And there are questions arising about the degree to which the White House response is actually damaging transatlantic relations (this at a time when the current President is considered the 'least pro-Atlanticist' President since World War II). Fraser Nelson writes in The Spectator:

BP is 40% owned by British shareholders and 39 percent owned by American ones: its board has six Americans and six Brits. This disaster happened on an American-owned, Korean-built rig leased by BP’s American subsidiary. But to listen to Obama, it is as if a few blokes from Stoke-on-Trent sailed over, and drilled a wildcat well – then buggered off and left Uncle Sam to suffer all the damage.

Transocean, the owner of the destroyed Deepwater Horizon rig, relocated for tax reasons first to the Cayman Islands and then to Switzerland. But blaming the Swiss would not quite have the same political effect in America. Halliburton, the controversial Texan firm once chaired by Cheney, had a hand in the ‘cementing’ processes that failed to protect the rig against explosion.

In the end, exasperation is expressed in the other direction as well. Matthew Lynn writes for Bloomberg, suggesting that BP should tell the Americans to ‘take a hike’ (not very likely though!).

One hopes that sensible minds will prevail all round, and that the leaking oil well will be stopped sooner rather than later. For anyone who has known and appreciated the Gulf region, this really is a tragedy.

Gold diggers

2010-06-15T01:19:00.001+01:00

Gold mining in South Africa (I have been down there - it is wet and hot!)

Several mining media outlets note a recent report by Citigroup which estimates which countries have the greatest mineral wealth in terms of existing reserves. And the Daily Telegraph reports with a picture gallery here.

The list of countries with the most wealth in their ground is as follows (figures are total worth of estimated mineral reserves in US dollars):

1. South Africa 2,500 billion
2. Russia 794 billion
3. Australia 737 billion
4. Ukraine 510 billion
5. Guinea 222 billion
6. India 200+ billion
6. Kazakhstan 200+ billion

(But where is Botswana, which still has very substantial diamond deposits?)

Importantly, the mines in these countries have an average life expectancy of 100+ years at current rates of exploitation according to Miningmx. But it must be difficult to compare and predict future rates of exploitaiton, never mind profitability, across countries with vastly different mineral profiles, like plantinum-rich South Africa and iron-rich Russia and Ukraine.

Perhaps the most interesting item in this story is that China does not appear among the countries with the greatest mineral wealth, and - crucially - that the average life span of Chinese mines is only 17 years. Expect China's aggressive and rapidly expanding acquisitions of mineral and other natural resources across the world, as in the 'New Scramble for Africa', to continue.

del.icio.us tags: gold platinum mining minerals Scramble for Africa

Burke In Our Time

2010-06-04T23:25:00.001+01:00

Edmund Burke

Long evening walks along Ballyholme Bay are even more enjoyable in early summer when sunset does not come until well after 10pm. Tonight's walk allowed me time to catch up on yet another episode of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on BBC's Radio 4.

In this recent episode Karen O'Brien (University of Warwick), Richard Bourke (Queen Mary) and John Keane (University of Sydney) discussed Edmund Burke, the eighteenth century Anglo-Irish statesman and conservative political thinker most famous for his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Link to Edmund Burke on In Our Time (iPlayer).

Living in these islands, there is much to find fascinating about Burke and the causes to which he lent his efforts: the Irish question, the American colonies and India, and later of course the French revolution. Issues to do with empire, the balance of order and freedom, the role of Monarchy and an established Church, and so on.

For me, having arrived at the study of what I call an 'Anglophone' tradition of conservative thinking via the empirical study of politics in the formerly colonised world, I am increasingly convinced that if scholars working within Western intellectual paradigms wish to better understand the drivers of, and potential dangers inherent in, large-scale political changes underpinned by ideological fervour - such as those that have characterised the modern era from the French to the Russian revolutions and including decolonisation - then the best intellectual tool we have for doing so is that Anglophone tradition, broadly defined, of conservatism which owes much of its existence to the thinking and writings of Burke.

On a different level, there is to me something particularly intriguing about Burke the man as well: of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland yet with close familial ties to Catholic Ireland, a man disparaged as an Irish 'adventurer' in London where he came to embark on a remarkable political career (as a Whig and not a Tory). An accomplished politician, thinker and writer, he counted contemporary intellectual giants like Samuel Johnson, David Hume and Adam Smith among friends, acquaintances and equals.

Like Cicero before him, Burke was the archetypal Homo Novus (new, or self-made, man) of his time.

del.icio.us tags: Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France conservative conservatism Whig Tory empire colonialism Protestant Ascendancy Cicero homo novus Samuel Johnson David Hume Adam Smith In Our Time Melvyn Bragg Karen O'Brien Richard Bourke John Keane

A new era in the UK

2010-05-11T22:11:00.001+01:00

David Cameron and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace

Today the United Kingdom has a new Prime Minister and a new Conservative government. David Cameron is Queen Elizabeth II's twelfth prime minister and the youngest for nearly two-hundred years.

At 43 Cameron is the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. He is also a direct descendant of King William IV.

The era of 'New Labour', which began with Tony Blair's landslide victory in 1997 has come to an end with Gordon Brown's resignation earlier today. However, while the Conservative Party won the election they did not gain an absolute majority of seats in Parliament.

Thus the new government needs the support of the Liberal Democrats, with whom they are now entering into a full coalition (a deal that as I write actually remains to be approved). Details of compromises on policy, and how many and which Cabinet posts will go to Liberal Democrats remain to be confirmed. But it is clear that George Osborne will be the new Chancellor of the Exchequer and William Hague will be the new Foreign Secretary (both strong Conservative Party profiles). It is Britain's first coalition government since World War II. Moreover, history suggests that British coalition governments do not last long, as they are not part of the political culture of Westminster, and therefore there is no guarantee that the new government will last a full term.

David and Samantha Cameron outside No 10 Downing Street

As noted above, this marks the first change of government in the UK since 1997 (and only the second since 1979 when Margaret Thatcher won power for the Conservatives). That year, I did not pay too much attention as the old Conservative Party led by John Major was swept from power by Tony Blair's New Labour. At that time, my wife and I were newly married and lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where we both studied for our Master's degrees. This time around we live and raise a family in the UK, and so a big shift in the political landscape here is something we follow with a much greater degree of interest and, as immigrants, are also a part of.

del.icio.us tags: David Cameron Conservatives Tory Queen Elizabeth parliament Liberal Democrats coalition government Tony Blair New Labour Gordon Brown George Osborne William Hague Margaret Thatcher Westminster William IV Lord Liverpool Downing Street Buckingham Palace

Post-election coalition chatter

2010-05-08T23:15:00.002+01:00

Party leaders at VE Day commemorations

'It would be politically toxic for us to enter a coalition [with Labour], and possibly fatal.' - Liberal Democrat 'insider' in the Financial Times

'This is the chance to achieve Margaret Thatcher’s ultimate ambition of two competing non-socialist parties of government.' - Guido Fawkes' Blog

'Dave had to fight a widely despised Prime Minister leading a Government incompetent and destructive on a scale unseen in living memory. Seldom has there been a softer target; but seldom has one been missed so unnecessarily.' - Simon Hefffer in the Daily Telegraph

'A new centre Right grouping (New Conservatives?) would probably find it easier to win under any system than the old Conservatives did on Thursday night.' - Michael Portillo in the Daily Telegraph

'Imagine how even the most leftwing Liberal Democrats feel about endorsing the party of Charlie Whelan, Damian McBride and Ed Balls.' - Nick Cohen in the Guardian

del.icio.us tags: David Cameron Nick Clegg Conservatives Tory Liberal Democrats Labour Gordon Brown coalition confidence and supply Heffer Portillo Guido Fawkes Nick Cohen

What now?

2010-05-07T11:28:00.000+01:00

No 10 Downing Street

So the UK election of 6 May 2010 has produced a 'hung parliament', the first one since 1974 (BBC live election coverage). The Conservative Party (Tory party) looks set to claim about 310 seats of 650, which makes them the biggest party in parliament and with the largest percentage vote, but short of an overall majority.

Notably, the Tory 'victory' comes with a substantial swing across the country from Labour to Tory votes. There is a lot of information buzzing across the web and other media at the moment, but it is suggested that the swing towards the Tories and away from Labour is larger than the swing to Labour in its 1997 landslide victory that brought Tony Blair and 'New Labour' to power.

Perhaps more importantly than who has won this election is who has lost. Gaining perhaps 260 seats, Labour has made a dreadful showing at the polls and have perhaps seen their largest loss of seats in about 80 years. The current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, not elected in the first place (he replaced Blair by internal party contest in 2007 and did not follow up on that by calling a general election to get his own mandate), has been comprehensively rejected. Moreover, the Liberal Democrat 'bubble' which saw the party's support skyrocket after the first televised party leaders' debate seems has been pricked. The LibDems have actually lost seats compared to the 2005 election and seem set for only a few more than fifty.

(This is all written off the cuff, so some of the numbers and figures above may in the end be adjusted, although they should give a fairly clear picture of the outcome.)

Early this morning, markets turned on the pound, UK gilts and shares as an indication of their unease with the prospect of a hung parliament, and even more so any prospect of a Labour - LibDem coalition which would see the Tories kept out of government and Gordon Brown and Labour, despite a very poor showing, remaining at the head of a new government. (Some stuff from City A.M. here.)

It is of course possible that Labour, in a coalition with the LibDems, could form a government as together they would command a few more seats than the Tories, but as this would be seen as a 'coalition of the defeated' (to use Michael Gove's phrase) it would run a huge risk of seriously punishing each of the two parties in the next election. And with such a coalition, holding a very dubious mandate, that next election could come very soon.

So the LibDems in particular will likely be loath to enter into any such agreement with Labour, especially as they recognise a very disappointing showing at the polls hasn't exactly given them a strong position from which to make their demands. And indeed, just moments ago the LibDem leader Nick Clegg has indicated that the party which has won the most votes and most seats has the right to form a govenment. That seems to be an invitation for talks with the Tories and not Labour. On the prospects of a Conservative-LibDem coalition, or a Conservative minority government with support from among others Northern Ireland unionists, markets seemed to calm down and the pound pick up some earlier losses.

Much is still in play, and the weekend may well pass before we know what the UK's next government will look like. My pre-election prediction of the Tories gaining 'around 300' seats and then forming a minority government is still a possible outcome, with likely a Conservative-LibDem coalition government a second likely outcome.

In either case, Brown would have to hand the keys to No 10 Downing Street over to David Cameron.

The big winner of the election may have been the Monster Raving Loony candidate in Cameron's Witney constituency. Alan Hope, aka Howling 'Laud' Hope, (150 votes) got to shake hands at the count with David Cameron (33,000 votes), likely the country's next Prime Minister (here).

David Cameron and Alan Hope

Whatever the outcome, the next government will have a bit of an economic crisis to deal with. As the Chinese say (and not with relish), exciting times ahead...

del.icio.us tags: Cameron Conservatives Tory Clegg Liberal Democrats LibDem Brown Labour coalition hung parliament Witney Alan Hope Monster Raving Loony No 10 Downing Street FPTP

Obama's war on terror

2010-05-05T16:53:00.001+01:00

Swedish liberal media reports (Swedish-language link) that the Obama administration seems more 'obsessed' with the 'war on terror' than did the Bush administration, and that it in one year has ordered more 'targeted killings' by military drones than did the Bush administration in its entire 8 years in office. It is suggested that 'execution by drone' has become a 'corner stone' of the Obama administration's fight against terrorism as it supposedly avoids the 'politically difficult' issues of trials and housing suspected terrorists in camps like Guantanamo.

According to the report, the Obama administration's Security Council (so 'in practice, Obama himself') gave the CIA orders to kill a US citizen last week, 'likely' the first time that has happened. The administration's lawyers are also attempting to shift the legal ground for 'targeted killings' - something which, strictly speaking, is unconstitutional - which would in the end mean that 'the White House will be able to order killings of its political enemies, in whatever country they reside and whatever nationality they hold, including American'...

Given how prominently the 'war on terror' played in the 2008 campaign and that Obama's promise to close down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp (which has not been done) was seen as a symbolic victory over the hard-line Bush approach to combating terrorism, one wonders how this will play with Obama supporters in the US and abroad.

(It is worth pointing out that the Swedish newspaper reporting this story, Dagens Nyheter, is generally considered Sweden's main, and liberal, newspaper of record. It is one the whole quite 'pro-American' and 'pro-Democrat' with presumably the overwhelming part of its readership having more in common politically with American Democrats and Obama-supporters than with Bush-supporters and Republicans.)

del.icio.us tags: Obama Bush war on terror terrorism unconstitutional Guantanamo targeted killings drone

Regal

2010-04-28T11:29:00.003+01:00

Portrait of HM Queen Elizabeth II, 2010 (oil on canvas)

A new portrait of Queen Elizabeth II has been unveiled in London (here). It is painted by Britain's youngest Royal Painter, Rupert Alexander ( age 35). The Daily Telegraph's Judith Woods describes it as a 'memento mori symphony of grey and taupe'.

I find it a fascinating portrait. It is perhaps not what many would consider 'flattering' (one of its merits) but one which certainly catches the eye and captures the mind without any sense of contrivance or aim for controversy. It portrays a commanding, if stern, gaze and presence appropriate for a monarch in the latter years of a very long reign. This a reign during which she has guided the monarchy through what are surely some of its most demanding socio-cultural challenges.

(A Memento mori, or 'Remember you must die', serves to 'remind people of their own mortality and the punishment they will receive if they transgress the rules of their religion'.)

del.icio.us tags: Queen Elizabeth monarchy royal portrait Rupert Alexander oil on canvas, Judith Woods, Memento mori

That spectacle of too much weight for me

2010-04-13T23:26:00.002+01:00

John Donne (1572 - 1631) c. 1595

Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian of The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers fame, has written a by comparison with most media commentary notably balanced opinion piece for the International Herald Tribune on the current child abuse crisis that has shaken the Roman Catholic Church (or at least the part of it which is in the Western world).

In this piece, entitled The Church Adrift, Kennedy references John Donne's poem, Good-Friday, 1613, Riding Westward as a means to frame his argument about a Church in need of rediscovering its bearings:

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes ?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us ? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our soul's, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg'd and torn ?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,
Who was God's partner here, and furnish'd thus
Half of that sacrifice which ransom'd us ?
Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They're present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them ; and Thou look'st towards me,
O Saviour, as Thou hang'st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.
O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rust, and my deformity ;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I'll turn my face.

del.icio.us tags: Paul Kennedy Rise and Fall of The Great Powers John Donne Good Friday 1613 Riding Westward Roman Catholic Church Vatican Pope child abuse paedophilia sin

Nature's poetry

2010-03-29T12:35:00.000+01:00

Anonymous poem (7th - 13th Century)

Bees and beetles, music-makers;
   Croon and strum;
Geese pass over, duck in autumn;
   Dark streams hum.

Angry wren, officious linnet
   And black-cap,
All industrious, and the woodpecker's
   Sturdy tap.

From the sea gulls and herons
   Flutter in,
While in upland heather rises
   The grey hen.

In the year's most brilliant weather
   Heifers low
Through green fields, not driven nor beaten,
   Tranquil, slow.

In wreathed boughs the wind is whispering,
   Skies are blue,
Swans call, river water falling
   Is calling too.

(Translated from Irish by Frank O'Connor in The Penguin Book of Irish Verse)

del.icio.us tags: Irish Frank O'Connor poetry Gaeilge

Repealing health care? 'Make my day'

2010-03-23T21:57:00.000Z

Ten immediate benefits (to 'come online within six months') of the controversial US Health Care Bill which President Obama has signed into law today have been listed on Crooks and Liars. These benefits are as follows:

1. Adult children may remain as dependents on their parents’ policy until their 27th birthday
2. Children under age 19 may not be excluded for pre-existing conditions
3. No more lifetime or annual caps on coverage
4. Free preventative care for all
5. Adults with pre-existing conditions may buy into a national high-risk pool until the exchanges come online. While these will not be cheap, they’re still better than total exclusion and get some benefit from a wider pool of insureds.
6. Small businesses will be entitled to a tax credit for 2009 and 2010, which could be as much as 50% of what they pay for employees’ health insurance.
7. The “donut hole” closes for Medicare patients, making prescription medications more affordable for seniors.
8. Requirement that all insurers must post their balance sheets on the Internet and fully disclose administrative costs, executive compensation packages, and benefit payments.
9. Authorizes early funding of community health centers in all 50 states (Bernie Sanders’ amendment). Community health centers provide primary, dental and vision services to people in the community, based on a sliding scale for payment according to ability to pay.
10. AND no more rescissions. Effective immediately, you can't lose your insurance because you get sick.

Several leading Republicans have promised to turn the November midterm elections into a referendum on the Democrat's health care bill. They will campaign to repeal (Dick Armey) this 'monstrosity' (Jim DeMint). 'This will not stand' (Newt Gingrich).

Really? Having lost this monumental political fight over health care reform, Republicans will somehow snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by running a campaign that promises to roll back coverage? To deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions? To remove children from parents' policies?

'Let's have that fight' said Democratic strategist David Axelrod. 'Make my day'.

del.icio.us tags: Obama ObamaCare health care repeal Newt Gingrich Jim DeMint Dick Armey GOP Republican Democrat David Axelrod make my day rescission donut hole Medicare preventative care pre-existing conditions Bernie Sanders

The banality of hate

2010-03-21T18:19:00.003Z

Goose stepping

Out for my evening walk the other night, I listened to an interesting documentary via Swedish Public Radio's podcast service. The programme, entitled, Patriot i frack (Patriot in tails), tells the story of Patrik Brinkmann, a wealthy Swedish businessman, now resident in Germany, who is casting around for suitably xenopobic and anti-Muslim parties on the populist and nationalist fringes to support in European party politics. Brinkmann has announced his willingness to supply up to 5 million euro in support of such parties becoming established locally or in the European Parliament. According the programme, the aim is to foment a more hard-line pan-European politics to defend the continent, its culture and peoples, from 'external threats' (now also in Europe's midst).

In one of his early attempts at linking up with hard-line nationalists, Brinkmann announced support for Germany's National Democratic Party (NPD), which its opponents classify as a neo-Nazi party and thus the successor of Hitler's Nazi Party (Nazism is illegal in Germany, so any such linkages and sympathies must of course be kept under the government's radar). However, Brinkmann's pact with the NPD came to an abrupt and rather pathetic end at a recent NPD party congress where two factions apparently fell out over how to relate to Jews and the Holocaust, and to Muslims and Iran.

One faction, seemingly the 'traditionalists' in the NPD, preferred to continue denying the Holocaust and to focus on Jews as a major threat to the European 'white race' while also professing support for Ahmadinejad's regime in Iran. They were particularly incensed about a newly published book, sponsored by Brinkmann, which suggested that the Holocaust did indeed result in the murder of about six million Jews and that the 'new threat' to Europe comes instead from Islam and Muslim immigrants.

Representatives of this faction accused one of the party's functionaries, who apparently supported Brinkmann's line of insisting on 'renewal' of the party' (i.e., to cease the Jew-baiting), of being a Jewish infiltrator. That this functionary's middle name was Jacob was particularly suspicious!

The NPD's 'modernisers', whom Brinkmann was eager to see take control of the party and its future direction, argued that the animosity against Jews and Judaism should be abandoned and that the party in order to 'attract middle class voters' should instead begin focusing on Islam and Muslims as the new danger to Europe. In other words, a different target group would make political and electoral sense. As the programme told the story, the 'modernisers' failed to convince the rank and file of the benefits of setting its sights on a new Enemy and Brinkmann, rather disappointed, dropped the project.

One is struck by the sheer banality of the cynisism involved in this new, slightly re-packaged, politics of hate. Whom to hate is no longer to do with deeply held convictions about racial supremacy, religious dogma, cultural purity or the like. (These were, of course, all concepts fundamentally distorted and corrupted by lies and deceit but nevertheless a matter of 'principle' for the old time haters!) It is now merely (?) about electoral politics. The argument seems to be that if it is possible to gain more from attacking and slandering one minority people more so than another, then let's just switch strategy, get on with the job and gain some votes...

Presumably this politics will remain on the far fringes and in the dark corners where it has re-emerged.

del.icio.us tags: Sveriges radio dokumentär Patrik Brinkmann NPD Pro NRW nazi holocaust Jew Muslim Islam fascism nationalism xenophobia racism Ahmadinejad Patriot i frack banality of evil

Keats and poetry on film

2010-03-12T10:57:00.000Z

Portrait by William Hilton

I watched, and rather enjoyed, Jane Campion's sentimental and weepy Bright Star about the brief and tragic life of the early nineteenth-century romantic poet John Keats. The film stars Ben Whishaw as Keats, Abbie Cornish as his beloved Fannie Brawne and Paul Schneider as a most amusing Charles Armitage Brown (find a review of the film here).

It is not an easy task to portray the life of a man of letters and/or poetry on the film screen, but I suppose movies like this one do a good job at convincing at least some youngsters of the value and beauty of the written word. This is a feat that should not be ignored in a popular culture that, certainly when it comes to the film and tv screens, has little time for such subtler pleasures.

BRIGHT STAR, WOULD I WERE STEDFAST

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

John Keats, 1819

del.icio.us tags: Keats Bright Star Jane Campion Ben Whishaw Abbie Cornish Paul Schneider romantic poet consumption words poems love Fannie Brawne Charles Armitage Brown

A poet's rest: Christ Church and MacNeice

2010-03-03T20:18:00.000Z

Christ Church and the MacNeice grave

It is easy to become somewhat blasé about the cultural riches that literally surrounds one on this island. For years I've meant to seek out Christ Church, the old (and now vacant?) parish church of Carrowdore in the Diocese of Down & Dromore. At the top of a long, narrow and tree-lined country lane, Christ Church is located on the Ards Peninsula only a couple of minute's drive from the Irish Sea and perhaps a twenty-minute drive from my own home.

Today I finally made it to what is probably most famous as the final resting place of the Northern Irish poet, Louis MacNeice. The inscription on the stone marking MacNeice's and his mother's grave reads:

This man with the shy smile has left behind something that was intact.

Find additional photos from my early morning visit, on a grey and overcast Wednesday morning here.

Christ Church is but one of the many (and especially rural) Church of Ireland parish churches I hope to visit during my time in Ireland.

One of MacNeice's most famous poem is Carrickfergus (the old Norman fortress town on the other side of Belfast Lough):

I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn-milled called its funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the Lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.

The Norman walled this town against the country
To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
The List of Christ on the cross, in the angle of the nave.

I was the rector's son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long.

I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines
And the soldiers with their guns.

And here's me some years ago, staring down the barrel of a cannon at Carrickfergus Castle with Belfast Lough and the North Down shore line in the background:

The Louis MacNeice Centenary Conference and Celebration was held at Queen's University Belfast in 2007.

del.icio.us tags: Christ Church Carrowdore Ards Church of Ireland parish church MacNeice poetry Carrickfergus Queen's University Belfast

Gates of Hell at Oxford

2010-02-21T15:10:00.003Z

Auguste Rodin's The Gates Of Hell

I blogged last month on 'The Good Old Days' and the gulf between those days and the 'higher education experience' in more recent times, characterised by mass education and democratisation of institutions (i.e., my own experience of higher education).

To Paul Johnson's Spectator review of Brockliss' history of Magdalen College, Lord Baker has added the following reminiscence of the Oxford Dons of times past (here):

######

Sir: Paul Johnson’s piece in The Spectator about Magdalen College of 50 years ago (‘When dons were still happy to be egregious’, 16 January) is a reminder of what a remarkable collection of dons were then there.

‘Tom Brown’ — actually C.E. Stevens — was on my staircase. He sported his oak for his tutorials and when the door was open wafts of port or madeira would float out. He was said on one occasion to have started his lecture on Roman history by asking all the young ladies in his audience to cross their legs and, once they had done that, began, ‘Now that the gates of Hell are closed, I can commence.’

I was lucky enough to have A.J.P. Taylor as a tutor. ‘Why do you hold your lectures in the hall at 9 a.m. in the morning?’ ‘Because if I were to start at 11 a.m., there is no hall large enough in Oxford to hold the audience.’

A.J.P.’s life was full of jealousies: at that time it was Hugh Trevor Roper who had just been appointed the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford — ‘a waspish old maid’. Then, of course, there was the great medievalist Bruce MacFarlane, stroking a Siamese cat on his lap as he drew your attention to another manorial roll.

Those were the days.

Lord Baker
London SW1

#####

del.icio.us tags: Magdalen College Oxford education Paul Johnson Brockliss Kenneth Baker Hugh Trevor Roper A.J.P. Taylor Bruce MacFarlane C. E. Stevens

Lawson, climate change and big money

2010-02-16T21:03:00.009Z

The debate about climate change, and - most importantly - what to do about it has become so charged that one feels loath to engage with it. Nevertheless, it is bound to impact us, economically as well as environmentally, wherever we live and whatever our life circumstances.

Neglecting climate change that may turn into environmental disaster will most directly harm those already least able to cope around the world. Misguided interventions, perhaps based on poor science, will end up costing those in developing countries dearly in economic terms, with the benefits of such costs uncertain.

In what has become an all too emotive debate, Lord Lawson (formerly Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer) hits the nail on the head in terms of what is at stake when pondering what to do about climate change (here). I would agree with Lawson that the key questions, and they are not easy to answer, are as follows:

If we are to embark on a programme of rapid and drastic decarbonisation, how much will that cost, not only in economic terms but in human terms, too, through the diversion of resources that might otherwise be used for economic development, the relief of poverty, the eradication of disease, and so on? And since decarbonisation makes sense only on a global basis, is a binding global agreement a practical proposition?

In other words, do we prioritise concrete action such as preventing deforsetation, cleaning up polluting factories and so on, or do we put our efforts into attempts at preventing temperatures that may rise and which may have dangerous consequences. After all, there are limits to how much economic and political capital can be expended on this particular problem - one of many we are facing in the present world. (This position is perhaps similar to that of the well-known and 'controversial' climate activist Björn Lomborg? Lomborg, it should be noted, is a political scientist and not a climate scientist, but hardly the only influential non-scientist who is intervening in and exercising influence on these issues on either side of the argument.)

What is also at stake here is not only a need to determine the nature and degree of the climate threat but also to get a better understanding of why particular responses to it are advocated and become dominant in official debates. As always, following the 'money trail' is one helpful way to proceed. And in this case it is not only the 'climate skeptics' (a decent term to use, as opposed to the shameful slur 'climate deniers' with all its ugly connotations) who are backed by financial incentives:

[T]he really big money is overwhelmingly financing organisations on the other side of the debate. The two principal sources are the UK government, anxious to foster support for an increasingly unpopular decarbonisation policy, and the banking sector, where carbon trading is now a multibillion-pound business, which would disappear altogether if decarbonisation policies were to be abandoned.

In any case:

The simplistic assumption that, if man-made warming occurs, present policies must be right and must not be challenged, and if they are challenged it is only by wicked oil companies, will not do.

del.icio.us tags: Nigel Lawson Bjorn Lomborg climate change global warming climategate IPCC Global Warming Policy Foundation development environment decarbonisation carbon trading

Burke against the Philosopher kings

2010-02-10T23:38:00.008Z

Burke's statue outside Trinity College Dublin, captured by me

Looking for a good illustration of Edmund Burke's preference for practice over theory, a crucial aspect of his brand of Anglo-Saxon Conservatism, I found the following comments on the danger of the intellectual in Michael Freeman's Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism (pp. 74-6):

The love of paradox is a common characteristic of intellectuals, who are attracted to novelty and bored by the familiar... The tendency to paradox is a psychological quality of intellectuals. But it is not only the psyche, but the social location of intellectuals which, in Burkes view, gives them their distinctive political character. Intellectuals are spinners of theories about the world, but their experience of the world is narrow. At this point Burke conjoins an epistemological, a moral and a sociological argument. Epistemologically, political wisdom requires long and varied practical experience: the most refined speculation is no substitute for this. Moral questions are not abstract but concrete and complex: they require a knowledge of the multifarious circumstances of social life. Sociologically, the intellectual is cut off from the requisite variety of experience. The intellectual in politics is a clever fool - and a dangerous one.

Moreover:

Because intellectuals delight in the search for fundamental principles, they tend to find solutions too big for the problem. Because they judge society by such principles, they are liable to find it fundamentally defective. Radicalism is inherent in theory.

And, to add further cause for concern:

Theory is also related to arrogance. Theoriests aspire to profound truths so that, if they are not restrained by fear of God or men, they are apt to overrate their own importance. The abstraction of theory adds to this arrogance a lack of humanity. [In Burke's own words:] 'Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician.... It is like that of the principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil'.

One may argue that in the present day, when the academy in which the intellectual primarily functions has to a large extent become democratised, the intellectual is less cut off from the sort of social and practical experience valued by Burke than was the case in his time. Nevertheless, anyone advocating the rule of Philosopher kings ought to keep in mind Burke's reservations (even if 'defecated evil' seems a bit harsh).

del.icio.us tags: Edmund Burke Michael Freeman radicalism revolution conservatism theory intellectuals epistemology morality morals paradox Philosopher king Plato philosophy

Immigrants as political footballs

2010-02-10T10:11:00.005Z

Jamaicans arriving in London on the MV Empire Windrush in 1948

A most curious set of articles in today's Daily Telegraph (here, here and here) on the Labour Government's plans during the last decade to massively increase immigration to the UK in order to achieve not only the country's 'economic needs' but also the government's 'social objectives'.

That the government has viewed immmigration not only as an economic means but as an (social) ends in itself is presumably no great surprise. Nevertheless, the information released via the Freedom of Information Act is revealing. Part of the government's goal has apparently been to boost 'multiculturalism'. This seems to suggest that somehow British culture was deficient prior to the advent of mass immigration and multiculturalism? One wonders whether that is an argument that the Labour leadership will today take to the doorstep of their supporters in the upcoming election campaign. In fact, the government has changed its tune in recent times, with the Prime Minister going so far as to openly call for 'British jobs for British workers'.

Playing political football with immigrants is no good. Those of us who have immigrated to the UK would like to think that we have been welcomed for what we can contribute with our skills, and not for reasons of contributing to the 'social objectives' of any particular government. These objectives presumably also include winning elections, considering that the very large majority of immigrants just happen to be voting Labour...

There should be no 'hidden' reasons for why immigration is increased or decreased. Hiding intentions about why immigration is promoted will in the end only give fuel to those groups that wish to target immigrants themselves for having taken the opportunities made available to them. This is undoubtedly a special danger for those immigrants who are not white and/or come from outside Western Europe.

technorati tags: immigration, Windrush, multiculturalism, Gordon Brown, British jobs for British workers, xenophobia, Labour, election, Migrationwatch

Africa's Development Impasse

2010-02-06T23:27:00.006Z

I have written briefly about my new book, Africa's Development Impasse: Rethinking the Political Economy of Transformation, on the publisher's blog.

Find more information about the book, which is published next week by Zed Books (London and New York), here.

'A bold and imaginative reflection, in the context of southern Africa, on what the post-development injunction to seek alternatives to development can actually mean. This book contains the most sensitive and nuanced treatment of post-development thinking I have read. I highly recommend this volume not just to Africanists, but to all those who, with an open mind, are willing to reconsider just what the ‘development’ enterprise is and might be.' - Richard Sandbrook, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto

technorati tags: Stefan Andreasson, Africa's Development Impasse, Zed Books, Africa, Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, development, political economy, post-development, transformation

Britons & Europeans, Hebrews & Greeks

2010-02-05T13:31:00.006Z

Laurence Olivier in Henry V (1944)

Margaret Thatcher famously said that, 'during my lifetime most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or other, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it'.

A similar sentiment is expressed on today's Times Letters page:

Sir, Lord Sacks (Opinion, Feb 3) and the Prince of Wales (report, Feb 4) are really saying the same thing: the continental Enlightenment belief that you can impose a political theory contrasts with the Anglo-Saxon pragmatic approach that there are no ready-made answers, and all you can do is deal with abuses as they arise. Their approach stems ultimately from Ancient Greece, ours from the Hebrew Bible.

Theory and idealism produced the horrors of Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong, and in a much milder way the idiocies of modern political correctness.

I suggest that, for all its snobberies, inequalities and injustices, the history of Britain during the past three centuries, together with the United States, has been immeasurably happier than that of continental Europe.

John Burrows
Ipswich

As always, the relationship between Britain and continental Europe, and in particular Britain's role in an increasingly integrated European Union, remains a generally elusive, sometimes conflictual and often difficult one.

technorati tags: Margaret Thatcher, Britain, Europe, EU, Ancient Greece, Hebrew, Bible, conservatism, totalitarianism, ideology, theory, John Burrows

Widdecombe and the Ten Commandments

2010-02-03T20:21:00.005Z

The Ten Commandments (1956)

Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe has recently presented her take on Moses and The Law, part of Channel 4's The Bible: A History. Her argument, essentially, is that if modern Britain followed the strictures of the Ten Commandments Britons would have a far better society than the present one.

Interviewed by the Daily Telegraph's Benji Wilson (here), Widdecombe put forth the following argument, which made me take note:

When [Wilson suggests] that a society following the Ten Commandments would have to hold that all other religions are wrong [Widdecombe replies]: “Of course it implies they’re wrong. If all religions were equally right you wouldn’t make any choice between them at all.”

She emphasises Britain is “a Christian country. There is one established church here. The law does follow that.”

Doesn’t that encourage religious intolerance? “No it doesn’t. I think they [other religions] are wrong. If you tell me you’re a socialist, I will think you wrong. That doesn’t mean I will prohibit you from proclaiming your socialism. But I will still say you are wrong. And that’s what we’ve lost – we’ve lost the capacity to say, ‘you’re wrong’. I can’t say somebody’s wrong without being intolerant? Oh yes I can.”

She sounds like a moral absolutist, then. “That’s your phraseology, not mine. I obey the commandments. I’ll rephrase that. I try to obey the commandments.”

Nevermind whether it makes sense to describe an increasingly secular and multicultural Britain as a 'Christian country' (I think it does, for several reasons). Nevermind whether it is possible to make the argument that one religion is right and other is wrong, and by what means one could properly come to that conclusion. Nevermind whether politicians should concern themselves with such matters.

What is interesting is that Widdecombe makes what should be a perfectly non-controversial assertion. She is simply stating what she thinks is right and wrong (and, consequently, what should be the foundaton for our governance, law and so on). But her argument will of course not be deeemed non-controversial. Given the relativistic bent of our present age, it is deemed not a little 'inappropriate' to make arguments that are based on a rejection of relativism - especially, it seems, when it comes to matters of religion and culture.

Be that as it may. It is nevertheless refreshing to see politicians speak their mind and state clearly what they believe to be right and wrong.

(Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams will present a future episode of the series, on Jesus.)

technorati tags: Ann Widdecombe, Conservative, Tory, Ten Commandments, Bible, Moses, law, Benji Wilson, relativism, socialism, Christianity, morality, Britain, Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein, Jesus

Senior affair

2010-01-25T23:58:00.006Z

The London Review of Books may be losing money, but luckily it has a wealthy benefactor as the Sunday Times reports. Because where else can you find personal ads like these:

“On 1 January my husband informed me that he will be spending each Wednesday with his mistress. Impossibility of disentangling our library means separation is not an option. Writer with senior railcard, still beautiful, seeks diversions.”

A magazine for the literati, no doubt.

technorati tags: London Review of Books, LRB, Mary-Kay Wilmers, personals, literati

Miracle in Haiti

2010-01-21T19:49:00.007Z

Madonna and Child by Tim Ashkar

In these days of heightened antagonism between forces of religion and secularism, and in some Western societies the ever-increasing militancy of the latter (Dawkinsonian atheism a case in point), the issue of miracles specifically features rarely in debates (or, more often, parallel monologues) that are more often concerned with issues of faith versus reason more generally.

Under the rule of reason, miracles seem an anachronism at best or simply an intellectual embarrassment. In this context, consider the news in today's Times about a fifteen-day old baby rescued from the rubble where she had spent a week all alone, without any nourishment (here):

Amid the uncountable horrors of Haiti, a triple "miracle" was hailed yesterday as a 15-day-old baby, an elderly woman and a young woman were dragged alive from the ruins in separate rescues.

The most extraordinary rescue of all was that of tiny Elisabeth Joassaint, who was found alive after spending nearly half her life without food or water in the remains of her home.

A search and rescue team was demolishing the ruined house when they discovered Elisabeth in the same bed where she had been sleeping when the earthquake struck. The bed had fallen to the ground floor, but the baby was not injured.

"It was the mercy of God," said her mother, Michelene Joassaint, 22, as she breastfed her daughter on a makeshift hospital bed next to the heavily damaged city hospital.

I think any parent, having themselves beheld and intensely felt the tender vulnerability of the newborn child, can to some extent relate to how remarkable an event this is. In the context of events like these, the (academic) squabbles about faith versus reason seem insignificant (interesting though they are in and of themselves and in terms of their potential impact on our societies).

I would suggest, humbly and ever so carefully, that miracles do happen. All that is needed is a willingness to open our eyes and see.

technorati tags: Joassaint, miracles, Haiti, earthquake, reason, faith, religion, Dawkins, God

The Good Old Days: Magdalen College

2010-01-19T11:10:00.003Z

Magdalen College, Oxford from the Cherwell

Paul Johnson reminisces in this week's Spectator (here) about his early postwar days at Magdalen College while reviewing Magdalen College, Oxford: A History, edited by L.W.B. Brockliss.

It was, according to Johnson, an age when 'political correctness' had not yet 'settled over the English-speaking world like a dense could of phosgene gas'. Perhaps typical of the Dons of that era was the historian C.E. 'Tom Brown' Stevens:

As a boy, Tom Brown had once beaten pheasants for the Archduke whose murder started the Great War, he had been bought cream buns by the sinister Esterhazy, villain of the Dreyfus Affair, and he had been kissed by Pavlova. He was often drunk but that did not stop him tutoring 40 hours a week, then a record. He told me that, despite the war, Magdalen had over 60,000 bottles of vintage port in its cellars. He was also in charge of the SCR ‘port railway’, and when Annie Fleming, the great hostess, dining there in March 1958 as the guest of A.J.P., bossily (as was her wont) tried to work the railway, and upset the Madeira, Tom Brown stuck his finger up her nose as a punishment. Her husband, ‘Bond’ Fleming, said: ‘Serves you right. Never interfere with male alcohol rituals.’

The book seems an intriguing read, and Johnson's review also features notes on A.J.P. Taylor, C.S. Lewis, A.J. Ayer, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others:

A.J.P [Taylor] was jealous of [C.S.] Lewis, his only rival as a popular lecturer. A.J.P. spoke at the unheard-of hour of 9 a.m., and attracted only men. Lewis lectured at 10 a.m. and lured all the pretty girls from Somerville and LMB as well as Miss Sprule’s Typing Academy (mainly ex-debs). Both filled Magdalen Hall to overflowing, in Lewis’s case the girls reclining at his feet, showing their nylon stocking-tops, and diverting attention from his analysis of Beowulf. He looked like a big, confident farmer watching his prize bull get to work, and I enjoyed our frequent rambles in the college deer park and around Addison’s Walk. He loved teasing Ryle, reputed to be still a virgin, and certainly censorious. When Ryle and I were talking once, leaning on the deer-fence, he spotted the sprightly figure of A.J. Ayer tripping across the New Buildings lawn. He said: ‘There goes Freddie Ayer. Might have been a great philosopher. Ruined by sex.’

'Rich feasts lost', as Johnson would have it, or an age now appropriately buried in the wake of 'progress'?

technorati tags: Magdalen College, Oxford, Brockliss, Paul Johnson, C.E. Stevens, history, C.S. Lewis, Ayer, Wittgenstein, Ryle, A.J.P. Taylor, philosophy, political correctness, universities, education, Archduke Ferdinand, Esterhazy, Pavlova, Dreyfus, Fleming, Bond

Patten on UK universities

2010-01-17T00:30:00.006Z

Saturday's Times carries an interview (here) with the last Governor of Hong Kong and Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Chris Patten, who gets it just right on the challenges facing UK universities and what might be done to meet them.

The sense that it will be increasingly difficult for UK universities to maintain their international reputation will likely require drastic action, and while not all is well 'across the pond', there is much that UK universities can learn from the US university system.

The most pressing difficulty is of course a national economy under great strain from increasing indebtedness and fiscal disorder, which will require significant public spending cuts to be brought under control. Universities cannot expect to be exempt from this process.

However, UK universities may enter the coming era of austerity in a comparatively weak position. According to Patten:

Britain is already in danger of losing its international reputation: “We spend 1.3 per cent of GDP [gross domestic product], America spends 2.9 per cent. We don’t have many world-class institutions or things we do well any more, but higher education is one of the very few areas where we are among the best in the world.”

Among other things, we will need to rething the organisation of the UK system of higher education (and in particular the post-1992 reforms):

The higher education system will, in his view, have to change dramatically to cope with the new financial reality. “We are trying to provide the same universities for everyone as the number of students increase. It’s all about equality of esteem, all universities have to do the same thing. That’s preposterous, insane. At the same time we want to defend our competitive research base — well, we can’t do both. The biggest worry is that we don’t change the sector, we just squeeze everything.”

His solution would be community colleges, state universities and Ivy League-style institutions, like the Americans have. “It would be more like the old polytechnic system. We need to start from the premise that these establishments need to do different things. America has 3,000 institutions granting degrees but only 220 which are serious research universities. In Europe we have 2,000 universities and they all feel entitled to do research. It’s ludicrous.”

In sum, Patten advocates a stratified system of institutions of higher education able to target a range of roles in terms of providing teaching and research; UK universities must be able to compete financially, which means higher fees and a greater ability to tap the private sector for funding; a thriving elite group of universities should not be stifled but strongly encouraged; salaries and employment conditions for (top rate) academic staff must improve.

While Patten does not address the issue specifically in this interview, there would also ideally be a growing range of private universities and other institutions of higher education that can bring some competition to the state-run system of funding and administration of higher education in the UK.

technorati tags: Chris Patten, Oxford, universities, polytechnics, higher education, research, teaching, funding, Ivy League, Tory, Conservative

A common Court

2010-01-16T14:00:00.004Z

Millions of pounds have been spent to transform Middlesex Guildhall into Britain's new Supreme Court. In the spirit of the age, tradition and elegance has given way to functionality and a common sense of style.

Marcus Binney of SAVE Britain's Heritage provides a 'stern judgment' on the new Court in today's Times (here):

A new word is needed in the vocabulary of restoration to describe the transformation of the Edwardian Middlesex Guildhall into Britain’s new Supreme Court. In future the word “supreme” should stand for the total emasculation of a historic building’s character, the gratuitous removal of fine fittings designed and made for it, and, in this case, the neutering of the Guildhall’s robust masculinity in favour of a bland, executive lounge look, with the rejection of shiploads of fine craftsmanship in favour of a select number of token artworks.

Much is made of the new Supreme Court’s symbolism but in fact it is schoolboy stuff, a few slogans and flowers repeated incessantly throughout.

Meanwhile, and this really sums it all up, the handsome marble bust of Edward VII, King and Emperor, which stood nobly opposite the entrance doors, has been banished to the basement café, where it is seen against a background of Costa coffee cups and has had to be cordoned off by the kind of strap barriers used to corral passengers at airport check-ins.

Will the quality of the Court's new architecture be reflected in its quality of justice?

technorati tags: Middlesex Guildhall, Edwardian, Supreme Court, Britain, justice, architecture, Marcus Binney, SAVE Britain's Heritage

Help Haiti

2010-01-14T20:39:00.003Z

Living in one of the world's poorest countries, most Haitians face a daily struggle for meeting their basic needs (let alone most other things those of us in wealthy parts of the world take for granted) at the best of times.

It is difficult to think of a country less able to deal with the consequences of the 7+ magnitude earthquake that struck outside the capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday, 12 January. It is certain that many tens of thousands of people have died, with many, many more suffering and in need of urgent medical treatment, food, water and shelter. (Find news on the disaster here.)

As an international rescue mission gets under way there are things that the rest of us can do, primarily in terms of donating money to organisations able to effectively channel that money to those in need on the ground in Haiti:

UNICEF's Haiti Earthquake Children's Appeal

Save the Children Haiti Earthquake Appeal

Google Support Disaster Relief in Haiti

Christian Aid Haiti earthquake appeal

technorati tags: Haiti, earthquake, disaster, appeal, donate, aid

Public versus private

2010-01-03T17:15:00.007Z

The Sunday Times carries a depressingly familiar story about the state of the UK economy and how the private sector has been consistently squeezed for public sector benefit over the last decade or so (here).

While public sector productivity has decreased (by 3.4% since 1997) and private sector productivity has increased (by 28% since 1997), it is nevertheless the public sector's average pay which has raced ahead. Average public sector pay is now about 7% higher than average private sector pay (and pensions and other benefits are better in the public sector too). And while the recession has caused the private sector to shed almost a million jobs, there has been an additional 300,000 jobs created in the public sector since the beginning of the financial crisis and the subsequent global economic crisis in 2008.

While there is nothing wrong with public sector employment per se, it must surely be the case that no national economy can remain internationally competitive while the productive and wealth-creating private sector is constantly squeezed for the benefit of a steadily growing public sector, where pay is dependent primarily on the wealth created in the private sector.

There seems to me a surprising lack of complaints about this state of affairs among UK academics and public intellectuals. Perhaps it is because we as academics are almost all dependent on the state for our pay and benefits (we desperately need, but do not have, a healthy competition between state-funded universities and a significant range of private universities like in the US and many other countries), as are a majority (?) of public intellectuals who contribute to and shape debates on politics and public finances in this country.

As the 2010 election campaign has all but kicked off with New Year's statements by the Prime Minister (here) and the leader of the Opposition (here), the state of the UK's economy, and how to bring public sector spending and debt back into line, will surely be the major battle ground on which the election will be determined.

technorati tags: public sector, private sector, employment, Brown, Labour, Cameron, Tory, Conservative, election, 2010, economy, budget, fiscal, economic, policy, universities, intellectuals

Full moon and street lamps

2010-01-02T15:22:00.002Z

Full moon and three street lights
Originally uploaded by bstefan.

We captured the full moon, along with the light from three street lamps, on the very last night of 2009.

technorati tags: full moon, street, lamps, new year's eve, night, bangor, down

New Year's Day

2010-01-01T00:46:00.004Z

Winter Blossom by deizi

New Year's Day--
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

-- Kobayashi Issa

technorati tags: Kobayashi Issa, haiku, poetry, New Year, Japan, blossom

Ring in the new year

2009-12-31T18:31:00.003Z

Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. (Ring out, wild bells):

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

A Swedish translation of Tennyson's poem is traditionally read publicly by a notable actor on each New Year's Eve in Stockholm, about which I blogged a few years ago. And here's a Youtube clip of a collection of well-known Swedes reading the poem over the years:

technorati tags: Tennyson, In Memoriam, New Year, Nyårsklockan

Follow the money

2009-12-21T20:22:00.006Z

Zimbabwe's President Mugabe telling the West it's time to pay up.

COP15, the Copenhagen climate change conference, has concluded, producing essentially hot air and a toothless Copenhagen Accord, 'recognised' by delegates and with no legal standing or meaningful implementation and verification mechanisms.

The Accord has been characterised as everything from a holocaust to farcical by developing country spokespersons and environmental organisations.

Whether the failure of Copenhagen constitutes an outrage or a blessing depends on one's view on 'climate change'. The debates about the science underpinning climate change, and what to do about it, are sure to continue unabated. They will take on even more urgency if countries come closer to committing enormous amounts of public money to (a) tackle what is not perceived as a major problem by many to begin (as compared to poverty, lack of economic development and so on), and to (b) commit that money in ways that will likely not generate the desired outcomes to begin with.

In a small contribution to what will be a drawn-out public debate, Bill Frezza of Adams Capital Management has provided a noteworthy argument about the problems with mistaking modelling for science, The Perverse Economics of Climate Modeling. (With biology and engineering degrees from MIT and employment in the finance sector, Frezza presumably knows a thing or two about modelling.)

Frezza points out that:

The nuance of modeling is that while scientists ask the objective question "is this true," engineers ask the subjective question "does this solve my problem"?

...

Scientists living on the public weal get compensated via a mix of government grants and scientific prestige. Their problem they are trying to solve is "How do I get my papers published in the most prestigious journals so I can maximize the size of my next grant?"

Although we are very willing to see potential problems with research produced by corporate grants and sponsors, we seem reluctant to recognise the same conflicts of interest in science produced by grants from government bodies and other public sources (that already seem to have decided what the answers, and responses, ought to be). 'Follow the money' should be of no less interest when the paymaster is environmental departments as opposed to, say, the Halliburtons or Exxons of this world...

technorati tags: COP15, Copenhagen Accord, climate change, global warming, Bill Frezza, science, modelling, academic publishing, public grants, UN, holocaust, farce, environment, Follow the money

Literary invective

2009-12-13T18:25:00.007Z

Ezra Pound at James Joyce's grave in Zurich, 1967

I usually enjoy reading The Irish Times's Saturday column, An Irishman's Diary. This weekend column consists of Frank McNally reviewing Gary Dexter's Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola.

That literary rivalries and critical zeal produces rather sharp literary judgements is nothing new, but in this review three brief volleys of 'invective' jumped out at me:

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
-- Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust

All I can do is wish you every possible success. I will have another go at it, but [...] nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization.
-- Ezra Pound on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (which Joyce had just sent to Pound)

The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.
-- Lord Macaulay on Socrates

technorati tags: Frank McNally, An Irishman's Diary, Gary Dexter, Poisoned Pens, Amis, Zola, Waugh, Proust, Joyce, Finnegan's Wake, Ezra Pound, Macaulay, Socrates, literature, invective

Do you think 'globally'?

2009-11-30T16:42:00.005Z

The world's 'Top Global Thinkers' that 'mattered most' in 2009, according to Foreign Policy (top twenty of one hundred in the full list here):

1. Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman (USA)
2. Barack Obama, President (USA)
3. Zahra Rahnavard, Political Scientist (Iran)
4. Nouriel Roubini, Economist (USA)
5. Rajendra Pachauri, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman (India)
6. Bill & Hillary Clinton, Former President and Secretary of State (USA)
7. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, White House Policy Advisor and Economist (USA)
8. David Petraeus, Central Command Commander (USA)
9. Zhou Xiaochuan, People's Bank of China Governor (China)
10. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, Theologian (Egypt)
11. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Former President (Brazil)
12. Bill Gates, Philanthropist (USA)
13. Dick Cheney, Former Vice President (USA)
14. Larry Summers, Chief White House Economics Advisor (USA)
15. Martin Wolf, Columnist (UK)
16. Mohamed El-Erian, Bond investor (USA)
17. Pope Benedict XVI, Catholic Pope (Vatican City)
18. Richard Dawkins, Sociobiologist (UK)
19. Malcolm Gladwell, Journalist (USA)
20. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Political Leader and CEO (Afghanistan and USA)

A few very quick, off-the-cuff, comments on this list. The majority are Americans and do policy-related stuff. Hillary still can't get separate recognition from her husband. Bill Gates is now recognised primarily as a philanthropist rather than software pioneer. The Pope is followed closely by his scourge. The only European representation in the top twenty is from the Vatican and the UK.

Johannesburg on camera

2009-11-27T19:34:00.004Z

View towards Hillbrow from my old 17th floor flat in Braamfontein

I've for some time been following an excellent blog, providing daily pictures with brief commentary of Johannesburg with surroundings: Johannesburg Daily Photo(s).

Today I find yet another blog about Africa's brashest city, also with plenty of photographic content: Urban Joburg.

Johannesburg will always be the city I will consider my 'home away from home' in Africa, and one to which I hope to return many times.

technorati tags: Johannesburg, Joburg, Jozi, eGoli, Urban Joburg, Johannesburg Daily Photo(s), Braamfontein, Hillbrow

A Bishop's duty

2009-11-27T13:45:00.005Z

As the history of child abuse in Dublin's Catholic Archdiocese is uncovered, a heavy responsibility lies on its leaders to set things right. Pace St Paul:

For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre;

But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate;

Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.

Titus 1:7-9 (King James Version)

technorati tags: Dublin, Archdiocese, Catholic, church, child abuse, Bishop, Titus, St Paul, Bible, New Testament, Gospel, children

Europe arrives with a bang, or whimper?

2009-11-20T10:18:00.006Z

And they are...?

With the Treaty of Lisbon now ratified by all EU member states and set to come into force on 1 December, the EU leaders have selected (certainly not elected) its first President of the European Council (Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy) and High Representative for Foreign Affairs (British EU Trade Commissioner Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who has never held elected office and was eight years ago head of a local British health authority).

Perhaps this rather modest duo (some Anglophone media tends to speak of mediocrity rather than modesty) befits a union, the expanded power of which come as a result of a treaty to which all European citizens, in the few cases they have been directly asked to vote have said no (The Netherlands and France to its very similar predecessor the Constitution for Europe,and Ireland to the Lisbon Treaty until asked by the EU to vote again and deliver the right result).

The EU leadership has thus opted for a 'lowest common denominator' for the union's leaderhip. After all, who has heard of Herman Van Rompuy, Lady Ashton, Fredrik Reinfeldt, or even José Manuel Barroso? Few Europeans know of any of them (except Barroso), and presumably they are all unknown quantities to the major global leaders, from Barack Obama to Hu Jintao.

There will certainly be more European logos, more legislation, more photo ops on Euronews and thousands of new publicly funded staff to support these offices in Brussels. But will these offices command any real respect, or have any real relevance, in global affairs?

Henry Kissinger once asked, 'if I want to call Europe, who do I call?' Will the leaders of the world call on Haiku Herman when there are important matters to resolve, or will it still be the Browns, Merkels and Sarkozys of Europe who continue playing a relevant part in global politics?

I suspect the latter, and as the EU project ends up looking ever more bizarre one wonders for how long the more sceptical members of the Union will put up with it.

technorati tags: EU, Lisbon Treaty, Van Rompuy, Catherine Ashton, Barroso, Reinfeldt, Obama, Hu Jintao, Kissinger, Constitution for Europe, bureaucracy, Brussels, Euroscepticism, federalist, Euronews, haiku

Att bygga andliga och kulturella sandslott

2009-11-17T17:46:00.006Z

Så var det dags att ryta litet. Den här gången angående den föreslagda kursplanen för grundskolan som inte fokuserar på, eller knappast ens nämner, kristendomen (den nämns bara i anslutning till de andra fyra världsreligionerna). Detta av den häpnadsväckande anledningen att "vi undervisar inte i religion utan om religion", enligt Skolverkets Maria Weståker. (Det tog tre förslag på ny kursplan för att ordet "kristendom" skulle nämnas överhuvudtaget.)

Tidningen Dagen rapporterar här.

Detta beslut om en ny kursplan handlar i detta fall knappast om att prioritera bildning, utan om politikerstyrt avkristnande och som en konsekvens av detta till slut en samhällsvid avkulturalisering.

Detta av sveriges Skolverk hänsynslösa och ignoranta framfarande, som säkerligen uppfattas av sagda statliga verk som utomordentligt upplyst och präktigt på alla sätt och vis, är symptomatiskt av en slags "Svenssonstalinism". Ideologisk konformitet på typiskt försiktigt, men ändå totaliserande svenskt välfärdsvis. Med byråkraters hjältemodiga insatser skall vi skapa en "ny" modern människa fri från historiens alla (ideologiskt) obekväma arv.

(I ett samhälle som sätts i skräck av t ex relativt normala influensainfektioner orkar man, eller vågar man helt enkelt inte konfrontera de stora moraliska och existensiella frågorna: världens verkliga faror och lidanden, vårat eventuella individuella ansvar, ultimata frågor om själaliv och eventuell existens bortom jordelivet osv. Religionstänkande, och för den delen även klassiska filosofiska frågeställningar som insisterar på sådant som i det moderna tidevarvet anses obekvämt eller upprörande vi vill helst inte låtsas om. Ignorans och moralisk eskapism blir vardaglighetens lyckorus.)

Resultatet av denna nya kursplan blir förstås inte en bättre eller mer insiktsfull undervisning för ett mångkulturellt och modernt Sverige, men istället en särdeles urlakad samhällskunskap. Den svenska skolan får nöja sig med att till stor del utexaminera moderna medborgare som i dess andemässiga och kulturella karaktär blir en nutidens kälkborgare (även en sådan biblisk referens till filistinismen kommer väl sedemera att falla i glömska i svallvågorna av denna ideologiskt snäva statliga planeringen av unga svenskars utbildning).

Kristendomen är, på gott och/eller ont, grunden till vår existerande samhällshistoria, musik, konst, arkitektur, osv. så som den utvecklats över ett par årtusenden (om kortare tid än så i just Sverige jämfört med andra delar av världen som inbefattades av t ex det gamla romarriket). De bibliska historierna i gammalt judiskt testament och nytt kristet evangelium - vare sig helig skrift eller mänskligt tillverkad mytologi - ligger till grunden för vår förståelse om utvecklingen och samspelet mellan temporal och spirituell makt, våra sociala normer och våran lag, viktiga delar av filosofin, och givetvis våran litteratur. Ett par århundraden av upplysning, religionskritik och realitivistisk samhällsmoral förändrar inte detta faktum.

Det handlar alltså inte om huruvida man anser det kristna arvet vara bra eller dåligt, eller ens om man faktiskt i kristen bemärkelse är troende eller inte. Vårt kristna arv kan vi inte bortse ifrån annat än utifrån komplett utopiska, och i grunden lögnaktiga premisser om vad vårat moderna samhälle är grundat på. Modernism, humanism och "nyandlighet" ger oss bara en bristfällig bild av hur vårat samhälle utvecklats och hur det är sammansatt. Som Paulus skriver i det första Korinthierbrevet, "nu se vi ju på ett dunkelt sätt, såsom i en spegel", våran "kunskap ett styckverk"...

Det är ledsamt att konstatera, men det känns som ett alltmer andefattigt fosterland man tar i beaktelse. "Fy för fan" hade man väl med ett mindre diplomatiskt och vördnadsfullt språkbruk kommenterat det hela!

technorati tags: Maria Weståker, Skolverket, kursplan, grundskola, religion, kristendom, bibel, Paulus, Korinthierbrev, historia, kultur, utbildning, Dagen, kälkborgerlig, byråkrat, andefattig, humanism, filosofi, nyandlighet, modernism, relativism, svensson, stalinism, jantelag, välfärd, Sverige, samhälle

Asian knout and European stock market

2009-11-16T09:53:00.004Z

What if ‘the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market’ (Trotsky’s characterisation of tsarist Russia) proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?

Slavoj Zizek on the resurgence of anti-Communism (in Europe) and the future of capitalism here.

technorati tags: Zizek, anti-Communism, Trotsky, Asian knout, capitalism, tsarist, stock market, velvet revolution, democracy, development

We want easy choices, please

2009-11-15T20:50:00.006Z

Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero in Quo Vadis (1951)

Being confronted with real choices can be one of the most difficult things we deal with in life, when whatever choice one makes entails a significant trade-off. Presumably this is why we would like to have 'easy' choices. But, of course, if the choice is easy is it really a meaningful choice.

Thinking about choice I came across two very interesting musings on the topic from rather different points of view.

In his controversial book, The Closing of the American Mind, the American philosopher and classicist Allan Bloom writes about a modern age in which we have shrunk from the ability to make real choices:

"I'm OK, you're OK." Choice is all the rage these days, but it does not mean what it used to mean. In a free society where people are free - responsible - who can consistently not be "pro-choice"? However, when the word still had some shape and consistency, a difficult choice meant to accept difficult consequences in the form of suffering, disapproval of others, ostracism, punishment and guilt. Without this, choice was believed to have no significance. Accepting the consequences for what really counts is what gives Antigone her nobility; unwillingness to do so is what makes her sister Ismene less admirable. Now, when we speak of the right to choice, we mean that there are no necessary consequences, that disapproval is only prejudice and guilt only a neurosis. Political activism and psychiatry can handle it. In this optic Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina are not ennobling exemplars of the intractability of human problems and the significance of choice, but victims whose sufferings are no longer necessary in our enlightened age of heightened consciousness. America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis invites to consider yet another perspective on choice. Arguably one of significant - indeed ultimate - significance:

I am here trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, or you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon: or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to.

This from a man who, at the age of thirty, accepted Christ as, in his own words, 'perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England'.

He did not take his choice lightly.

technorati tags: choice, Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, Antigone, Hester Prynne, Anna Karenina, C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Jesus, Christ, God, Devil, moral teacher, convert, no-fault divorce, Quo Vadis, Peter Ustinov, Nero

Pettit Visiting Professor at Queen's

2009-11-14T17:42:00.003Z

Philip Pettit, the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, has been appointed Visiting Professor in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast.

Pettit received his PhD in Philosophy from Queen's in 1970.

Read more about this very exciting appointment for philosophy at Queen's here.

technorati tags: Philip Pettit, Queen's, Belfast, QUB, Princeton, philosophy

Pope's international policy

2009-11-08T18:26:00.005Z

Find here the Thomas More Lecture on Pope Benedict XVI's international policy by Francis Campbell. The lecture encompasses the Pope's thoughts on faith and reason, international development, climate change and disarmament.

Campbell is the British Ambassador to the Holy See and also a politics and scholastic philosophy graduate from Queen's University Belfast. The Thomas More Lectures take place annually at Allen Hall, the Seminary of the Diocese of Westminster.

technorati tags: Francis Campbell, Holy See, ambassador, Pope, Benedict, international policy, Allen Hall, Diocese, Westminster, Thomas More Lectures, Queen's, Belfast, QUB, faith, reason, climate change, international development, disarmament

Brother Ass, your body

2009-11-06T17:05:00.005Z

While Karl Popper spuriously deduced twentieth-century totalitarianism from Platonism, an arguably better link can be established between the pagan Greek idealisation of the (manly) body and the Nazi cult of the healthy and fit Aryan Übermensch.

St Francis, far removed in both spirit and time from pagans and nazis alike, took a more sensible view on the human body which Francis preferred to think of as 'Brother Ass'. St Francis's view of the body is relayed by C S Lewis in The Four Loves in the following way:

Man has held three views of his body. First there is that of those ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or the "tomb" of the soul, and of Christians like [Bishop] Fisher to whom it was a "sack of dung", food for worms, filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation to bad men and humiliation to good ones. Then there are the Neo-Pagans (they seldom know Greek), the nudists and the sufferers from Dark Gods, to whom the body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view which St Francis expressed by calling his body "Brother Ass". All three may be - I am not sure - defensible; but give me St Francis for my money.

Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body.

technorati tags: Popper, Plato, Platonism, totalitarianism, pagan, paganism, Christianity, Christian, Greek, Nazi, Aryan, uebermensch, C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, St Francis, Assisi, Bishop, John Fisher, body, ass, donkey,

Till Far, igen

2009-11-01T12:26:00.002Z

Nostos, hemfärd

Ingenting annat än himlen
för honom som ligger med
ansiktet, det olyft-
bara, uppåtvänt.

Röda lyktor, tulpaner,
står tända utanför,
där vårens hemslöjdsmatta
för andra fötter vävs.

Ingenting annat än himlen,
ett drivande grått, det blå
flödet utan detaljer,
att ordlöst drunkna i.

Ensam på detta från vinröda
skymningar bortvända hav.
Nostos. Hemfärd till glömskan,
som var före allt.

-- Hjalmar Gullberg, 26.4.59

technorati tags: Nostos, hemfärd, Hjalmar Gullberg, far, saknad

God in the dock

2009-10-28T19:36:00.004Z

Icarus

The public Western 'dialogue' on faith and religion continues apace and is gathering in ferocity.

In what is perhaps Richard Dawkins's most vicious attack on organised religion yet, this time in the Washington Post's On Faith panel discussion (here), he labels the Roman Catholic Church as potentially the 'greatest force of evil in the world' and continues to revel in remarkably frenzied invective by describing the Church's recent offer of a place to disaffected Anglo-Catholics as 'dragging its flowing skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp: "Give me your homophobes, misogynists and pederasts"'.

It is not entirely difficult to understand why the Daily Telegraph's Damian Thompson wonders whether there's 'something wrong' with Dawkins (here)...

In any case, the here is not to voice outrage at a debate on faith and religion that is seemingly spinning out of control and losing all sense of perspective on that which it is ostensibly aiming to illuminate, but to recall some rather perceptive words written by C S Lewis during World War II and published as Mere Christianity.

Pondering the changing relationship between God and man in the modern era, Lewis writes:

Modern man has reversed the relationship between God and himself. The ancient man ... approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge [although 'kindly' is hardly Dawkins's approach]: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.

I doubt, however, that Lewis could have imagined the debate getting this noxious.

technorati tags: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, God, judge, dock, man, humanity, religion, Christianity, belief, faith, Richard Dawkins, Catholic, Church, Anglo-Catholic, Damian Thompson, Icarus, hubris

The next Pope?

2009-10-27T20:41:00.009Z

Cardinal Peter Turkson of the Cape Coast, Ghana has been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to head the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (report here).

His new and weighty role within the Church has the media inevitably speculating (which is probably of little use given the Byzantine, if that expression may be permitted in this context, process of electing popes) on whether Cardinal Turkson is likely to become Africa's first pope since the fifth century.

Previous African popes were St Victor I (second century), St Miltiades (fourth century) and St Gelasius I (fifth century). In recent decades, Roman Catholicism has expanded faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world.

technorati tags: Cardinal, Peter Turkson, Vatican, Council for Justice and Peace, Pope, Benedict, St Victor, Miltiades, Gelasius, Cape Coast, Ghana, African Pope, Roman Catholic, Catholic

Judge for yourself

2009-10-26T23:57:00.006Z

I recently blogged on a not very generous review by Paul Johnson of Diarmaid MacCulloch's colossal history of Christianity, the recently published and much discussed A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. It is only fair to note, that in response to Johnson's review, one reader noted:

Sir: Paul Johnson’s review of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity (26 September) is unnecessarily mocking in tone. Mr Johnson describes Professor MacCulloch as ‘essentially a comic figure’. Any reader of the review who is unfamiliar with the rest of MacCulloch’s work will be unaware that far from being the figure of fun portrayed by Paul Johnson, he is (along with Eamon Duffy) the most distinguished historian of early modern religion working at present in the UK.

C.D.C. Armstrong
Belfast

Archbishop Rowan Williams has reviewed the book here.

Having remained curious about MacCulloch's book, and having now also listened to Andrew Marr discuss the book with the author himself on tonight's Start of the Week on BBC Radio 4, I've now decided to make my own mind up.

The book is duly ordered and on its way. All 1184 pages of it.

technorati tags: Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Paul Johnson, Spectator, Eamon Duffy, Cambridge, C.D.C. Armstrong, Andrew Marr, Rowan Williams, Start the Week, Church, Christianity

'n Boer maak 'n plan

2009-10-20T20:23:00.007+01:00

Afrikaner family, 1886

South African farmers, 2009

The South African government has signed a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo which will make available available for South African farmers about 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) of farmland (here).

Given the serious tensions surrounding land ownership and the unequal distribution of land in southern Africa, a legacy of the colonial and apartheid eras, farmers in the region are likely eager to embrace new opportunities where they arise.

The Congo deal is intended to improve food security for the Congolese and the 30-year land leases will provide new opportunities for South African farmers, many of whom presumably have worries about their standing at home given (some) popular pressure for an increased pace of land reform coupled with the high levels of violence against farmers that remain quite serious.

It is often suggested that two of the most dangerous professions in South Africa (in terms of the likelihood, on a per capita basis, of becoming a victim of violent attacks and murder) are farming and policing, with white South Africans overrepresented among farmer victims and black South Africans overrepresented among police victims.

In Zimbabwe, the violent struggle to resolve the legacy of extremely uneven land distribution has led to de facto ethnic cleansing of white farmers and their African workers (many of the latter being immigrants from neighbouring countries), and collapse of the country's economy. Some of the commercial farmers expelled from their lands in Zimbabwe have taken up farming in neighbouring Zambia and Mozambique, and as far afield as Nigeria.

Considering the explosive legacy of land in southern Africa, this is a deal bound to have some interesting implications for politics, economics and development in the region.

technorati tags: land, land reform, farming, Boer, maak 'n plan, Agri SA, Congo, South Africa, colonialism, settlers, Zimbabwe, ethnic cleansing, Congo

Pilgrimage

2009-10-20T02:53:00.004+01:00

Saint James Major by Carlo Crivelli, 1492

I go through life as a transient on his way to eternity, made in the image of God but with that image debased, needing to be taught how to meditate, to worship, to think.

-- Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury

technorati tags: Donald Coggan, Archbishop, Canterbury, transient, eternity, God, meditation, worship, thinking, Saint James, Carlo Crivelli

Why Obama is failing

2009-10-19T15:53:00.007+01:00

David Bromwich (Yale) has written an thought-provoking article in the current issue of London Review of Books, 'Obama's Delusion', on why Obama's presidency might well be running into a brick wall.

Among Bromwhich's provoking comments on the perhaps surprising turn of post-Bush politics:

The model of the Republicans today is John C. Calhoun, the political theorist of the slave South and deviser of the rationale for local nullification of federal policies.

[O]n 21 May, [President Obama] gave a speech on law and national security at the National Archives [transcript and video here]: the worst speech of his presidency. He said that his paramount duty was ‘to keep the American people safe’: that word, safe, which was accorded a primacy by George W. Bush it had not been given by any earlier president, Obama himself now ranked ahead of the words justice, right, liberty and constitution.

...

Preventive detention was a step President Nixon had proposed to Congress in 1970, but he never found the support or the temerity to put the programme into effect. Yet here was a Democratic president and professor of constitutional law doing what Nixon and for that matter Cheney and his assistants had only dreamed of.

technorati tags: Obama, Bush, Cheney, Nixon, Clinton, Calhoun, David Bromwich, Guantanamo, preventive detention, South, Dixie, Republican, Democrat, Fox News, Limbaugh, Joe Wilson, terrorism, Afghanistan, Israel, constitutional law, safety, justice, right, constitution, immigration

Too many apologies?

2009-10-07T19:54:00.003+01:00

The writer and retired Spectator columnist Paul Johnson (disappointingly replaced by James Delingpole), a man of esteemed age and leisure who can thus dispense with overy sensitive considerations of collegiality, takes Diarmaid MacCulloch to task when reviewing his 1100+ page tome A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (here).

Johnson is clearly less impressed with MacCulloch's writing style, and undue concern not to 'offend' (for all sorts of more and less strange reasons), than with the content. Johnson writes:

The reason I find him essentially a comic figure is that, while obviously successful at his trade (and a great collector of literary prizes), he appears to be absolutely terrified of offending people, especially powerful groups who know how to use their muscle. Of course dons, especially Oxbridge ones, are so heavily supervised now in what and how they teach, that professors cannot be too careful, especially if they hold a chair in such a tricky and contentious subject as religious history. A don can now get into trouble merely for failing to answer the emails of students who attend his lectures. Then again, MacCulloch’s book is to accompany a television series on the subject, and the demands of the medium constitute an added dimension of worry and conformity to elitist fashion.

The review is, however, not wholly negative and MacCulloch's work seems a tremendous effort and of interest to anyone wanting to learn more about the Church.

technorati tags: Paul Johnson, Diarmaid MacCulloch, History of Christianity, Oxford, Oxbridge, Don, political correctness, church, Christianity, PC, Delingpole

The dangers of mixed marriages

2009-09-27T19:17:00.053+01:00

Uhura and Kirk, first 'interracial kiss' on American television, 1968

When my wife and I arrived in Northern Ireland, we soon became aware that a 'mixed marriage' in Ireland refers to something entirely different (namely one between Catholic and Protestant) than in Alabama where we were married and where, like in the USA generally, it refers to an interracial marriage.

In his amazing little book, Persecution in the Early Church, Herbert B Workman provides a vivid description of a 'mixed marriage' (between Christian and heathen) in the Roman Empire in the days of the early Church, and the difficulties with which those entering into one may have been faced:

For the Christian wife, conflict with her heathen husband would be accentuated by the arrival of the first baby. No woman who had worshipped the Child of Bethlehem could ever allow to go unchallenged the patria potestas, the right of the father to decide which of his children should be permitted to live, and which should be cast into the street, or exposed on the Island in the Tiber. 'If it proves a girl', writes a father in Alexandria to his expectant wife, 'throw it out'. As to this and other evil practices sanctioned by a home-life in many respects elevated and pure the issue was clear. But our sympathies are less assured in other matters, for instance, Tertullian's portrait of a Christian wife who has at her side a servant of the devil - this is his pleasant name for her husband. The man, he says, is sure to be such a brute that if it is a fast day he will 'arrange to hold a feast the same day'. He will further prove his allegiance to Satan by taking it ill that his wife

'for the sake of visiting the brethren goes round from street to street to other men's cottages, especially those of the poor... He will not allow her to be absent all night long at nocturnal convocations and paschal solemnities ... or suffer to creep into prison to kiss a martyr's bonds, or even to exchange a kiss with one of the brethren'.

After this it is a little matter that her signing 'her bed and her body with the Cross' will arouse his suspicions. If the fellow endures his wife and her ways at all it will simply be because of her dowry, or that he may make her his slave by his threats of dragging her before the executioner. We can hardly believe that all pagan husbands were brutes, or all Christian wives so lacking in at times in discretion. But, at the best, the situation in a mixed marriage was difficult, almost impossible, as Tertullian, in spite of his extravagance, rightly saw.

Methinks we have it a bit easier in this day and age - all the other dysfucntions of modern life and the decline of the family aside!

technorati tags: mixed marriage, Catholic, Protestant, interracial, miscegenation, Workman, Prosecution in the Early Church, Christian, heathen, pagan, Roman, patria potestas, Tertullian, wife, husband, Uhura, Captain Kirk, marriage