normblog

Presumin' dog?

No, dog passing in the night.

G.A. Gooch handled the ball 133

The first time a Test batsman was given out for handling the ball, I wasn't watching it, but I was following the game closely from a position north of Cape Town on the same continent. The next three occasions it happened somehow passed me by. But on the fifth occasion I was there. It was the last day of the first Test of the 1993 Ashes series, played at Old Trafford, and I was sitting with my buddy Ian. I was anxious that Australia should make a good start to retaining the Ashes, regained on this ground four years before; and Ian was anxious that they shouldn't. Graham Gooch was, from my point of view, holding things up. Then Merv Hughes bowled to him from the end we were sitting, something happened that neither of us could quite make out, and Gooch began his journey back to the pavilion. Ian and I cleverly deduced that he must be out.

[H]alf an hour after lunch Gooch became the fifth cricketer, and the first Englishman, to be dismissed "handled the ball" in a Test as he instinctively flicked out with a glove at a ball dropping on to his stumps. Umpire Bird had no hesitation in giving Gooch out, with the moral victory, if not the wicket, going to Hughes for extracting extra bounce on an increasingly lifeless pitch. - Wisden 1994

He had patted the ball into the ground off Merv and turned to see it bounce towards his wicket. Instinctively, Gooch swatted the ball away with his hands. Unfortunately, the hand is the only part of the body which it is illegal to use. That particular dismissal proved to be a major turning-point in the game. We picked up a further four wickets in the session. - Steve Waugh's Ashes Diary

I dropped into another friend's house on the way home to catch the post-lunch session on TV. We sat there predicting a draw. We lamented the fact that Merv couldn't snare Hick despite working him over in a lion-hearted spell and, as for Gooch, we just couldn't see how he was going to get out. Suddenly, Gooch showed us a way we hadn't considered - he handled the ball! As Merv said in his diary entry, this was the turning point in the match. - Ian Cover, in Merv Hughes and Ian Cover, Merv and me

Gooch [was] dismissed 'handled the ball' when he brushed aside a mishit from Hughes which threatened to drop on to his stumps. Gooch had batted 314 minutes with 21 fours and two sixes for his 133. It was as good an innings as any he has played at Test level. - Peter Wynne-Thomas and Peter Griffiths, The Australian Tour to England 1993

I was as pleased about the fifth instance as I had been dismayed about the first. Such are the swings and roundabouts in a lifetime of cricketing passion. You can watch Gooch's dismissal here.

[For links to the other posts in this series, see here.]

One of the worst of crimes

Anne Gallagher writes in The Age of a case before the High Court in Canberra on the question of whether the legal prohibition of slavery can be held to cover certain practices in the Australian sex industry. She says:

A portion of Australia's sex industry is made up of "contract girls": individuals brought over here from Thailand, Korea, China and other countries to meet Australia's growing demand for commercial and "exotic" sex. Some are under no illusion about the work they are going to do. Others imagine - or are tricked into believing - that they will be employed as waiters, cleaners or bartenders.

All share that universal and most human aspiration for a better life. It is only once they arrive that "contract girls" understand they owe a debt of between $35,000 [and] $50,000, an amount that is often inflated to cover employer "costs" such as medical tests and food. They are required to engage in sex work, without any payment, for as long as it takes to discharge that debt... Physical violence, forced detention, withholding of identity documents and intimidation are used to control recalcitrant individuals.

While I'm in no position to comment on the legal technicalities involved, in terms of the ordinary meanings of words the situation Gallagher here describes has got to be a form of enslavement. Some people are exercising a power of control over the activities of others which these others are unfree to remove, and they are enforcing it by threats, violence and imprisonment. The existence of a financial debt based on a transaction contracted earlier doesn't alter this. Free persons who incur debts of one kind and another cannot be forced to pay them off by being tied to a particular kind of labour - they would have options to seek other forms of employment, and repay any debt out of the proceeds of that. As Gallagher goes on to say:

International law is beginning to acknowledge the awful truth that while the old, government-sanctioned slave trade may indeed be a thing of the past, human beings have just become more ingenious at working out ways to enslave each other.

Bad dad music

While we're in that sort of territory... I enjoyed the opening paragraph of the piece here:

[P]erhaps no current music phenomenon is as odd as the sub-section of the singer-songwriter genre entirely devoted to songs about what a crap bloke Loudon Wainwright III is. His former wife and sister-in-law Kate and Anna McGarrigle kicked things off a decade ago with the title track of their album Matapédia, but it's in recent years that the concept has really blossomed. Son Rufus offered to give him a thump on Dinner at Eight, while his daughter Martha coyly alluded to her anger towards him on her debut single Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole. Their half-sister Lucy Wainwright Roche is pursuing a musical career and presumably has her own dad-related grievances to air: given the amount of media attention the whole business has received, it's only a matter of time before some canny bandwagon-jumper not actually related to the former star of Carrot Confidential writes a song bitterly bewailing his paternal shortcomings. If things carry on at this rate, they'll end up with their own section in HMV: Hip Hop/R&B/Metal/Punk/Emo/Music Complaining About the Hopeless Parenting Skills of Loudon Wainwright III.

(Thanks: J.)

The Momma 'n' Daddy Collection 100

It's a big day. To mark it, day of the Momma 'n' Daddy century, I'll be bringing you two special features, so stay with this till the end. The first feature is a piece of Momma 'n' Daddy revisionism. Because, you see, I wanted to have a specially good song for this instalment, and I thought of one I hadn't really covered here. I'd previously ruled it out as not having sufficient M&D content. What? Was I crazy? Of course it's Momma 'n' Daddy; the song centres on what Mommas should and shouldn't let happen to their babies. It's Cormac McCarthy meets John Bowlby and D.W. Winnicott. How could I have excluded it from the canon? Hence the revisionism. When you've been wrong, it's better just to face up to it.

So today I bring you 'Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys', one of the greats, as sung here by Waylon and Willie:

Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold
They'd rather give you a song than diamonds or gold
Lone Star belt buckles and old faded Levis
And each night begins a new day
If you don't understand him and he don't die young
He'll probably just ride away.

Chorus
Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys
Don't let 'em pick guitars and drive them old trucks
Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such.
Mammas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys
They'll never stay home and they're always alone
Even with someone they love.

Cowboys like smoky old pool rooms and clear mountain mornins
Little warm puppies and children and girls of the night
Them that don't know him won't like him and them that do
Sometimes won't know how to take him
He ain't wrong, he's just different but his pride won't
Let him do things to make you think he's right.

Repeat chorus

It's so, so Momma 'n' Daddy, don't you agree? The mother needs to cope with the growing boy who's gonna be the man who's gotta do what a man's gotta do: not wrong, just different, 'but his pride won't/Let him do things to make you think he's right'. Mommas, don't let your buckskins grow up to be trousers. (For a link to hear this fine song, see below.)

The other feature today is a whole bunch of YouTube links for songs that have figured in the series. Not exactly the best of the M&D collection, since some very good songs I failed to find. But a wonderful selection of them.

The Box (94)

Coat Of Many Colors (12)

Don't Cry Daddy (9)

Holding Things Together (31)

Idaho Home (50)

I Don't Wanna Play House (11)

Love Without End, Amen (2)

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys (100)

Mama's Opry (21)

Mama Tried (30)

My Son Calls Another Man Daddy (10)

Papa Loved Mama (54)

Sonny (88)

South Texas Girl (96)

To Daddy - and here (6)

Waiting Around To Die (25)

Wild Montana Skies (80)

Will The Circle Be Unbroken (53)

Listen and enjoy.

[The Momma 'n' Daddy Archive, containing all the details of the series, is here.]

Schmolocaust

Seumas Milne is a very good guide to things. I mean, he's a good guide to how a certain section of the left - not to put too fine a point on it, the regrettable section - thinks. His column yesterday provides an example of what I mean. It gives us the pure form of a contemporary leftist trope. It is worth examination for that reason - for representing a set of rhetorical moves that has become rather general amongst anti-Zionists.

After telling us that the takeover of Palestinian land on which Israel was founded was a phenomenon of colonial rule, Milne writes:

Israel was, of course, also born out of idealism and genocidal horror in Europe and can boast remarkable achievements. But it was the tragedy of the Zionist project that Jewish self-determination could only be achieved at another people's expense. Israel's independence and the Palestinian nakba are not just different national narratives, but diametrically opposed experiences which make one-sided tributes to Israeli nationhood seem so brutally galling in the Arab and Muslim world and beyond.

Employing a kind of shorthand, one might say that this has the following rhetorical structure: yes, the Holocaust; but the nakba. If you study the overall argument within which that 'yes-but' is placed, however, what you will find is that the 'yes' carries no legitimating force at all and that the 'but' lays claim to all of such force. In saying this, I do not mean that Milne is undismayed by the thought of what happened to the Jews of Europe. What I mean is that in terms of what he's willing to allow it establishes by way of Jewish rights, it establishes nothing. The 'but' of the nakba, on the other hand, gives serious legitimating grounds. It allows Milne to talk of Palestinian 'national dispossession and suffering' and, correspondingly, of Palestinian 'aspirations to self-determination'. Furthermore, we know that he takes Palestinian self-determination seriously, because he's now thinking the chance for a two-state solution - accommodating the national rights of both peoples - may have 'slipped away', leaving instead the goal of 'one state for both peoples' as the only 'realistic option', an option being looked to, he thinks, amongst Palestinians. In this, Milne is more cautious than many others from his general precinct. For them, a one-state solution has always been the preferred solution, the two-state business resting, as they see it, on a historical usurpation. But whether in the bolder or the more cautious version, the one-state option amounts to a denial of the right of Israeli Jews to self-determination, for unless they themselves accept it, it isn't a form of self-determination.

Within this framework of assumptions, therefore, what 'Yes, the Holocaust, but the nakba' actually means is 'Holocaust, schmolocaust - yes, the nakba'.

Now, turn it round. Imagine that a supporter of Israel were to say 'Yes, the nakba, but the Holocaust'. And imagine they were to mean by this, not that the Palestinians have a right to national self-determination and their own state, and not that the occupation of the West Bank should be terminated, the Jewish settlements there wound up and a peace agreement negotiated, recognizing, however, the national rights of Israelis alongside those of Palestinians; but rather that the Holocaust gave the Jews rights which in effect cancel out the rights of the Palestinians. Imagine they were to mean, when you come right down to it, 'Nakba, schmakba'. I don't think it's extravagant to suggest that their saying this would be taken as a form of brutal arrogance if not of outright anti-Arab racism.

It's a mystery, is it not? The tragedy of one people - the Palestinians - may be invoked, and regularly is, on the anti-Zionist liberal-left as one way of pressing the national rights of that people. Here is a wrong to be made good. But the tragedy of another, now linked, people is not thought in the same quarter to generate any national rights, it does not carry force as a wrong the (partial) making good of which would be undone if Israel's existence were forcibly terminated. How does this work? Such tragedies either do give some weight to the case for national self-determination for the people in question, or they don't. It cannot be, can it, that the Palestinian tragedy generates a kind of right that the Jewish tragedy does not?

Here one must anticipate a side-step. It's not because the Palestinians have suffered a tragedy that they have a right in this matter which the Jews lack. It's because the land was (and therefore still is) theirs. That's how the side-step would go. Notice, first, that if we are to take this seriously, it's not the occurrence of a national tragedy that's relevant any longer - and so we should forget the nakba in this context? - it's the connection between peoples and particular geographical spaces. But few, including among anti-Zionists, truly believe this. Not in the sense of a sacred, unvarying tie. There are no movements in that political neck of the woods to restore the Americas, or Australia, to their indigenous peoples. There is no movement on the left that I know of to get Europe to find a national homeland for the Jews - in Europe - to make good the way in which European Jewry was ripped from its places of abode, robbed of its possessions, ghettoized, transported, tortured, massacred. These are not projects of a politically practical nature. So practicality does a certain amount of work here, in some cases altogether eclipsing hypotheses of a sacred tie between this people and this land. And if it comes to that, the Jews, like the Palestinians, do have a historical tie with what is present-day Israel. It's one thing or it's the other. But, whichever it is, the rhetoric alone won't do it for you. There's no 'yes-but' about it; there's just 'yes' and 'yes', both.

Jazz 20: Pyramid

I'm reminded by the list of essential jazz which I linked to the other day that I ought to move along with my own recommendations. The Modern Jazz Quartet weren't everybody's cup of tea. To some they seemed a bit bloodless - chamber music jazz, as it were. But any collection put together by me has to include them. In part that's just a matter of when I first came across the group, back when I took my first steps on the great continent of this music, with its many different regions, rivers, tributaries. The MJQ were in there for me at the start, with Armstrong, Ellington, Goodman, Bix, Miles, Monk. But I also retain a liking for the specificity of the combination they represent, in which you might think some 20th century J.S. Bach had met up with the blues. John Lewis and Milt Jackson both had the spirit of the blues, as comes through on the quiet counterpoint of all their records. I'm recommending Pyramid (1959-60 - 37 minutes). The album is made by the title track, written by Ray Brown. John Lewis: 'The title came from an experimental arrangement of the piece in which the idea was to make a kind of tempo pyramid: from slow to fast back to slow.' Also excellent is 'Django'. There's a short review here.

[Links to the rest of the series.]

With the world's attention elsewhere

From inside Zimbabwe Peter Oborne gives some searing details of the brutality being visited by Mugabe's regime on those who voted against him:

The village head man told me there had been two Zanu-PF meetings there during the past 24 hours in which suspected MDC supporters had been driven away.

He also revealed that those who survive Mugabe's murderous purges are then subjected to food deprivation.

The village elder produced a ration card entitling each Zimbabwe family to 10kg of Mealie Meal (a kind of maize that is the national staple diet in a country plagued by food shortages) from a local relief organisation every month.

The months of February and March had been ticked off, showing that the food had been handed over.

But there were no ticks for April and May, revealing how hand-outs were stopped as a way of punishing Mugabe's political opponents.

The elder told me his children were away in the forest looking for wild fruits. "We are so hungry," he said.

"People are dying."

The rest is here.

Tanks for thinking

In this week's Spectator Anthony Browne, director of Policy Exchange, is looking enviously across the Atlantic at the thriving condition of centre-right think tanks as compared with their British counterparts. Think tanks, whether centre-right or of any other stripe, are not a scene about which I have much knowledge, so I should perhaps proceed with caution in commenting on it. But, then again, maybe I'll just proceed. If I get something wrong, someone else can point it out.

Odd features of Browne's piece to my untutored eye. First:

Universities are pretty much monopolised by the Left, and seem to rejoice in their lack of real-world impact.

This is not something people of the centre-right can have any complaint about, surely. Universities are open to the competition of ideas, left, right and centre, and competition is a value favoured by the centre-right. If they're not competing adequately within universities, maybe they're doing something wrong. Ditto with regard to a second - the general - theme of Browne's piece: namely, how much less well-heeled British centre-right think tanks are than their cousins across the sea. If the centre-right can't raise money, think about what it's like for other people. Anyway, it's a problem the centre-right should feel at home with. No one is obliged to part with their ruboolas, legitimately earned, n'est-ce pas? Third, from within the left it's not difficult to see how many problems the left has got; partisans of the centre-right cannot but agree. If you can't prosper against this advantage, something may be amiss. Maybe your ideas aren't as good as you think they are.

The Long and the short answer

It's an experience we're all familiar with. You're asked a question, you answer it as best you can on the spot, and then later it comes to you what you should have said. Kate Long is describing one such occasion. Over at the Picador Blog, she tells of a gig she did at which the issue came up of characters 'behaving badly', and whether the writer is obliged to 'show those characters' crimes catching up with them'. Kate now gives the answer she'd like to have given then.

A novel is not a public information film.

Quite so. Fiction would be extremely dreary if no one ever got away with bad behaviour. Worse still, it wouldn't be true to the world. I liked the title of the post: 'Warning: mad wives should not be kept in attics'.

The normblog profile 243: Emma Darwin

Emma Darwin was born and brought up in London, with interludes in Manhattan and Brussels. She studied Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and her debut novel The Mathematics of Love was published in 2006 by Headline Review. The Times described it as, 'that rare thing, a book that works on every conceivable level, a real achievement', and it was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers and Goss First Novel awards. Emma's second novel, A Secret Alchemy will be published in November 2008, and in 2009 in the US. At the moment she's trying to finish her PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College up the road from where she lives in South East London, when she'd much rather be starting a new novel. Emma blogs at This Itch of Writing.

Why do you blog? > Like most writers I don't really know what I think till I see what I say, so my blog is where I can think aloud about things that won't fit in the current novel.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Finding that people actually enjoy what I write, so they comment and come back for more.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > So far (I've been lucky, perhaps) only losing most of an hour's work on a post, because the computer crashed.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Your blog needs a definite flavour: either concentrating on a particular subject, or having a particular tone and take on life which people respond to.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Aristotle, Marina Warner, Karen Armstrong.

What are you reading at the moment? > Barry Unsworth's Stone Virgin and Narratology by Mieke Bal.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Walker Evans, Seamus Heaney, Anton Chekhov.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > Yesterday I discovered that some literary Theory does actually connect with what I do as a storyteller.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > That aggression is the product of fear and should be dealt with bearing that in mind.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Creationism and other pseudo-sciences.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Do five years of the Guardian Women's Page in the late 1970s count? A brilliant education for a teenager in the history, practicalities and humour of feminism.

Who are your political heroes? > Ex-President of Ireland Mary Robinson, 18th century British Prime Minister Henry Pelham, Elizabeth I.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > I would pay whatever it took to have much, much smaller classes in all schools, so that all teachers could actually teach, and all children could learn.

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be Prime Minister, who would you choose? > Archbishop Rowan Williams: nothing to do with religion, but because he's the sanest, shrewdest, most intelligently compassionate public voice I've heard in years.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > The United States' conviction that they should police the world. They do it so very badly, and the fallout is so appalling.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Start by assuming that most people are trying their best, but know that their idea of the best thing to do may not coincide with yours, or with what you need.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Imaginative, clear-headed compassion.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Knee-jerk, un-thought-out reactions on any subject.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > I find it hard to think well of people who vote Conservative, even though I know plenty of admirable people who do.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Moaning comfortably and endlessly about how much worse everything is today than 20 or 50 or 100 years ago.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > My children, and being on time for things.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I'd overcome my upbringing and remember that silly, pointless frivolity is as essential to the human spirit as high cultural pleasure.

What would you call your autobiography? > I'd Rather Be Writing A Novel.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Emma Thompson.

What would your ideal holiday be? > Riding a horse somewhere spectacular but not too hot, like Romania or New Zealand.

What is your most treasured possession? > A lifetime of photographic negatives - and now the digital files.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > I can't imagine wanting to do anything as much as I want to write.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Jasper Fforde.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > Very unrealistically indeed, that they'd extend the London Underground to be five minutes walk from my house.

What animal would you most like to be? > An otter.

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Providing connection

Julie Andrews - yes, this Julie Andrews - is putting in a word for adequately funding libraries. And good for her. I just wish she'd left out the bit knocking the internet:

Perhaps most important, libraries offer a powerful antidote to the isolation of the Internet, providing connection, support and community. Rather than wading in a solitary fashion through the morass of potential misinformation available on the Net...

Hey! I'm now connected by the internet to people in L.A., as I didn't used to be. And there's no 'rather than' about it; it's the internet as well as libraries. You know, just like being able to have Truffaut or Buñuel and The Sound of Music. And there's straight information there too, oodles of it.

Bird talk

If you like Charlie Parker and/or jazz, do yourself a favour and read this item. In fact, do yourself the favour anyway. It's about a man's passion, 'blurring the line between exhaustive and exhausting', one of those glorious insanities of a harmless kind of which human beings are so capable. A sample:

Not long ago, I listened to him [Phil Schaap on his radio programme] play a recording of "Okiedoke," a tune that Parker recorded in 1949 with Machito and His Afro-Cuban Orchestra. Schaap, in his pontifical baritone, first provided routine detail on the session and Parker's interest (via Dizzy Gillespie) in Latin jazz, and then, like a car hitting a patch of black ice, he veered off into a riff of many minutes' duration on the pronunciation and meaning of the title - of "Okiedoke." Was it "okey-doke" or was it, rather, "'okey-dokey," as it is sometimes articulated"? What meaning did this innocent-seeming entry in the American lexicon have for Bird? And how precisely was the phrase used and understood in the black precincts of Kansas City, where Parker grew up? Declaring a "great interest in this issue," Schaap then informed us that Arthur Taylor, a drummer of distinction "and a Bird associate," had "stated that Parker used 'okeydokey' as an affirmative and 'okeydoke' as a negative." And yet one of Parker's ex-wives had averred otherwise, saying that Parker used "okeydoke" and "okeydokey" interchangeably. (At this point, I wondered, not for the first time, where, if anywhere, Schaap was going with this.) Then Schaap introduced into evidence a "rare recording of Bird's voice," in which Parker is captured joshing around onstage with a disk jockey of the forties and fifties named Sid Torin, better known as Symphony Sid. After a bit of chatter, Sid instructs Parker to play another number: "Blow, dad, go!"

Okeydoke, says Bird.

Like an assassination buff looping the Zapruder film, Schaap repeated the snippet several times and then concluded that Charlie Parker did not use "okeydoke" as a negative. "This," Schaap said solemnly, "tends to revise our understanding of the matter." The matter was evidently unexhausted, however, as he launched a rumination on the cowboy origins of the phrase and the Hopalong Cassidy movies that Parker might well have seen, and perhaps it was at this point that listeners all over the metropolitan area, what few remained, either shut off their radios, grew weirdly fascinated, or called an ambulance on Schaap's behalf.

(Thanks: GC.)

Philosophers and the uses of philosophy

Does philosophy have anything to say that is of relevance to the way non-philosophers think about the world? This question is put to a group of philosophers, and one of them, Jonathan Barnes, answers 'not very much'. This is what he says by way of explaining his answer with respect specifically to moral philosophy:

[G]lance about at our colleagues. There's Professor W, who has written some brilliant pieces on ethics: Is he more honourable in his philandering than my neighbour Bernard? And there's Professor D, the most competent logician of the age: Are his practical reasonings better regulated than those of my neighbour Brian? The answers are: No, and No. Moreover, I incline strongly to think that ethics, as it's done by philosophers, is more likely to confuse than to enlighten non-philosophers, and that logic, as it's done by logicians, tends to produce logic-choppers rather than reasoners.

Hmmm... I don't know Jonathan Barnes; but one thing I do know is that should I ever need a philosopher to speak up for me in some matter, I won't now be approaching him first. That Professor W is a philosopher and a philanderer, while the non-philosopher Bernard is faithful to his spouse, only shows that personal virtue doesn't necessarily accompany intellectual learning, or analytical ability, or an understanding of the complexities of some moral issue or other. However, going out of his way to deny the use of learning, analysis and attempting to understand the contours of difficult moral issues, Barnes doesn't give the best possible advertisement for his subject.

Fortunately, Raymond Geuss, responding to the same question, makes some observations which are usefully to the point: about the internal complexity of many of the moral and political concepts in common use, and the need to attain some clarity about their different components and meanings. Unfortunately, in offering these observations, Geuss gives out the global-dinner-party view that there was nothing at all complex, unclear or requiring philosophical analysis in the arguments surrounding the Iraq war, in particular those connected with democracy. It was all just obvious (in the dinner-party direction, needless to say). Geuss thus demonstrates - what you should already know - that a philosopher can say intelligent and stupid things in the same place, and therefore you shouldn't take what a philosopher says as beyond challenge; just as you shouldn't take what anyone else says as beyond challenge.

Philosophy itself, indeed, encourages a questioning frame of mind. It should also encourage those who practise it to perceive that moral issues that divide intelligent people can have complexities to them, especially where they concern alternative courses of action that are both – or all – costly in human terms; and should encourage them, likewise, not to pretend in such circumstances that their own preferred view just stands out boldly in the facts, as if it had been written there by a Superior Hand. It should encourage these attitudes, but evidently doesn't always do so. That is not the fault, though, of philosophy, merely of the fallible humans that we all are, including even those who are philosophers.

Reticent generals

Jesus! No, I don't mean by that to offend anyone's religious sensibilities. I'm merely referring to the figure whose name is invoked in this rank piece of apologetics by the Reverend John Bell on the BBC's Thought for the Day. You can listen to what he has to say here.

I'm not an apologist for the cabal of generals who rule Myanmar... but should we be surprised if the leaders of a country which Western governments have accorded pariah status are reticent to defer to our wishes?

That's what they are, reticent. And it's 'our wishes', rather than a will to help people in distress. Bell says it again later:

[Our] cultural ignorance [as displayed in Iraq] may explain why the Burmese generals, even if they do not speak for the majority of citizens, feel more reticent about welcoming unknown Western experts than they are about receiving the aid supplies now trickling into the country.

He's not an apologist, but he accentuates reticence over other possible motives that could be at work with the Burmese generals - such as a worry about opening the country to influences of an unsettling kind. Then comes Jesus. This is in a concluding reference by Bell to the 'untidy way' in which Jesus responded to need. 'Suffering,' Bell says, 'whether in the body or the body politic, is always a mystery.' Perhaps we should be sending that message in multiple copies to the people who have been stricken by Cyclone Nargis. (Thanks: SdeW.)

Marx and the agency of change

[T]he redemptive role attributed by Marx to the united workers of the world was taken over by the rich, formerly stigmatised as grinders of the faces of the poor...

So argues Jeremy Seabrook. Never mind about 'redemptive'. It suggests a saviour role for the workers of the world and I prefer to think about these issues in non-religious terms. The question I wish to address, though, is this one: why did Marx think it would be the working class that would act as an agent of revolutionary change, change to create a more just society than capitalism?

It's not because the workers were poor and oppressed. That Marx thought of the modern working class as having 'nothing to lose' may have been for him a necessary condition of socialist change; but it wasn't a sufficient one. Had the latter been his assumption, he could have envisaged socialism as a possible product of peasant revolt or of the uprising of a slave class. But this wasn't his line of thought. One reason why it wasn't was that he saw capitalism as creating the material preconditions for socialist economy. He wasn't thinking of a socialism of shared indigence and hardship. There is, however, a second reason which is companion to that first one. The kind of society that Marx envisaged emerging from capitalism would require a populace that had been organized and educated by capitalism itself to be able to run an advanced modern economy. In this sense, what mattered to him about the working class was not so much its (relative) impoverishment or oppression, but its capacity. I mean its political capacity: the result of characteristics it possessed - geographical concentration, trade union and political organization, literacy, technical competence, political and economic experience - through being integral to the running of capitalist society itself, at the same time as it mobilized its forces to oppose and reform certain features of that society.

Marx got many things wrong. But some he got right. Such hope as there is today for achieving a world in which there is less systemic injustice, more freedom, less poverty, greater equality, rests in significant part on the kind of populations that developed capitalist economies increasingly put in place (this despite every countervailing tendency encouraging selfishness, greed, and so forth): populations educated, increasingly aware, competent - and not well-shaped for tolerating being dictated to.

Calculated act of cruelty

Two days ago I posed the question of whether denying people access to food could count as a crime against humanity. Now This Is Zimbabwe points to evidence of food being destroyed in a country suffering from hunger and malnutrition: Zanu PF thugs - or should we call them 'militants'? - are burning piles of maize.

Gaps in thought

Nonsense that is expressed clearly is always preferable to the kind of stuff being highlighted by David Thompson today, but from time to time it's worth being reminded that this exists:

The shuffling and unfolding of the information of her body in sensory space is enacted across a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is multiple and present. Subjectivity is the lens and connector through which the spatio-temporal dislocation gets focused and bridged. The gap is outside vision - felt not seen - and always existing on the threshold in between nodes. Like the monster's subjectivities, all knots in the matrix are linked.

Ahhh... a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is not only multiple but also present. Much better than such a gap or trajectory that is multiple while absent. Just think what it might get up to in its absent multiplicity. But that threshold in between nodes - ouch! It must really hurt. And the gap that is felt but not seen. They were talking about it on The Wire. You feel me?

A revisionist account of atheism

The world being complex, understanding it isn't always easy. Still, you can make the task more difficult than it already is. On the strength of a letter of Albert Einstein's coming up for auction in London this week, Andrew Brown starts by telling us that he - Einstein - was a model atheist. Straightforward enough, you might think. In the letter Einstein says that the word 'god' is a 'product of human weaknesses', and he places religion amongst 'the most childish superstitions'. A dictionary definition of atheism gives it as 'a disbelief in the existence of deity' and 'the doctrine that there is no deity'.

By the end of his post, however, Brown has arrived at the conclusion that Einstein 'had rid himself of belief in atheism too'. By what route does he arrive there? He arrives there via the observation that Einstein accepted that devout believers could share the 'striving to make life beautiful and noble'. So to be an atheist, on this revisionist account of what atheism is, you have in fact to be either a fool or someone impervious to empirical evidence: you have not merely not to believe in a deity, you have also to deny that religious believers can work for the good of humankind. The nonsense of Brown's short journey is made more obvious by the clarity with which he traces it out; and that, at least, is to his credit.

Australia fair

You can dismiss it as empty rhetoric or mumble something else as to why it isn't really of consequence. Or else you can condemn it for the hateful thing it is, and better still, try to do something about it. Kevin Rudd's government is seeking legal advice on the possibility of taking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the International Court of Justice for incitement to genocide. Greg Sheridan thinks the move is unlikely to succeed, but praises it nonetheless. (Thanks: BD.)