normblog

Whose shoes?

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in some people's philosophies concerning a person's relationship to his or her shoes. What prompts me to say so is the way the shoe-buying universe is conceptualized here.

I think I can say without fear of demur, cavil or outright contradiction that I have some kind of 'bond with [my] footwear'. No need for you to get funny about this or to indulge in lewd or unseemly suggestion. But a bond of some kind, certainly. I try to buy shoes that I like and feel comfortable in. However, I neither 'truly collect [shoes], always on a mission to find the next rare edition' - what a preposterous idea! - nor 'generally select [my] styles based on the movements of the industry'. All I do is: when I feel I need a new pair of shoes, I go to a shop and I buy some.

I would have expected a more comprehensive taxonomy.

The value of free speech

Asking, after the Oxford Union ruckus, why free speech is valuable, Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling casts aside three standard ways of defending it. I think he's too quick with each of them. I shall take his arguments in reverse order.

3) Chris questions the value of the claim that to silence an opposing viewpoint is to assume our own infallibility. He says: 'But our opinions that racism and Holocaust denial are wrong are surely infallible.' This is to misunderstand the force of the infallibility argument. It doesn't license the silencing of opinions on a case-by-case basis, such that it would be OK to shut people up whenever we are very sure that we are right and they are wrong; it doesn't only urge us to respect free speech when we're uncertain about the validity of our own views. Instead, it says that we know in general that people have often been wrong even where they were utterly confident of possessing the truth; and, further, most of us know that we ourselves have sometimes or often been wrong. For these reasons, it's a good general principle not to silence opposing opinions, even when the chances of these being right seem to us infinitesimal. And even if those opinions are wrong they may (as J.S. Mill famously wrote) contain something of value from which we can learn; and even when they don't it's a good intellectual exercise to have to defend what we think, since this helps to keep our own beliefs alive and fresh and interesting - it discourages us from holding our beliefs in the way of mere dogma.

2) Chris challenges the view that free speech is the most effective way of reaching the truth. Part of what he says in this connection is beside the point: he suggests that David Irving is unlikely to be shifted by persuasive reasoning. But the argument for free speech as a pathway to the truth doesn't depend upon a claim that you will be able to reason successfully with someone who is mistaken about something. The argument isn't that truth will always prevail with a particular opponent; it is about the all-round effect of free speech and clashing opinions, as compared with a regime of controlled speech. Even the more general thought Chris expresses here to the effect that most people (not only David Irving) are too wedded to their opinions to be easily persuaded from them doesn't defeat that argument. For the latter to have force, all that needs to be the case is that freedom of speech should be more effective for getting at the truth than is having someone or other dictate what may permissibly be thought and said.

1) Finally, Chris rejects an 'inalienable rights' defence of free speech. I think he's wrong to do so, for the general reason that a political morality that tries, on fundamental ethical questions, to do without a notion of rights is bound to be defective, bound to produce morally lamentable results. But, in any case, at the end of his post Chris himself provides a positive argument for free speech that is either a disguised rights argument - so contradicting his earlier apparent rejection of it - or not an argument for free speech at all. He says:

The other argument is about the nature of truth and equality. To use the law to suppress false speech is to suppose that matters of truth should be decided by those in power. But this is not so. The "Truth" - or approximations thereto - is owned equally, by all of us. The state has no more business deciding what is true than deciding what is beautiful.

That we all, equally, own the process of decision about what is true and what isn't looks to me like a rights argument: it appears to indicate that each of us must be permitted his or her say over truth and falsehood, and that no one is entitled to take that away from us. If Chris really means each of us and equally, it's hard to know why he hesitates to speak of a right; unless it is because he thinks that, though the state or 'those in power' may not arrogate decisions on truth to themselves, all of us may do so as a democratic collectivity - through the mechanism, say, of majority voting. But in that case the majority simply becomes a substitute power here, and there is no free speech, merely speech as tolerated by the collective.

False palace

It is hard to imagine Craig Raine or Ian McEwan posing a threat to the state.

Poor them. They're being compared unfavourably in this regard to some illustrious literary predecessors. Never mind that it is also hard to imagine Terry Eagleton, author of the comparison, posing a threat to the state. More notable is his commending of excess and recklessness. Fair dos where they apply. The utopian impulse is a creative and a necessary one; it can lead the imagination down paths not previously recognized, reveal, as being alterable, limitations hitherto thought of as forever binding. And yet... to commend these things as virtues in a political context, and without any single word of qualification; after the century preceding and the manner of the beginning of this one. Merely:

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...

That doesn't look altogether like wisdom.

Holy red stats

Readers of normblog who have the good judgement, refined instincts and all-round strength of character to be Manchester United supporters as well may like to know about the Website of Dreams. It is a statistical treasure house. Here you can learn how far Ryan Giggs still has to go to overtake the number of appearances clocked up by Bobby Charlton. You can study the table of United's top goal scorers in the Premiership. You can look at the All-Time Premiership Table and note the remark at the bottom: 'Enough said'. You can study United's record against particular opponents, from Barcelona to Grimsby Town. You can compare United's managers, including the guy you all love best. As the friend pointing out the site to me said: 'Not sure who keeps it going but they deserve a sainthood.' (Thanks: MS.)

Play, prayer and modernity

Picking up on the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent remark that 'There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul', Giles Fraser argues to the conclusion that religion is the one thing standing in the way of this bleak process:

[T]he only people [he writes] offering a genuinely countercultural critique of western modernity are to be found in churches, mosques and synagogues.

It is by an extraordinary route that he arrives at this conclusion. Associating modernity with a condition in which individuals are defined by their function, are mere tools in a 'vast machine-like system', Fraser describes a personal epiphany experienced when he spent a day playing an elaborate game with his children. It was a day in which they 'achieved nothing beyond the sheer enjoyment of each other's company'. From this small liberation from the tyranny of time (or 'fascism of the diary') it is just one step for him to prayer - prayer as 'time spent with God', as a space hard to come by within modernity - and thence to the conclusion aforesaid.

As someone who has been enjoying games of one kind and another for more than six decades - games with friends, games with my children, ball games, board games, word games, games of cards, games watched and games read about - I am struck by the combination of bathos and illogic in Fraser's reasoning. For, first of all, games are enjoyed by millions of people as well as the vicar of Putney, and in just the way he experienced his game with his children. They are enjoyed as interrupting the time of functionality and narrow utilitarian purpose. And this happens within modernity. Second, it is testimony to the fact that, whatever the benefits of prayer may be in the way of changing the modalities of time, prayer is not alone in doing that: there are also taking time to think, to sit, to walk, to dance; and taking time to read; and taking time to join with others in appreciating theatre, film, music or the pleasures of association and conversation. Third, one needs to recognize how much modernity itself has contributed to people's possibilities of doing all these things, whatever obstacles it might have put in their way. In pursuing his argument, Fraser makes reference to the Marxist critique of capitalism (without endorsing it). Critical as Marx was of capitalism's narrowing and oppressive effects, however, he didn't labour under any illusion that premodern conditions had offered better possibilities to most people for taking time, as genuine free time, for their own purposes.

Fraser's article is too one-sidedly negative about modernity, and it makes unduly monopolistic claims on behalf of prayer in particular and religion in general.

Max and some wild things

A remarkable passage from Max Hastings yesterday - discussing the Oxford Union business, he writes:

Muslim extremists say worse and more dangerous things about Jews than [David] Irving ever has. We excuse and even indulge them, because of our guilt about the role of Europe and the US in creating and sustaining the state of Israel.

We excuse and even indulge them - coughed up without more ado. Then there's also the little matter of 'guilt about... creating and sustaining the state of Israel'.

Not a member of the set

I've seen referees' reports for papers submitted to academic journals where the paper being refereed looked perfectly OK to me but the referee damned it. Different people, different judgements. Here's a bold concept: an online academic journal 'that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences'. Those submitting a (previously rejected) paper to Rejecta Mathematica must accompany it with an open letter; 'it is expected that the authors will discuss any known flaws in their paper with full and honest disclosure'. Is this a joke? The editors say no. (Thanks: PMc.)

Writer's choice 130: Jean Kazez

Jean Kazez is the author of The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life. She has written recently about happiness for Philosophy Now, about motherhood for The Philosopher's Magazine, and about death for Free Inquiry. Jean writes about a lot of things for Talking Philosophy, the blog of The Philosopher's Magazine. Below, she discusses Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Jean Kazez on Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I'm a huge fan of the author Kazuo Ishiguro. Two of my favourite novels are his books Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. Both are about people who go along with being treated 'merely as a means', as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant would say.

Never Let Me Go is about an underclass of clones living in present-day England. Though they are 'copies' of people in the main population, they are nevertheless perfectly normal human beings. After growing up in special boarding schools, they begin to report to hospitals periodically to serve as organ donors. They gradually weaken and after some number of donations, they 'complete' - they have that last fatal operation.

The eerie thing is that there's no overt coercion involved. There are no thugs dragging these people to hospitals. Kathy, the main character, gets special privileges as a 'carer' - she helps others through their medical ordeals - but then she eventually becomes a donor herself. She puts up some resistance at points, but mostly she's compliant.

Kathy isn't zombie-like, but she does have a tendency to be a little too obsessed with surfaces and details. Why doesn't she get her mind off minutiae and focus on the big picture? Why doesn't she hide or run away? There's no simple answer, but the key thing seems to be the clones' perception that they have a role to play. That role is not to their liking, but they're resigned to it.

I take it the novel is set in the present day, not in the far future, because Ishiguro wants to say something about us, not make up things about strange futuristic people. We are capable of these things, whether as exploiters or as exploited.

There doesn't seem to be a specific real-world question Ishiguro wants us to think about, but the book put me in mind of questions like this: why do the women of Saudi Arabia accept not being able to vote, drive, move about on their own, and show their faces in public? For considerable illumination, think Kathy!

But surely we wouldn't deliberately grow an underclass of clones to use as our organ donors. We would never exploit other people to that degree. Or would we?

We are told the cloning project began in the 1950s. Kathy seeks out a former teacher who explains it to her: 'How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days?' Once the project had begun to save lives, it couldn’t be stopped. '... [Y]ou were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren't really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn't matter.'

Unrealistic? The story brings to my mind many types of exploitation we're unable to go back on - like relying on extremely cheap labour in third-world countries so we can afford a luxurious life-style.

The novel makes me think about animal experimentation as well, though I don't think that was Ishiguro's intention. What intrigues him is compliance - letting yourself be treated as a means. (That's the theme of The Remains of the Day as well.) Animals aren't compliant - they aren't cognizant enough for that. But with or without their compliance, we do treat lab animals as a means only. We perform surgeries on them. And they actually do endure procedure after procedure until they 'complete'.

Well, but that's different! (Kant certainly thought so.) Or is it? We may not be in a position to know. We've been using animals as a means to our better health for hundreds of years. We do 'keep them in the shadows', and of course we think they don't much matter. It may not be within our powers to wake up and see the practice clearly.

The best we can probably do is wake up half-way and see that many experiments are unnecessary or done in a cruel manner. Within medicine and science, there are now reformers who want to 'reduce, replace, and refine' (the so-called '3 Rs'). Hardly anyone seriously contemplates bringing the whole practice to an end.

The reformers seem laudable, but I'm not sure. They have counterparts in Ishiguro's novel, a group of progressives who want the clones to be raised in better schools and orphanages. Sadly, eerily, these more enlightened people can imagine reform but can't imagine wholesale change. Too much has been gained by thinking of the clones as a subordinate class with merely instrumental value.

On animal experimentation and many other issues, I wonder how different we really are from the benighted society of Ishiguro's novel. There's such a thing as a point of moral no-return, a point where nobody can even see the problem, and even witting victims can't contemplate resistance.

[All the pieces that have appeared to date in this series, with the links to them, are listed here, here and here.]

Execution most tactful

The other day Timothy Garton Ash was asking what we should call those who want to kill us. One usage he didn't consider was 'militants'. You can read about two people so categorized here - '[t]wo sisters [who] beheaded their own uncle and his wife in front of the couple's children because the man wore Western-style trousers...' According to the report, what these so-called militants did in beheading the man and his wife in front of their children was nothing so vulgar as to murder them. Perish the value judgement. No, they 'executed' them. (Thanks: RB.)

Former UK employees at risk in Iraq

We are writing as a group of agencies concerned for the many thousands of people whose lives are, or have been, threatened by the crisis in Iraq. These include the many Iraqis who have worked as employees of the UK armed forces and civilian missions. [Italics added.]

So begins an open letter to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, from signatories for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Rescue Committee and the Refugee Council. The text of the letter is here. And see also Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling.