normblog

Peter Tatchell, rightly or wrongly, on a conference venue

Whom the gods would confuse, they first set to thinking about how to justify selectively punitive treatment of Israelis. The case in hand is that of Peter Tatchell who has criticized the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Youth and Student Organization (IGLYO) for deciding to hold its general assembly in Israel. Let me be clear, before going any further, that Tatchell's criticism of IGLYO doesn't occupy the more noxious part of the boycotter terrain. He gives Israel some of its due and takes a clear distance from the apologetics standard on the international anti-Zionist left. Thus, implicitly acknowledging the fact that Israel is a democracy that protects liberal rights, Tatchell says:

I applaud the equality achievements of Israeli LGBTI groups, and the support they offer to LGBTI Palestinians. Their efforts are remarkable and have done much to improve the lives of LGBTI people.

He also condemns 'indiscriminate rocket and suicide attacks on innocent Israeli civilians by Islamist organisations', and he laments the 'double standards' of those who criticize Israel but are 'silent about the neighbouring Arab dictatorships', or who propose boycotts of Israel but not of various tyrannies in the region and elsewhere. 'It is wrong', he says, 'for Israel to be singled out for special, unique demonisation and protests.' He supports a two-state solution as the only realistic option for the time being.

Still, Tatchell is against holding the IGLYO assembly in Israel, and here is a central part of his reasoning for being opposed to it:

Since human rights are universal, we cannot divorce LGBTI rights from the national rights of the Palestinian people. These are two aspects of the same struggle for universal human rights.

It is true that on LGBTI rights Israel is, by far, the most progressive nation in the region. However, human rights should not be viewed from a gayist perspective. LGBTI rights do not trump all other human rights.

Or, as he also says, 'human rights are universal and indivisible'.

Human rights are indeed universal, but what is meant by saying they are 'indivisible'? If all Tatchell meant was that every human right is important and we shouldn't neglect any of them, one could agree with this. But what he appears to mean, beyond it, is that if a country has a comparatively good record with respect to some human rights and not others, then you may not treat its citizens in a normal way on account of the good record, but must withhold participation in, or organization of, events in that country on account of the bad one. Rather than rewarding Israel and its LGBTI community for being 'the most progressive nation in the region' on these matters, one must punish them for their human rights derelictions towards the Palestinians.

It would presumably follow from this same indivisibility of human rights that if one opposed the Iraq war - as Tatchell did, along with a large segment of the international left - one should have opposed any conferences being held in the US, Britain, Australia and sundry other 'coalition of the willing' countries. Waging aggressive war - which is what opponents of the Iraq war held that war to be - against a country is certainly a violation of the right to national self-determination. One should also oppose events being held in the US, on account of Guantanamo, or in any country implicated in extraordinary rendition, or in France, on account of the law forbidding (Muslim) women from covering their faces. And so on. Yet this practical consequence of human-rights-indivisibility seems always to home in on Israel - as it does here, despite Tatchell's reservations about double standards. Perhaps I am in ignorance and he opposes the holding of conferences everywhere where there is an issue about an important human right. But I doubt it.

Then there's also this:

If the IGLYO conference goes ahead in Israel, LGBTI people will, rightly or wrongly, be seen as endorsing Israel. This could increase and inflame the already existing homophobia in the Arab world, potentially putting the freedom and lives of LGBTI people at risk and profoundly damaging the emerging LGBTI movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Is this what we want?

That 'rightly or wrongly', it contains multitudes. Imagine if you could never undertake anything when someone else wrongly took it to imply something bad or putatively bad - which in fact it didn't. Why should participating in a conference in Israel imply overall endorsement of Israeli policy, any more than participating in an event anywhere else implies endorsement of everything about the country concerned? One can even make it clear what one's participation does and doesn't entail, thereby better enabling others not to see it wrongly. Tatchell says, 'we should avoid appearing to sanction Israel's illegal occupation of seized Palestine territories'. You don't wish to appear to sanction that? Then don't sanction it; condemn it. This is the usual way in politics (and life more generally) of not being taken amiss, other than by people who deliberately want to misconstrue you.

The 'rightly or wrongly' notion is a feeble aid to the thesis of indivisibility. Between them they set up a standard of moral purity that is impossible to maintain. If we may not do anything which others will wrongly construe and if we must punish those in proximity to every good human rights record because it is marred by something bad, then all of us are going to be staying home most of the time.

Postscript: I wonder if Peter Tatchell has given any consideration to the following. If he takes this view about the venue of the IGLYO assembly, some people, rightly or wrongly, will take him to be stirring up anti-Semitism. Therefore he shouldn't. (Thanks: E.)

Not that different from you and me

Kenan Malik takes a look at that question of whether peoples living in isolation from the modern world should be left alone to carry on doing so. He challenges the assumption that not making contact with them shows proper respect for the peoples concerned. He writes:

[W]ho makes the call as to what is morally right? The policy of No Contact means that the Amazonian tribes are excluded from making that decision. The Brazilian government - and more broadly 'modern society' - makes it on their behalf. It decides what is good for the tribes and imposes that decision upon them. And it does so because it believes that it is the morally noble stance to take. The No Contact policy, in other words, is as much about the moral needs of contemporary modern society as it is about the social, cultural and medical needs of Amazonian tribes. There is a certain moral smugness about the policy: 'We are morally superior because we accept that our way of life may not be good for you'.

Kenan goes on to trace the historical development of this attitude. He concludes that a blanket no-contact policy is indefensible.

On the one hand and on the other

Reading this report on the use of rape against opposition activists in Iranian prisons, I couldn't help being reminded of another column from almost exactly two years ago which appeared in the same newspaper. It urged on the paper's readers a softer view of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime than the writer thought was being offered at the time 'in the western media'. You can find the link to that column - by Seumas Milne - here. Well, it's a liberal newspaper, what do you want? It accommodates different points of view.

Charity, justice and political association

Foreign Affairs carries an article by Michael Walzer about humanitarianism, drawing on sources in traditional Jewish thought. Both the length and the subtlety of the article make it difficult to summarize, so I'm not going to try; you'll be using your time well if you read it for yourself. Neither is the discussion below a discussion, much less a critique, of Michael's arguments. It is simply a thought process that takes off from one of the themes central to the piece: namely, that helping others is a matter at once of charity and obligation, of benevolence and justice.

If you think that people owe other people nothing when these others are in grave need or emergency or peril, then what follows may be of no interest to you. My starting assumption here is that there are obligations of both charity and justice to other human beings in dire straits, obligations arising on the basis simply of these others being human, rather than because we stand in some special relation to them - such as parent to child, or child to parent, or doctor or nurse to hospital patient, and so on. How extensive are these obligations of remedial help or rescue? I don't know. They lie somewhere between zero and 100 per cent (not very helpful, obviously, as a range); being greater than zero according to my starting assumption, and less than total because each of us is entitled to some kind of life of his or her own, which we wouldn't be able to enjoy if we were bound to spend all our time and/or resources on helping others. My own inclination is to think that our duties of help are, for the reason just given, modest ones: they are not so extensive as to erode the possibility of pursuing our own lives and interests most of the time. I do not know how to quantify 'modest' but shall proceed with the argument by supposing that everyone should give some small but significant proportion of their time and/or resources to humanitarian purposes.

Now, if our obligations of a helping kind are requirements only of charity or benevolence, then they aren't of a sort that can be enforced upon us. We should fulfil them - should give, do, assist, etc - but if we don't, then though we are morally at fault, we can't be held to what we ought to have done. Is it different if the duty is one of justice? It depends. Let's say that the share of my time and resources owed to others as a matter of justice is n per cent, but that there is no mechanism of enforcement. Then I can behave just as if it were a matter of charity. For, though my n per cent is owed, it isn't owed to anyone in particular. Although Hadassah may be in need, or Dougal in a crisis of some kind, or John and Indira under attack, none of them can claim that in not coming to their assistance I was in violation of an obligation to them. I might have been helping a fifth party to the full extent of my n per cent. Even though, as it happens, I wasn't, since I wasn't helping anybody, the example is illustrative of the circumstance that my duty of helping others is a duty owed to humankind in general but not to anyone in particular, so that no one in particular has a claim against me, let alone an enforceable one, if I do nothing in response to the woes of the world.

What I think follows from this is the necessity of political association, of people forming collectivities with authoritative means of requiring them to do what they justly must - state-like bodies with enforceable policies implemented through taxation. Let me put this another way so that the point of putting it at all is made more transparent. For political association to be necessary we do not have to make very pessimistic assumptions about human nature. Though, for my money, it is unwise to give oneself an account of these things that is too benign, we do not have to assume excessive selfishness, cruel impulses, callous indifference to suffering and so forth. In order to recognize the necessity of political association, we don't have to get all Hobbesian about it. It is enough if - or rather that - human beings are vulnerable creatures, that the world sometimes delivers them harsh blows and that they and their fellows cannot always be relied on sufficiently to feel the pull of what justice requires and come to the aid of others when this is needed. Stateless utopias (anarchist, libertarian, Marxist) are, consequently, utopias in the bad rather than good sense of that word.

Something also follows, if the above reasoning is OK, for humanitarianism in the international arena (which Michael's article deals with as well). The less like an authoritative political association the institutions of the global community are, the more patchy will be efforts of international humanitarian aid and justice. Is a world polity possible? Again, I don't know. But unless something very like it comes into operation when states themselves are gravely delinquent about human rights, the duties of international humanitarian justice will have no one else to attend to them than other states. (Via.)

On there being a point even with no grand plan

Marcelo Gleiser, Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, pops the question:

If you think there is some kind of cosmic teleology, a sense of purpose that inevitably leads to life, you are saying we are inevitable. If you don't, if you say we are the result of a series of cosmic accidents, then you believe we aren't inevitable. We just happened. This latter position is often accused of being nihilistic: if we are the results of accidents, what's the point of being alive?

Which just goes to show how very different the framing assumptions can be with which different people operate. The logic of that final 'if etc... what's the point?'-sequence eludes me. It implies that there can only be a point in being alive if there's some preordained metaphysical purpose. Goodness, haven't the people who think like this ever heard of the Lord's Test? (Ummm... no, not that Lord, this one.) Or the North Sea Jazz Festival? Or loving their children? Or working on a project the outcome of which is important to them?

This is the gist of what Gleiser himself goes on to say (though, strangely, he fails to mention the Lord's Test): we can have a sense of purpose without being the elements in a grand plan. He narrows things down a bit too much for my liking, saying 'our purpose comes from our rarity'. I think we can have worthwhile purposes even if it's the case that there's a lot more intelligent life knocking about out there.

Only if he sees fit or dies

After the many lessons the country has already given the world in the true meaning of a free election, it seems that Zimbabwe may be poised to add another.

Switch off everything and hold hands with someone

Don't use the phone. 'Hey, why not?' Because it's not genuine face-to-face communication with another human being but merely the appearance of human connection. And don't use text messaging either, for the same reason. 'Gee, OK then.' Another point: you should stop watching television. 'But why?' Because it gives you a mere simulation of the real thing; stick to live dramatic performances. 'Dear me... I used to enjoy my hour or two of TV in the evening - well, many evenings.'

Here speaks Alexander Chancellor:

New research shows that 77% of people over 65 now have their own computers and use the internet with gusto... It makes them feel young, they say. And they particularly like social networking because it helps them keep in touch. Well, that's what they say. But the internet can also be seen as a tool for withdrawing from the real world into a world of one's own invention. It obviates the need for any direct human contact, which can be stressful, and replaces it with a controllable system of social communication that keeps other people at an unthreatening distance. It can offer the illusion of a social life without ever having to see or talk to anyone else. This might be tempting to old people who are shy or deaf or don't like going out; but it can be a trigger for compulsive behaviour, whatever their age.

Observe the technique. It's 'that's what they say', followed by a bunch of 'can'-sentences. And following the quoted paragraph are then Chancellor's chosen examples of compulsive internet behaviour.

The short answer to 'can' is: 'doesn't have to'. Or, if 'can' is what you insist on, then how about this? The internet can be a way, another way, of engaging with the world rather than of withdrawing from it

A right to be left alone?

Here's a moral and philosophical conundrum for you. Suppose there is a site of extraterrestrial life somewhere very far off and that the life in question is not only intelligent but also - miraculously - human. These are human beings, what is more, who are technologically much further 'ahead' than we are. They have the means to detect us and they have detected us, and they have the means to travel across the vast spaces they need to in order to come and shake our hands.

Do they owe it to us to forbear - to leave us alone? Do they owe it to us on the grounds that so culturally different are they that making contact could have effects on us of a very disruptive kind that we might well find unwelcome?

These questions are suggested to me by the report under the link about uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian government officials, it says, 'currently seek to avoid direct contact' with them; and I'm presuming that that's on some such assumption as that the tribes have a self-sufficient and viable way of life and would prefer to go on going their own way. But may we simply assume that all the individuals in these tribes would share the same preference if they knew of the alternatives? May we assume that all the interrelational practices within the tribe are benign ones with respect to the individual human rights widely held to be universal rights? Isn't some at least minimal contact needed to establish whether this is the case?

Imagine (going back to them now) that those extraterrestrial humans had already found ways of solving social, medical or other problems still bedevilling us here on Earth. Suppose, similarly, we could help extend the lifespan of the average rainforest tribesperson by 50 per cent.

Don't ask me. I only pose the questions. Want you to say.

A salubrious scope

There's some puzzlement over here about use of the word 'salubrious' to refer to a casino. How could a casino be regarded as 'health-giving' or 'healthy'? (Perhaps by enabling some people to enjoy themselves in a relatively harmless way - but I better not get into that, since there are also the non-harmless aspects to consider.) The writer wonders whether there may be an evolving, ironic usage of the word to mean 'dodgy' or 'seedy'.

I shall report for my own part that in the slang of white teenagers in Bulawayo circa 1960, 'salubrious' was used in a way similar to 'cool', as widely understood now. 'Hey, that was a salubrious scope' might be said about a movie you'd just seen (with 'scope' derived from 'bioscope'). Is there anyone out there - a former denizen of Northlea School, in particular - able to confirm my memory on this point?

Afghan radio now

A five-minute video clip centring on the activities of Afghan journalist Masood Farivar.

As the man said, 'The Afghan media has come a long way since the draconian days of the Taliban regime. Dozens of organizations now compete across every platform.' And a few years on, what?