normblog

Dancing away your culture

The Machol Israeli Dancing Club of Melbourne has withdrawn from a Multicultural Folk Dance Festival in Mansfield because the organizers had removed 'Israeli' from the group's title, and described them instead as Jewish - though, as it happens, not all of Machol's members are Jewish. When Esther Blumenthal-Skop of Machol asked the organizers for an explanation of the name change, she was told that they 'would not be held responsible for [the] consequences if the words "Israel" or "Israeli" were used to describe the group'.

Thus: if you perceive a threat to some of the participants in your festival, you don't take steps to ensure their safety; no, you cave in to the threat, whether real or imagined. It gives a new meaning to the 'cultural' in 'multicultural'.

The Beatles' greatest eight

Longtime readers of this blog may recall my poll on the best-loved songs of the Beatles from June 2007. Whether you do or not, I now point you towards Rolling Stone magazine's 100 Greatest Beatles Songs. I did a comparison of their top 10 with the top 10 from the normblog poll and was interested to find that fully eight of the songs coincide. Below are the top 10 from my poll, with the placings at Rolling Stone recorded after the oblique stroke. Only 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'Here Comes The Sun' are not in the top 10 overlap:

01 (36) - A Day In The Life /1
02 (35) - Eleanor Rigby /[22]
03 (31) - Hey Jude /7
03 (31) - Yesterday /4
05 (25) - Here Comes The Sun /[28]
06 (21) - While My Guitar Gently Weeps /10
07 (18) - In My Life /5
08 (17) - Let It Be /8
08 (17) - Strawberry Fields Forever /3
10 (16) - Something /6

This yields an authoritative top eight.

The normblog profile 399: Love and Garbage

The Love and Garbage blog was set up over five years ago and is currently hosted here. Its author is a 30-something parent, TV viewer and lawyer who lives and works in central Scotland and who writes occasionally on law, politics, the media and scones.

Why do you blog? > There are various motives. Sometimes it is to inform, or to raise awareness of an issue not in general public discourse (e.g. I posted a number of times about whether a referendum could be legislated for by the Scottish Parliament a year before it became an issue in the mainstream media). Sometimes it is as an outlet for absurdity or satire, in the hope that I might make someone laugh. And sometimes there is no thought of an audience - just to write out or about issues that have concerned or interested me, in order to attempt to gather my thoughts in a coherent way.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Making contact with people with similar interests furth of my home area.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > Touching on some issues in Scottish politics can lead to the receipt of offensive comments. With young children the receipt of some of these pre-moderated comments into the family email inbox has meant that I have deliberately steered clear of certain issues.

What are your favourite blogs? > I particularly enjoy reading Lallands Peat Worrier, a blog reasonably well known in Scotland but which deserves a wider audience. The blog deals primarily with Scottish legal and political issues with erudition and wit. I also enjoy reading Alex Massie and Obsolete.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Eric Clive. He is one of the unsung heroes of modern life. He was a Scottish law commissioner for two decades and was responsible for the modernization of much of Scots law (including the transformation of family law). Following his retirement from the Scottish law Commission, he is now part of a group working on the codification (the setting out of legal principles in a legislative form) of private law across Europe, bringing together the best of the legal traditions across the continent.

What are you reading at the moment? > I usually have two or three books on the go. I am currently reading China Miéville's The City and the City, Georges Simenon's My Friend Maigret, and Arthur C. Clarke's Collected Stories.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Galton and Simpson, Terrance Dicks, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. Galton and Simpson should need no explanation. They wrote Hancock. They wrote Steptoe. What more does one need to say? Gray and Kelman rejuvenated Scottish fiction at the end of the 20th century; Terrance Dicks may sit a little oddly on the list and be a more unfamiliar name. He script-edited Doctor Who in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and wrote over 60 novelizations of TV stories. These books - typically 127 or 144 pages - played a large role in encouraging me (and many others) to engage with fiction. I have maintained my old Doctor Who collection and it has been a delight to read them to my children, who seem to get the same pleasure from them that I did.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > I admire many novelists and read a lot of fiction. I admire Banville, Roth, Coetzee, Kelman, Klima, Lem etc. From day to day my favourite novel changes. Today, I'd say Pfitz by Andrew Crumey.

What is your favourite poem? > I could choose any one of a number of poems by Norman MacCaig. Currently, my favourite of his is 'A Man in My Position'.

What is your favourite movie? > Touch of Evil. In some ways the casting is ridiculous: Charlton Heston as a Mexican policeman? But from the opening shot (whether in the original release with Mancini score or the restored version) it is compelling. Welles, as Quinlan, is monstrous.

What is your favourite song? > I prefer instrumental work so this is not quite a song, but I love 'The Wind-up' by Keith Jarrett's European quartet (including Jan Garbarek).

Who is your favourite composer? > J.S. Bach.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > Bicameralism and the virtues of legislators who come from outwith the normal political system. As a student I was in favour of scrapping the House of Lords. Watching the unicameral Scottish Parliament in operation, and its inadequacy as a vehicle for proper legislative scrutiny, I have moved to a position where I feel a second chamber is necessary, and would benefit from independent appointees from outwith the political parties to allow for scrutiny that was not dependent on the party whips.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Liberalism.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Viscount Stair's The Institutions of the Law of Scotland. I have read and continue to read this. It is the foundation of modern Scots law, and consequently has had a major role in the development of the legal system I use in my day-to-day work. It is a work informed by great Roman law texts of the past, by natural law thinking (of which I am largely sceptical), and by a familiarity with the approaches of European legal traditions.

Who are your political heroes? > Roy Jenkins and J.S. Mill.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > The UK is an odd place in that in order to find out what the laws are that govern our day-to-day lives you need to trawl through multiple volumes of legislation, and case reports, and commentaries. I would have a written constitution delimiting the powers of the state, and codify our private and criminal law to take an important step in demystifying the legal system.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > The best is yet to come, provided humanity never loses its innate curiosity.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > With the economic difficulties of the day it is easy (and understandable) to worry about what might happen. Having children – and the way in which when very young they live in the instant – has taught me the truth of Dennis Potter's words in his final television interview when he described the 'blossomest blossom' and living in and celebrating the present tense.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > I tend to avoid novels where the writer's name appears in large gold-embossed letters on the cover. This meant I did not read John Le Carré for some time, which was a mistake.

What is your favourite proverb? > In primary school we had an old English textbook that mangled proverbs in an exercise where you had to find the real proverbs or phrases. The mangled 'Many hands make good canoe' remains my favourite.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > I've never understood the attraction of golf.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Norway.

What would your ideal holiday be? > A lengthy period in Oslo and the surrounding countryside.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > I read; and I enjoy DVDs and CDs of old British dramas and comedies.

What talent would you most like to have? > Some musical competence.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Legislative drafting has its attractions as an intellectual discipline. Writing for television was my ambition when I was a youngster.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Of the living Larry David, Chris Morris and Magnus Mills. Of the dead: Thurber and Hancock.

Who are your sporting heroes? > Cynical Italian defenders from the 1980s. I was the solitary child that played at being Claudio Gentile in school football matches rather than trying to be Kenny Dalglish.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Dennis Potter, Orson Welles and John Banville.

[A list of all the normblog profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Why does inequality matter?

Not all of it does. There are inequalities that are unobjectionable from a moral point of view. To give a crude example, if A is in prison for a rape or murder that he committed, and after receiving a proportionate sentence as the outcome of a fair trial, while B, who is guilty of no crime, retains her freedom to go about, this is an inequality between A and B but it is a just inequality. It may be objected that my example is not what people generally have in mind when discussing inequality; they are referring, rather, to social and economic inequalities. No worries, I can adapt the example. If A works hard at a job for 10 years while B, in the same job, takes life really easy, then - assuming no other significant differential between them than that A made the effort and B preferred not to - B has no grounds to complain of the fact that A's life now goes better than B's does because A has earned better rewards; B has no grounds for complaint even if he or she has come to think that the years of taking it easy were a mistake. Ditto if A and B are in different occupations and A tries hard while B doesn't. The resulting inequalities here are not unjust inequalities - at least so long as we suppose that people are responsible agents and answerable for what they do (and, in this post, I'm not going to question this supposition).

Some inequalities do, however, matter morally - they are unjust. A paradigm example would be severe inequalities in the lives of children that are due to the different economic situations of their parents. Children are not responsible for the economic advantages and disadvantages they are born to. It is a matter of luck and the luck isn't evened up by what is called equality of opportunity. How can it be just for one child to live in great hardship or deprivation and another not, merely because the parents to whom they were born have fared differently? How can it be just that, not only their lives as children, but their life chances subsequently, right down to their expected longevity, should depend on something they could have done nothing about? Much social and economic inequality is of this kind: not earned, whether positively or negatively, not deserved, but due to a lottery of birth.

If inequalities matter morally, however, that is why they do, because of being unjust in themselves, and this brings me to the crux of the present post. In the column here Heather Stewart argues that 'a decent standard of living for those at the bottom of the heap should be the mark of a decent society'. That's for sure. In support of the contention Stewart details some of the indices of inequality in Britain today. But then she writes the following:

Yet as the High Pay Commission report argues, such a gaping divide between rich and poor is corrosive: it undermines any sense of belonging, or community, or mutual responsibility.

I have nothing against the principle of community, but I think that appealing to it in this context is problematic. Either the inequalities that appear troubling are morally objectionable in themselves or they aren't. If they are, that is why we should want to do something about them; not because it will erode our sense of community. On the other hand, if they aren't morally objectionable, why should they be overriden in the name of community. Communities shouldn't place impositions upon individuals within them only because they're aimed at things perceived as divisive. This can easily become a formula for illiberal conformism or worse.

I should perhaps end by emphasizing that I do not think the extent of the inequalities in Britain and other advanced capitalist societies is justifiable as the result of differential effort. Not remotely.

Enlightened

Until this morning I didn't know what a 'Jew goal' was. Now, I'm sorry to say, I do know.

Occupation unlimited?

In a letter to the Guardian today, 31 people - among them, Tony Benn and George Monbiot - express their support for the Occupy movement. In doing so, they say that the efforts to disperse occupiers are an attempt to stifle protest, and they speak of the 'need to defend the right to protest'. It is indeed important to defend the right to protest. But it doesn't automatically follow that every move to dislodge people who are occupying somewhere or other is an assault on that right. It depends - unless, that is, one believes that the right to protest entails a freedom to occupy any place that groups of would-be protesters choose to occupy. Rights of protest obviously can't entail this.

Some of the reasons why not may be inferred from the ruling of Ontario Superior Court Judge David Brown a couple of days ago that the city of Toronto has a right to evict the Occupy Toronto protesters from St James Park. Here (most but not all of them culled from the Canadian press, but checked against the ruling itself) are some excerpts from his decision [pdf]:

[T]heir message expresses a fundamental disagreement with the structure of the global economy. Those are most legitimate issues to raise in the public forum. The Protesters have every right to voice their critiques of the current political, economic and financial systems and to seek to bring others over to their point of view.

Although proclaiming a message of participatory democracy, the evidence, unfortunately, reveals that the Protesters did not practise what they were preaching when they decided to occupy the Park. Specifically, they did not ask those who live and work around the Park or those who use the Park - or their civic representatives - what they would think if the Park was turned into a tent city.
.....
The Charter [Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms] does not permit the Protesters to take over public space without asking, exclude the rest of the public from enjoying their traditional use of that space, and then contend that they are under no obligation to leave. By taking that position and by occupying the Park the Protesters are breaking the law. Such civil disobedience attracts consequences.
.....
The amount of space available for public use in a tent-free park necessarily would be much greater than the amount available in a park populated with 300 tents, 3 yurts and approximately 10 larger tent structures. Such a dense coverage of the Park's space by structures inevitability reduces the amount of land available for non-protesters to use and enjoy in the Park. The evidence shows that the Protesters have appropriated to their exclusive use most of the area in the Park.
.....
[I]f the Protesters possess a constitutional right to occupy the Park and appropriate it to their use, then the next protest group espousing a political message would have the right to so occupy another park, say, Moss Park; and the next group the next park, and so on, and so forth.
.....
I have no hesitation in concluding that the evidence shows that there is proportionality. In seeking compliance with two provisions of the Parks By-law, the Trespass Notice would have the effect of ending the Protesters monopoly of a public park in downtown Toronto and requiring them to share it with the rest of the public. The Protesters have ample means left to express their message, including continued use of the Park (but no structures or "midnight hours"), and other Torontonians can resume their use of the Park.

There are likely to be many more legal judgements on this question unless the Occupy movement suddenly fizzles out, which looks improbable; and it will be interesting to see how much they vary. But, in any case, the clear implication of Judge David Brown's ruling is that the right to protest doesn't depend on being able to occupy any space of one's choosing. At the same time, I don't think it follows from this that the right to protest needs no such public spaces - spaces available for protesters to occupy for some more or less lengthy period.

Think of it like this. Technically, literally, my right and yours to protest about this or that requires neither that you and I be able to march alongside others in the same cause nor even that we be free to assemble together. I could just say my piece wherever I happened to be, as you could. Still we regard the freedom of assembly as a crucial one, as we do, too, the freedom to process together in public demonstrations - which democratic societies are bound to accommodate. This is because a protest uttered by an isolated individual is not as effective as one registered in collective form, and neither are a series of individual but separate protests. Most effective political action is a mode of acting with others, it is a quintessentially social activity; and therefore a secure right of protest needs the wherewithal for acting jointly.

It is reasonable, equally, to contend that a legitimate form of collective protest, other than marching or holding a brief demonstration at some selected spot, is to create a longer presence through some form of encampment. This doesn't license people to occupy any space they please. Otherwise a group of would-be protesters could freely set up permanent camp in Tony Benn's garden, or the offices of the Guardian, or blocking a bridge or other thoroughfare that is vital to the flow of traffic in London or some other city. It does mean, however, that there should be public spaces available for this form of continuous protest, since it is a from of protest which has a proper place in a liberal democratic society - or so I am arguing it is reasonable to think.

But what if, such spaces being duly available, or duly made available by democratic decision if and where they aren't yet, it is thought by some people that the spaces available don't suffice, or aren't good enough ones, or are not well situated for the purpose of the protest's being noticed? May the protesters in a democracy, deciding to be creative, then just settle down where they please? Well, it's a contestation over the extent of the rights of use of public spaces for the purposes of protest. But, as the judge said, it may also be - depending on what the law is regarding some particular space - an act of civil disobedience. Standardly, those who engage in civil disobedience do so aware of the consequences and willing to face these.

Belief and choice

In a post on the Dish, one of Andrew Sullivan's readers questions whether atheism is a choice. This raises the more general question of whether any sincerely held belief is a choice - and Andrew signals a couple of earlier posts in which there is discussion of that question.

I think it would be, in general, misleading to talk of sincere beliefs as if they were arrived at by choice. The temptation to do so may be based on the fact that a person's beliefs can, and sometimes do, change; so they are not just like some permanent, biologically-fixed feature of his or her make-up. But they are also not like anything that can be the object of a free choice - such as, say, whether I'll have this or that flavour of ice cream (when I like both equally well), or whether I'll take a holiday in July or in August. If after considering the matter carefully, I have come to the conclusion that there is no God, I cannot but be an atheist. I could pretend not to be one. I could try not to be one - by reconsidering all the best arguments for not being one. But if this doesn't work, it doesn't work. I'm stuck with the belief. The same applies to other beliefs: I don't choose to think that respecting human rights is a better way of relating to other people than violating them; I don't know how to think otherwise.

This is surely one of the reasons why we regard freedom of belief as so important. It is very painful to have to renounce what one believes - even if this is only a public show. Belief is mostly a case of being able to do (to think) no other.

Indignant and weak

Further to this post: I don't know how many times I've seen the Arab Spring invoked as having been an inspiration to anti-capitalist and other protesters in the Occupy movement, but it's plenty. It is worth noting, therefore, that while in Egypt the holding of elections - sooner or later - and transition to civilian rule is regarded as a key demand, for (as a Guardian leader today puts it) 'inject[ing] badly needed legitimacy to the political process', there are protesters actually celebrating the result of the general election in Spain, won by the rightwing Popular Party. They 'question the very legitimacy of electoral politics', looking forward as they do to a 'new form of politics'.

I wonder what it takes - in Spain, after Franco! - to drive home the idea that, whatever else you might think necessary to further democratizing a political system, not being able to get people elected who represent your views is not a sign of strength in the country at large, it is a sign of political weakness.

Knitting the past

Over lunch WotN has just told me that she recently saw a child doing French knitting. While I was glad to learn that children still do this, I was also shocked to be told that the child had a French knitting set. Good heavens! In my day, back in Bulawayo, we had to fashion an old bit of wood into a sort of cotton reel, then wear down old bits of metal until we had four pin-shapes, run across the bush to catch a sheep from which we then got wool, and dye this with the plant juices we found to hand. By the time we'd produced a few inches of French knitting we knew the meaning of initiative and hard work, and had developed scads of moral character.

No end of politics

In today's Daily Telegraph Mary Riddell begins by emphasizing the stark contrasts on the economic map of contemporary Britain (and beyond): on one hand, 'more than a million unemployed 16- to 24-year-olds'; on the other, 'the top 0.1 per cent of British earners... as rich as Croesus'; overall, 'a pay gap that is widening to Victorian levels'. She ends by saying that 'in one respect, Karl Marx was right. Capitalism has been shown to contain the seeds of its destruction', and 'the world may be staring at the end of politics'.

Riddell is right about those stark contrasts. Whether she is right about Marx is moot: it's arguable - and I would argue - that though, for Marx, capitalism contains the seeds of its destruction, these can only lead to a positive outcome if the political forces are in place, and adequately prepared, to transform capitalism into something better. Until then, there is no end of politics in sight; there are only better and worse forms of politics. Where democracy is really in jeopardy, that is because a worse kind of politics threatens to take its place - whether of dictatorship, fascism, technocratic oligarchy, or whatever. It may be as well not to shout about the end of politics in political systems that still retain functioning institutions of democratic representation and competition, the free articulation of interests and opinion, when these are among the most important mechanisms for asserting control over the distribution and use of wealth.