normblog

A smiling 2012

I've told you once before, I'll tell you once again: Louis says it best. See what happens shortly after two minutes in and whether it doesn't lift your soul and bring a tear to your eye.

One of my resolutions for the coming year is to listen to more jazz. Happy New Year to you all.

A world in which human beings love one another

In his exceptionally interesting essay 'Can Socialists Be Happy?', George Orwell begins with some thoughts about Dickens and Christmas and goes on to discuss how unappealing visions of utopia and Heaven tend to be. This forms the main body of the essay and leads him towards the tentative conclusion, 'It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast.' The whole is well worth reading.

But I want to discuss something Orwell says much more briefly after arriving at the above conclusion. It's this:

I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness... The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.

Now, a world with more brotherly, and sisterly, love is certainly something to be desired (as, equally, is one with more happiness than has so far been possible); but I think Orwell was wrong, nonetheless, to characterize the central objective of socialism in the way he does here. The main objective of socialism is egalitarian justice, and while establishing it, should this be possible, would depend on a widespread change of attitudes, that is something else than universal love. I shall offer two reasons for disagreeing with Orwell's characterization.

First, universal brotherly and sisterly love is not a necessary condition of socialism. We know even from non-socialist experience that people don't have to love one another to accept that others than themselves have rights to be treated with dignity, have basic human rights that must not be violated, are entitled to freedom of speech and to vote and so forth. You don't have to be everyone's friend, much less feel towards them as a loved brother or sister, to recognize the universality of such entitlements. Socialism, therefore, is essentially about the principles, procedures and institutions that are to prevail and not about the generalizing of love.

Second, it is fortunate that this should be so, since on the basis of all that we currently know, the expectation of a love that has become universal is exorbitant. Most of us, I would be willing to bet, can think of people whom we certainly do not love, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the nature of the social and economic order; and in any large society that is remotely conceivable there will, for just about anyone, be large numbers of others whom they don't love, even if they harbour no feelings of animosity towards them. It might just be people that are distant from us, or who have values that we find unattractive or repellent, or who have behaved in ways with which we cannot reconcile ourselves.

I now consider two possible counter-arguments to what I've said - one for each of those two arguments.

It might be urged in Orwell's defence that it was the principle of social harmony that he was really getting at, rather than its emotional underpinning. Perhaps so. But it remains the case that the way he describes the 'real objective' of socialism is misleading. What socialists aim at is a set of institutions and relationships; the attitudes needed to sustain these need not be as demanding as brotherly and sisterly love.

And it might be urged, also, that though it is true that most of us do not currently love everyone, this doesn't necessarily mean that a new human type (who would emerge in the changed environment of a socialist society) could not love everyone. The short answer to that is: yeah, right. The longer answer is: we have no evidence from the long history of humankind that such a development is likely; rather the opposite. If you're willing to assume away the problems of interhuman friction, indifference, hostility, etc, simply on the basis that all of this might be changeable, why not just assume away every kind of problem that stands in the way of creating a better world, without the need of looking for practical solutions? How to coordinate multiple decisions and a mass of information compatibly with egalitarian social structures? Oh, we'll come up with something. How to reconcile equality of opportunity in the second and third (etc) generations with inequality of outcomes in the first and second? There's bound to be a way. And so on

On the basis of everything we know, love has its limits and they fall far short of embracing the totality of humankind. Socialists need objectives that look reachable in the light of some serious evidence.

A Dickens of a list

For some time now I've been wanting to know what the comparative lengths are of Dickens's novels. Your guess is as good as mine as to why I've been wanting to know this, but yesterday, thanks to @DickensDaily on Twitter, I was made aware of the ranking by word count that I reproduce below:

1. David Copperfield: 357,489
2. Dombey and Son: 357,484
3. Bleak House: 355,936
4. Little Dorrit: 339,870
5. Martin Chuzzlewit: 338,077
6. Our Mutual Friend: 327,727
7. Nicholas Nickleby: 323,722
8. The Pickwick Papers: 302,190
9. Barnaby Rudge: 255,229
10. The Old Curiosity Shop: 218,538
11. Great Expectations: 186,339
12. Oliver Twist: 158,631
13. A Tale of Two Cities: 137,000
14. Hard Times: 104,821
15. The Mystery of Edwin Drood: 96,178 (first 6 of 12 parts only)

In total that's 3,859,231 words. How far along am I on the journey I began in late 2007? I have still to read numbers 4, 5, 7 and 8 and won't bother with number 15; I've also read (not on this list) A Christmas Carol. By my calculations that means I'm just a shade off two thirds of the way.

Earthly matters

Mark Steel isn't as funny as he thinks he is. In fact, much of the time he isn't funny at all. Still, he writes a column for the Independent in which funny is what he tries to be, while at the same time mixing in a little bit o' politics. Because of that - the mixing in - he can be held to certain standards of accuracy, even if there's no holding him to any requirement of humour. Here's Steel on Christopher Hitchens:

Hitchens appears to have become obsessed with defying religion, so made himself one of the most enthusiastic supporters for a war he saw as being against the craziness of Islam. But the war wasn't about God or Allah, it was about more earthly matters, which the people conducting that war understood. And, as that war became predictably disastrous, they were grateful for whatever support they could find. And so a man dedicated to disproving GOD was praised in his death by the soppiest, sickliest, most, irrational, hypocritical Christian of them all. [Tony Blair, geddit? - NG]

You can say what you like about Hitchens - and many who disagreed with his politics have been doing just that since he died - but defying religion wasn't the only, or indeed the principal, motive he had in supporting the war in Iraq. Most prominent here was his opposition to the regime of a murderous tyrant, Saddam Hussein - an earthly matter indeed, if not a very funny one. Now, why would Mark Steel (and a spillion or so others on the left) be interested in eliding that fact?

Hugo, from C to deadly c

Hugo Chávez has a new hypothesis. It's not an accusation; he's just reflecting. In any case, he wonders whether his enemies to the North might have done something to induce cancer among Latin America's leaders. You remember who Hugo Chávez is, don't you? Of course you do - he's the hero of Camden.

Don't say 'sci fi'

While I'm in the country of usage, I want to return to an issue I aired on this blog seven and a half years ago. (Seven and a half years, would you believe! Why is it that blogging seems not to inhabit real time but some other kind of universe in which much of it seems like yesterday, or indeed all posts are simultaneous with each other and capable of being referenced 'sideways' as if from one page in a book to another? Anyway...) That was the issue of why the evidently better practice of calling science fiction 'SF' for short had to compete with the evidently worse practice of calling it 'sci fi' (ouch). At the time, I wrote about my preference in this matter as being a prejudice I had, which I couldn't really justify by argument; and my post on the subject produced some follow-up email correspondence which I duly posted as well.

Readers, I'm here to tell you that I've now thought of an argument in favour of my prejudice preference. 'Sci fi' is supposed to abbreviate 'science fiction', but it is spoken as if it rhymes with 'hi fi'. What kind of sense does that make? If I say 'in the circs', I wouldn't pronounce 'circs' to rhyme with, say, 'larks', so that it came out 'sarks'. If I say 'peeps', I don't rhyme it with 'hopes' and call them 'popes'. And so on, you get the picture. Accordingly, 'sci fi' ought to be said as if the second syllable was the beginning of the word 'fiction'. But no one says it like that. It would sound silly, as if it had been interrupted by a sponge suddenly being thrust into the mouth of the speaker. From now on I'll be urging this silly pronunciation upon all who say 'sci fye', in the hope of shaming them towards the more elegant 'SF'.

Blogs that are really posts

Resisting a linguistic usage that's already made some headway is mostly a waste of time, but I'm prompted by a tweet from my friend Damian to try and hold the line against referring to the posts that appear on a blog as being, themselves, 'blogs'. No. OK? Just no. It's a bad habit. I can surmise how it has come about: (1) 'blog', initially, a noun derived from 'weblog' and denoting these internet diaries or journals or whatever; (2) then, 'to blog', as the derivative verb for the activity of writing on a blog; and (3) then, further along, 'blogs', as the discrete products of the activity of blogging, those individual items that appear on the (larger) blog.

But it's confusing as well as horrid. We already have the word 'post' or 'blogpost'. To call a post a blog risks mixing people up. If I read a post on your... er... weblog and then tell you 'Good blog', am I praising that particular post or your website overall?

So there, it's not just a prejudice. It's a plea for preserving a useful distinction. It's like... You can use 'criteria' incorrectly as being a singular as well as plural form. But why do this when you already have the correct singular, 'criterion'? What will someone who says 'I don't agree with your criteria' be saying?

(This has been a post and not a blog. A blog is what it appears on.)

Noble but not righteous?

I follow that story about Italian rescuer Gino Bartali with one told by Eva Weisel in yesterday's New York Times. Weisel sets out the details of how she and her family were saved by 'an influential local man' and then reports on the effort, so far unsuccessful, to have him honoured by Yad Vashem:

During the horrors of the Holocaust, non-Jews saved many thousands of Jews from death and depravity at the hands of Germans and their allies. Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial museum, has recognized more than 23,000 of these brave men and women as "The Righteous Among the Nations." Our family's rescuer deserves to be among that number. And in his case, the impact of recognition would have powerful reverberations, striking a blow against Holocaust denial in a part of the world where such denial is widespread.

That is because my hometown is Mahdia, on the eastern shore of Tunisia, and our rescuer, Khaled Abdul Wahab, was an Arab Muslim. (He passed away in 1997.)

So far, however, Abdul Wahab has been denied the recognition he deserves. Nearly five years ago, in January 2007, the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem nominated him to be a "righteous," the first Arab ever to be formally considered for this honor. This nomination was based on witness testimony from my late sister, Anny Boukris. In March of that year, however, the official Commission for the Designation of the Righteous, a body presided over by a retired Israeli judge and created by Israeli law to decide who merits recognition as a "righteous," voted to reject the nomination. That decision was kept secret for two years.

In 2010, that same jurist, Justice Jacob Tuerkel, sent the Abdul Wahab file back to the commission for a second review. This time, the case was bolstered by two fresh testimonies - a video interview of my cousin Edmee Masliah, who was with me at the farm and now lives outside Paris, and a notarized letter I wrote recounting my own experience. Yad Vashem now had three firsthand accounts of the story. But to my complete dismay, the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous once again voted to reject the nomination. Abdul Wahab was a noble man, I was told by Yad Vashem, but his actions did not rise to the statutory level required to merit the "righteous" designation - that is, he didn't "risk his life" to save Jewish lives.

While that may be the wording of the law, I am told by experts that Abdul Wahab would not be the first rescuer of Jews not to have suffered physical harm, let alone life-threatening danger. Many in France who have won that designation were honored because they acted to save Jews without knowing for sure what fate would await them if they were caught. In addition, some of the famous diplomats honored as righteous were never arrested, injured or threatened with death for aiding Jews.

Not being a party to the deliberations of those who decided to withhold the award in the case of Khaled Abdul Wahab, of course I don't have the information they have, and can only go on what I've read here (though see also this earlier normblog post). On that basis, however, it appears to me that Eva Weisel has a point. The criteria for the Righteous Among The Nations award do include the running of some risk: 'Risk to the rescuer's life, liberty or position'. Yet, except where rescuers actually lost their lives or suffered incarceration or some other grave consequence for trying to save Jews from the Nazis, the inference that they took a significant risk must arise from the overall context as well as from the details of their particular rescue initiative. The very fact that someone acted to thwart a German attempt, during wartime, to round up Jewish families surely suggests they might have been incurring some danger by doing so. As Weisel indicates, there were rescuers in Europe who have been recognized as Righteous Among The Nations although the level of risk they took seems not to have been very high.

Naturally, those deciding on the award will not want to devalue it; but it is better in this matter to err on the side of recognition where the risk was low than on the side of withholding the award when it might be fully merited.

The dulcet tones of Hamas

As delivered by Ismail Haniyeh:

We say today, explicitly, so it cannot be explained otherwise, that the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel] from the blessed land of Palestine. The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine - all of Palestine, Allah willing. Allah Akbar and praise Allah. We say with transparency and in a clear manner, that Palestinian reconciliation - and all sides must know this - cannot come at the expense of [our] principles, at the expense of the resistance. These principles are absolute and cannot be disputed: Palestine - all of Palestine - is from the sea to the river. We won't relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine. The involvement of Hamas at any stage with the interim objective of liberation of [only] Gaza, the West Bank, or Jerusalem, does not replace its strategic view concerning Palestine and the land of Palestine.

You can see and hear him saying all that here. Next time you hear some Western leftist (verkrappt branch) mouthing off with the slogan 'from the river to the sea', all the while adding assurances about a secular-democratic state for Palestine, you might draw his or her attention to Haniyeh's words, 'expulsion of the invaders and usurpers from the blessed land of Palestine'.

Hoodwinked into war

I read a post on Comment is Free just before Christmas, and figured I'd leave it alone just then as I didn't want to do anything to interrupt the build-up towards peace and goodwill. The post is not of any great significance in any case, but I like it for the neat illustration it provides of a mindset in which, when it comes to issues of war and peace, the assumption is fixed in stone that there is only one viable point of view and that the writer is in possession of it and everyone else but the malign forces of government would share it with him were they not being duped by those malign forces.

The post in question is by George Chesterton, who laments what he calls 'the militarisation of popular culture'. He does begin by giving their due to our '[d]edicated servicemen and women', but after that it's simply assumed that they should not be or have been in Afghanistan:

[I]t is our fault we allowed our politicians to send them to conflicts that served little purpose other than to cling on to some amorphous notion of national power. Now the debate about why they are still dying - and killing - in Afghanistan has disappeared from public life. Instead, an acceptance that the military is an agent for good has become the norm...

Note 'served little purpose' and deprecation of the notion that the military might be an agent for good. Note also, in what follows, his thought that 'we are being chaperoned [my emphasis] down this path amid economic gloom' and that 'the public have been taught to love [mine again] those who fight but not to hate the fact that they are still fighting'. Finally, there's the conclusion, 'it is our responsibility to stop the government sending them out to die in the first place'. What, regardless?

Reading this piece, it isn't just that one might disagree with him on certain points - as I do. It's his self-contained certainty that there's nothing to weigh on the other side of the question, nothing at any rate that merits being registered in order to supply an answer to it. The guy doesn't mention that Britain first went into Afghanistan in response to the attacks of 9/11 and did so with considerable public support; that one consequence was the overthrow of Taliban rule in that country, which has had some benefits for its people; or (at the end) that sometimes going to war is justified and necessary. The whole thing is framed as if George Chesterton just knows the truth and everyone else would be with him in recognizing it had they not been mistaught and mischaperoned.