normblog

Juvenilia

[It's Friday, what the hell. Looking through some old stuff, I came across this from the Northlea School Magazine for 1960 - Northlea being the high school in Bulawayo that I attended between 1956 and 1961. It's the editorial for that year. It's unsigned, but is by yours truly at the age of 16 or 17, for the editorial team. Make of it what you will.]

Editorial

This year, for the first time, the Northlea School Magazine is not being edited by a member of Staff but by pupils of the Sixth Form. Is this a good thing? We think that it is, since the pupils can now feel that the magazine is more their own work than it has been in the past. And not only has the editorial been handed over to us, but much of the other material contained in the magazine; for example, notes on sporting activities have also been written by the pupils. There are, too, other and perhaps more important advantages. For this handing over of responsibility is in keeping with the recently introduced policy of the School: prefects are being given more duties and more authority, as are sub-prefects, monitors and form captains; and the library, too, is being run by pupils. Thus the policy is one of forming minds that are more responsible, independent and self-reliant.

The necessity for having in society responsible people who might one day become leaders has never been more apparent than it is today. The chaotic state of affairs that reigns throughout the world is a clear indication that there is an urgent need for far-sightedness and tolerance on all sides. For only this can overcome the troubles, whether political, racial or otherwise, and thus bring about a peaceful solution. The two possibilities that the next few decades offer have, we know, been presented many times: on the one hand there is dissension and strife that can bring only disaster; on the other there is a world peaceful and having the endless opportunities offered by the enormous advances that have been made in science, medicine and, in fact, in all fields. However, we do not feel it unreasonable to bring up the great contrast between these possibilities once again. For it is an idea that needs to be driven home to all, and when once people have fully realised what another war could mean, when they begin to fear the consequences of stubbornness and intolerance, only then may we look forward with hope to the future and the more peaceful of the two paths that humanity can take.

The stress, therefore, must surely be on a better-educated and a more responsible society. And in order to obtain this a beginning must be made at school, for only there can those essentials that go to make up a peaceful world be learnt; the adult is already indoctrinated, his prejudices are firmly rooted and will remain so.

"And we will help to bring to pass in the world the dreams our fathers dreamed, of lands that are free, of people growing in friendship, in love, in co-operation and peace. This is history's challenge to us. I know, as you do, that we shall not fail." - Paul Robeson.

Grandparents

Being a link to a column about people like... why, like me (ouch!) and WotN. You might be interested. I was.

The boycott opinion glass

There's encouraging news in the results of a poll for the Jewish Chronicle that Martin Bright reports on in that paper:

[P]eople calling for a boycott of Israeli actors, dancers and musicians are not in the majority in this country. Sometimes, in the heat of the debate, it is easy to lose perspective. The voices branding Israel an apartheid state are so shrill and vocal that it is easy to forget that they command only limited support.

Easy to forget for people (including me) whose impression of national opinion is too much influenced by the Guardian and its more verkrappt left periphery. In any event, Martin continues:

The YouGov poll carried out for the JC shows that most people in this country believe Israeli artists should be welcome to perform here. Younger people and Labour voters are marginally less supportive of Israeli artists playing here, but only just...

The picture is different when it comes to British artists playing in Israel: when 27 per cent of people believe we should not send our cultural talent to play in a particular country, this is something that should give cause for concern. However, it is important to bear in mind that 37 per cent also oppose a boycott in this direction.

Martin also warns against taking too sanguine a view of these survey results:

[B]efore we start thinking that the boycott glass is half-full, we should look at the less positive aspects of the poll. It is sobering to know, for example, that 17 per cent of the public believe Israeli artists should not be welcome in this country. For most countries in the world this figure would be zero.

If that doesn't suggest the need for an explanation, probably nothing will.

Herbert Lom 1917-2012

It has taken the death of Herbert Lom, at the age of 95, for me to discover that he was born Herbert Karel Angelo Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru. This is how he will be remembered as an actor by many who saw him - as Chief Inspector Dreyfus, opposite Peter Sellers' Clouseau.

Fiction dereliction

Just as there are people who think that Wikipedia is wrecking our civilization, so Sir Peter Stothard, chairman of this year's Man Booker Prize panel of judges, thinks that book bloggers are wrecking our civilization:

"It is wonderful that there are so many blogs and websites devoted to books, but to be a critic is to be importantly different than those sharing their own taste... Not everyone's opinion is worth the same."

The rise of blogging has proved particularly worrying, he says. "Eventually that will be to the detriment of literature. It will be bad for readers; as much as one would like to think that many bloggers opinions are as good as others. It just ain't so. People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we'll be worse off..."

I think Sir Peter could do with getting off his high horse. People can read book blogs or indeed blog about books themselves without believing, or implying, or lending support to the thesis, that one opinion is as good as another. Nor is it credible that the overall effect of a more widespread discussion of books will be that more books of lower quality will be read. One might think that before the advent of book-blogging, when critical discussion of books was more confined, nobody read any literature of the sort Stothard would regard as inferior. It is much more likely that the relative democratization of opinion-sharing about, and critical discussion of, books will be a beneficial one.

There is a measured discussion here of Stothard's remarks, by John Self. But Self concedes too much, for my taste. He goes along with this lot:

"The novel is more than a story. Storytelling is a great art and not to be knocked."

"Yet, If the English novel does nothing to renew the English language, then it really doesn't do anything. The great works of art have to renew the language in which they're written. They have to offer a degree of resistance."

Storytelling a great art, but unless the novel does something to renew the English language, unless it offers 'a degree of resistance', it does nothing. Oh, please! What about the aforesaid art of storytelling? What if a given novel merely tells a good story well and without offering resistance? So, then, it may not be at the cutting edge or a 'great work of art', but it could still be an excellent novel. If it tells a story, if it makes you think, if it shows you something about the world, about people; it might do these things in a fresh way or in a traditional way, exploring new forms or sticking with old and recognized ones; if it's part of the great continent of fiction and wins readers and holds them, that is good enough and plenty. Sir Peter Stothard's requirements are narrow and stultifying.

Poor rich people

There's an article at Greater Good that reports on the negative effects of inequality. It's by Jason Marsh, the editor in chief there, and 'there' is The Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley; it 'studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being'. I'm all for highlighting the harmful consequences of inequality, but I'm sceptical about the particularities of Marsh's argument in this piece.

What it highlights are the harmful consequences of inequality, not for the poor - though it does refer to these too, taking them for granted - but for the rich themselves. Marsh refers to studies showing that 'attaining high social status impairs key social and emotional skills'; rich people are less able 'to read other people's emotions' than are their poorer compatriots, are less compassionate, feel less empathy. Furthermore - and this is key to the criticism I shall go on to make - the emotional skills which the rich possess and display less than others do are skills 'linked to leading a happy, meaningful life', and so 'they risk depleting their own reserves of happiness'. On this basis Marsh believes that inequality should be 'a concern for anyone who cares about the health and well-being of American society as a whole'.

Well, so it should, on grounds of fairness. My scepticism about the above argument relates, however, to the subtext it carries, which is to the effect that everyone, rich as well as poor, has a common interest in addressing and trying to lessen high levels of inequality. This is a most implausible view. To begin to see why, one only has to ask: if the rich are made unhappy by their wealth why aren't they clamouring in large numbers for programmes to deal with the imbalance and the inequities involved in their having it? An attempted answer might be: they're unhappy, or less happy than they might be, but they just don't know it. This sort of thing is sometimes possible, of course; that someone is unhappy without knowing the causes of their unhappiness. But it is usually possible in such cases to help them towards understanding the source of the problem; through conversation, information, therapy, or what have you. There's nothing wrong with trying to do that, to convince the rich that they too would be a lot better off if they were less rich.

As a general political project, however, what I would say about this is - good luck with it. While it might have some success, persuading a proportion of the very rich, it will fail with others, and most others. Marsh ignores certain pertinent 'relativities' in the present context. He trades on the hypothesis of an unhappiness of the wealthy, of which the wealthy themselves are supposed to be more or less ignorant - not knowing either of their unhappy emotional state or of its causes - but he doesn't reckon with the possibility that the very wealthy may in fact be on balance more happy than otherwise, because the advantages and conveniences of wealth outweigh its emotional disbenefits, so that there is a net gain in happiness. For this reason, I hypothesize that the struggle to reduce inequality will have to rely, as it always has done, more on those who suffer its ill effects at the sharp end, so to say, than on those putatively short on human empathy because of their riches (who can, incidentally, always give lots of money away if they choose to, thereby gaining an extra psychological boost).

Memory as grudge and as protection

Philip Gourevitch is the author of a fine and important book on the Rwandan genocide. I am therefore surprised to see him expressing this too simple view about memory, in connection with genocide, in an interview at the Boston Review:

[W]hat really interests me ultimately is not to record the past, so much as how people live with the past and get on with it. There's a kind of fetishization of memory in our culture. Some of it comes from the experience and the memorial culture of the Holocaust - the injunction to remember. And it also comes from the strange collision of Freud and human rights thinking - the belief that anything that is not exposed and addressed and dealt with is festering and going to come back to destroy you. This is obviously not true. Memory is not such a cure-all. On the contrary, many of the great political crimes of recent history were committed in large part in the name of memory. The difference between memory and grudge is not always clean. Memories can hold you back, they can be a terrible burden, even an illness. Yes, memory - hallowed memory - can be a kind of disease. That's one of the reasons that in every culture we have memorial structures and memorial days, whether for personal grief or for collective historical traumas. Because you need to get on with life the rest of the time and not feel the past too badly. I'm not talking about letting memory go. The thing is to contain memory, and then, on those days, or in those places, you can turn on the tap and really touch and feel it. The idea is not oblivion or even denial of memory. It's about not poisoning ourselves with memory.

Some of what Gourevitch says here makes good sense. It can be better - better for those aggrieved - to put the past behind them rather than let it eat away. This may be true in public as in personal life. The glancing allusion to Freud makes the necessary point: memories can indeed 'hold you back'. Equally, what he says about containing memory puts proper emphasis on giving priority to the 'aims of life'.

On the other hand, linking memory with the bearing of a grudge narrows its functions. The difference between memory and grudge, says Gourevitch, is 'not always clean'. Not always; but that leaves open the possibility, which is in fact a reality, that memory can also have nothing whatever to do with grudge. In the given context, remembering genocide, memory can be not about nourishing a grievance, but about educating those who do not know, or do not know enough, or those who deflect the grim truths about what human beings can sometimes do (and very quickly), with false comforts drawn from 'normal' times and lucky places. It's not only about marking terrible wrongs when they have been done, out of respect for the victims, though this has its own importance; it's also about the world, even at this late date, needing to learn and understand.

(See my series of which this post is the most recent and which was conceived with the rationale I've argued for above.)

Must-read

Yesterday I came across two or three posts (blog, tweet or facebook) pointing me towards a must-read item. Not the first time it's happened, obviously, but I took against it. I didn't want to read that particular must-read piece, and while I have no objection to being told what I might read or even what I should read, as a free citizen I decided to take exception to being told what I must read.

But, then, good sense and the calming influence of more than a thousand cricket books around the walls of my south Cambridge fastness worked their magic upon what I like to call my mind and I saw that there was no need to take exception. Logic rather than morality was the way forward.

Imagine a team of clever folk compiling a list of the world's must-read books. They start: The Bible, Shakespeare's Collected, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, and so forth. Doesn't matter what you put on this list or leave off; just go, for now, with the idea of the exercise. The list gets bigger: all the great novels; collections of the works of great poets, Yeats, Auden, Eliot, etc; histories, biographies, dramas, works of science accessible to you and me (well, you anyway). Bigger and bigger. My hypothesis now is that any credible list of must-read volumes will get to be so big that very few normal people will be able to read all the items on it during a lifetime - especially given that they'll also be wanting to read non-great books that aren't must-reads.

From this it follows that for most, if not all, of us the proposition is true that we can't read all the must-read books there are, and that is to say nothing of how things stand once you add other items than books - like blogposts and newspaper columns. On the principle of 'ought' implies 'can', there are therefore no must-read items. For while for any single item a given individual can make time to read it, he or she can't have time for all the putative must-read items in existence. So we're free to choose among them.

I regret to have to admit that I have in the past occasionally used this ill-chosen adjective myself in a hortatory way. Not any more.

Worse than prisons

Fintan O'Toole writes in the Irish Times about the dark stain on Ireland's history that was 'the shadow system of confinement, made up largely of industrial schools, Magdalene homes and mental hospitals'.

Did the Iraq war kill R2P?

Anyone who happened to read this post of mine yesterday will already know that I think the answer to this question is no. But Julian Borger appears to think the war played its part:

The ghosts of the 2003 Iraq invasion and the furious debates that preceded it still hang in the air. Even though it was not fought on humanitarian grounds but rather on spurious claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the fiasco and subsequent US and British attempts to justify it helped reverse what was arguably one of the great moral advances of the post-cold-war era: the UN-backed principle that the international community had the "responsibility to protect" civilian populations when their own states were unable or unwilling to.

There's something wrong with Borger's chronology. R2P was accepted by the UN General Assembly in September 2005, some two and a half years after the beginning of the war in Iraq. It was plainly at work in the thinking behind the intervention in Libya in 2011, authorized in UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (which Borger also mentions).

His column is worth reading anyway for its account of how things stand at the UN right now.