normblog

Baubles, bangles and schools

Shuggy couldn't find anything to agree with in what I had to say about the case of Sarika Watkins-Singh and her bangle. I'm willing to meet him half way on that: I can't find very much to agree with in what he has to say about what I had to say. Well, disagreement is a more or less normal state of affairs. But I also can't find anything in the way of a compelling reason for Shuggy's disagreement. I pointed to the fact that the school allows watches and ear studs as exceptions to its 'no jewellery' policy, and asked how it was that the considerations licensing those exceptions could be more important than the girl's desire to wear something expressive of her Sikh identity. Shuggy responds (cross-posted here):

Watches? Goddammit all! If consistency is the problem here, let us insist that every pupil wears one. This would stop the little toads turning up late after lunch claiming they 'didn't know what time it was'. And earring studs are not just a matter of fashion. If you have pierced ears but don't wear [the studs] then the holes will close over. So for a school to insist on no earrings at all would amount to them proscribing pupils' fashion sense when they are out of school - and that really would be intolerable.

In other words, on watches he offers nothing explicit of substance, just a kind of belittling exasperation that it should even be mentioned in the comparison; and on ear studs he offers the claim that to prohibit them in school would amount to dictating fashion out of school because the holes in the kids' ears would close over. He's sure about that, is he? Me, I don't think so; and, taking advice on the matter, I find that others, who know better than I do, don't think so either. The holes close over in due course, not after the length of a normal schoolday. The earring studs, in fact, could be worn out of school as a way of keeping the holes open, so that... the earrings could be worn out of school, etc. I go back, therefore, to my point: the exceptions made for watches and ear studs are perfectly reasonable ones, but it's hard to see why the considerations that justify them outweigh the consideration that would allow the wearing of 'an object important to a person on account of her identity'. The only thing Shuggy has that might pass for a reason against this is as feeble as it is old:

[B]etter a school run by anally-retentive assholes than one where no-one's running it, where the fucking kids are setting the agenda...

It's the threat of anarchy. Shuggy doesn't explain why, if two exceptions can be permitted without such a worrying descent, three exceptions can't be. Why does an orderly school uniform regime - and that's assuming uniforms are vital, which is itself open to question - break down not at watches or ear studs or both, but just at the point of a bangle or bangle-equivalent? His disagreement is long on mock indignation and irony and short on argument. It doesn't, in any case, disconfirm my claim that 'you will struggle to get an answer to [the] question' which I asked at the end of that post.

(See also the two letters here.)

Moderation and immoderation at Comment is Free

A report by Jonathan Hoffman [pdf] looks at the problem of anti-Semitic comment on the Guardian's Comment is Free. I have not had a chance to read the report properly yet, and my posting a link should not be taken as expressing a judgement about it one way or the other. I want to make an observation about just one limited aspect that is covered early on in the report (see paragraphs 17-21 at pp. 4-5).

Comments on the posts at Comment is Free are not generally pre-moderated, but only read after going up, and then deleted at some point later on if there is felt to be a problem with them. Unless things have changed since the time when I (occasionally) blogged there, this policy contrasts with the way the posts of the CiF bloggers themselves are handled. At that time (and I understand that this has not changed) putting up a blog post at Comment is Free couldn't be done directly by the blogger whose post it was, but had to go through those administering the site. When I asked why this was, I was told that it was for legal reasons: in order that each post could be checked to see it didn't run afoul of the law.

I can understand that pre-moderating all comments would be a much bigger job than is pre-moderating the posts that generate them. Nonetheless, bigger is bigger; it is not out of the question. If there is anti-Semitic or other racist comment, to say nothing of abusive comment of an entirely non-racist kind, going up at Comment is Free, this job one might have thought to be a necessary undertaking. That it isn't seen as one suggests that the Guardian is more relaxed, at any rate, about racist and other abusive comment on its site than it is about running into legal difficulty (if, in fact, it would run into legal difficulty: for, after all, the CiF posts could, like the comments, be moderated once they were up and quickly taken down or amended if they looked dodgy).

Minority rights and their limits

There is an excellent short discussion here, by Will Kymlicka, of issues of liberalism, minority rights and multiculturalism. An excerpt:

[W]e need to distinguish different cases. In some cases, liberal values are being twisted to justify limiting people's fundamental civil rights – as in the hijab and foreign marriage cases. In my view, this is simply illegitimate. If we are worried that some girls are being coerced by family members to wear the hijab or to marry foreign husbands, we need to find ways to stop the coercion, rather than limiting the rights of all people to wear religious dress or to marry non-citizens. These blanket bans really are repressive.

But in other cases, minorities are seeking not simply to exercise their civil liberties, but also to exercise state power - for example, asking the state to legally enforce the decisions of religious family law tribunals. People have a basic civil right to consult with their own religious authorities on issues of marriage and divorce, but those religious authorities do not have an inherent right to have their judgements be given legal effect and be enforced by state officials. In my view, it is perfectly appropriate for a liberal state to say that religious tribunals will only be legally recognized if they meet certain standards - such as informed consent, due process, professional training, non-discrimination, the best interests of the child, and so on. These standards may conflict with the historic traditions of certain minority groups, but of course they conflicted with the historic traditions of the majority as well. To insist that these standards be respected is not evidence of hypocrisy or insincerity in the application of liberal values. It simply re-affirms core liberal beliefs about the legitimate bases and goals of state power, beliefs that have been invoked to challenge both majority and minority traditions.

Act of oversight

Apropos the BBC drama House of Saddam, Michael Deacon reports of its writer/director and its main star that they have 'complicated views about Saddam':

They agree that he was a terrible tyrant; on the other hand, neither supported the Coalition invasion of Iraq (all it has done, in [Igal] Naor's eyes, is unleash a bloody civil war and make Iran more powerful).

Not so complicated, but let that go. As Naor is himself playing the tyrant, and at the same time preferred that he (Saddam) should have been left in power rather than overthrown by military force, one might expect the actor to have been able to handle the added complication of recognizing that unleashing a bloody civil war and strengthening Iran is not all the invasion of Iraq has done. It also put an end to Saddam's regime of unlamented memory. (Thanks: RB.)

Marriage made in hell?

What is a marriage? In this review, Carlin Romano encourages us to think hard about that. OK, I don't for my part think marriage is 'the mystical melting of two people' - not unless they start out made of chocolate, and even then I'd have trouble with the mystical bit. However, 'marriage as hierarchy, as fusion, and as contract', with 'each version present[ing] intractable problems'? So that with hierarchy, you get hierarchy, with fusion you get the absorption of one distinct personality by the other, and with contract between equals you get an inevitable battle which one of the supposed equals must win and the other lose? So that in marriage there 'is only room for one full person', and so that there is, when all is said and done, only the 'hierarchy in which someone, usually the husband, has to be the boss'? So that 'marriage is a form of violence against individuality'? I mean, marriage with its possibilities exhaustively so set out?

In trying to contribute to the 'sophisticated conversation about the subject' that is here urged upon us, I would want to make two points. They appear to me obvious but do not figure in Carlin's review, though I can't speak for the book which he's reviewing. First, while marriage is plainly not an inescapably universal institution or human need, many people seem to be wedded to it, if I may so express the point. Second, just about any two-person relationship of any proximity, continuity, longevity, is likely to have its difficulties and even the odd intractability. A balanced conversation about, and assessment of, marriage ought to be measured against that fact, as well as to include some consideration of what it is that the people who value their marriages succeed in drawing from them. (Via.)

Fashionable sophistries about Iran and Israel (by Jeff Weintraub)

[From an email I received from Jeff, in response to this post - NG.]

What you say is, of course, right on target. Many people miss, ignore, try to obscure, or pretend not to see a basic point about the tensions between Israel and Iran - which is that the source of these tensions is entirely one-sided. They derive from the ideologically based hostility of the Khomeinist Iranian regime against Israel (not against Israel's policies, but Israel's existence) since the 1979 revolution. Through all the ups and downs since then, the official position of the Iranian regime has consistently been that Israel is an illegitimate country that needs to be eliminated (though it is true that, most of the time, the Iranian regime has not explicitly committed itself to doing the job itself). This consistent and pervasive eliminationist position on the part of the Iranian regime is the source of the problem. Israel, by contrast, has never been committed to the elimination of Iran. There is no 'objective' geopolitical reason why Israel and Iran should have fundamentally clashing interests (though Iran has, to some degree, created such a reason through its arming and funding of Hizbollah in Lebanon).

When Iran was on good terms with Israel (under the Shah), Israelis were happy to be be on good terms with Iran. Furthermore, it remains true that the Iranian people (as opposed to the lunatics who happen to be ruling them at the moment) remain by far the least anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic population in the Islamic Middle East, as well as the least anti-American (outside Iraqi Kurdistan). Every public opinion poll, as well as all other relevant sources of information, confirm this. If and when Iran experiences its version of 1989 and the current Iranian regime goes into the dustbin of history, there is every reason to expect that Iran's relations with Israel should be at least as good as, say, Turkey's.

In short, Monbiot's remarks, which are intended to sound tough-mindedly 'realistic', actually express a wilful refusal to recognize the basic realities of the situation... which is, alas, not uncommon. (Jeff Weintraub)

Proud of a British court

Unlike Brett at Harry's Place, I welcome yesterday's decision in the case of Sarika Watkins-Singh. That the girl should have been forbidden by her school from wearing a '5mm thick steel bangle, known as a kara,... one of the five outward signs worn by Sikhs to show their faith', strikes me as a piece of worthless rigidity not justified in a secular and liberal society.

That secularism doesn't require any prohibition against wearing religious insignia in schools or other public spaces is something I've already argued more than once, including in these posts, so I won't go into that again. But the argument from a need for uniforms is also unconvincing, given the way in which exceptions generally seem to be made to this requirement but to stop short just where the relevant authority arbitrarily specifies it must. In this particular case, it is no different:

It was not until April 2007 when a teacher noticed her kara that she was asked to remove it in line with the school's "no jewellery" policy which allows pupils to wear no more than watches and simple ear studs.

The school, it would seem, was willing to allow exceptions of practicality (a watch for telling the time) and - what? - fashion (ear studs). So, not everything on the pupils is quite uniform. By what reason, then, can it be said that an object important to a person on account of her identity speaks to a less important consideration than these two? You will struggle to get an answer to that question.

Death in the eyes of the living

Round at Talking Philosophy Jeff Mason is asking us to think about death and the fear of death. He mentions what some of the philosophers have said about this:

Epicurus famously tells us that where death is, I am not; and where I am, death is not. So death is not to be feared, since it is nothing, and we will never experience death. As Wittgenstein tells us, being dead is not an experience within life. We will never know death.

Anything you can philosophize about you can also blog about. Here are three blog-thoughts on the topic Jeff raises.

1. We do sort of know what death will be like, because we know what it's like not to be alive (and I don't just mean that we know it from those periods when life is dull). True, at the time when we weren't yet alive, we didn't then know what it was like not to be alive, because we didn't know anything. But now that we are alive (those of us who are), we know what it was like then. It was like... nothing happened, we had no experiences, we missed everything there was going.

2. We not only know, in this specific and limited sense, what it's like to be dead - assuming, at any rate, that death after life is exactly like non-life before it - it also gives us a sound basis for preferring to be alive than to be dead. The fact that total absence of experience wasn't too bad at the time, doesn't mean that we can't see and feel that this is much better than that was, in the obvious senses both that something is better than nothing and that something as full as life can be of the marvels of the world is, a fortiori, better than nothing. This is not to say that life can never fall below being better than nothing; when it brings too much pain, it evidently can be. But in the general way of things the something of life is, most of the time, better for most people than the nothing of death or of pre-life non-existence.

3. Whether or not we should fear death, the way that human beings are, many do fear it, and I think the material in the foregoing two paragraphs provides some rational basis for their doing so (though fear of death isn't entirely a matter of rationality). It doesn't have to be a fear of nothingness; it can be a fear of the experiences which you value coming to an end.

Life imitating art

Not that the art in question is within my range, but people were going into bookshops trying to find a book they'd seen in the movie of Sex and the City. The book didn't exist. Its title? Love Letters of Great Men. The publishers Macmillan are now producing a book of the same title, containing, well, love letters of great men. I take no credit for the idea. But when you see whose idea it was, you will understand my interest in it.

Reciprocal torture

Further to this post on the one-state solution: just one day after being offered a vision of a democratic and secular state in which the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis 'are equally protected', we learn from the Guardian that the two major organizations now representing Palestian aspirations, Fatah and Hamas, routinely torture detainees, and hence each other's supporters - this according to Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group, and Human Rights Watch. As the Guardian's reporter presenting this information is the slippery-tongued Jonathan Steele, you might expect - somewhere - an attention-shifting, mitigating note to be struck. Your expectation won't be disappointed:

The alleged abuse by PA forces appears to be aimed at convincing western donor governments, as well as Israel, that the authority is "clamping down on terror".

Just a typical day in the columns of the Guardian newspaper.