normblog

An outing

And a story from yesterday told in Tweets...

Tweet 1: 'My first tweet while walking (and I don't just mean while on a walk). Chelse[a] lost. Heh.'

Tweet 2: 'Wait for the whingeing opinion column: people now tweet while out walking; what alienation etc.'

Tweet 3: 'Oops. Twere a close thing with that car!'

Tweet 4: 'Aah. Glories of nature. Well, the park at least. Must tweet it. Trees, grass. Gone so soon. Back on road and pavement aka sidewalk.'

All this and more when you follow normblog on Twitter.

The Falklands and the dance of Simon Jenkins

Late last week Simon Jenkins unloaded his wisdom about the Falklands question, and guess which side it fell on. It is possible to form the impression that Jenkins has a simple method in these matters: if Britain is in dispute or contention with someone else, then side with the someone else. But of course he wouldn't see it that way, so intellectual charity dictates that one should try to understand his reasons. Please do so, those of you who can. Jenkins's argument on this is an ever-shifting dance of considerations that appear to carry weight at one moment and to lose weight at the next.

Early in the piece, having referred to Britain's defeat of Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982, Jenkins tells us that 'Military conquest does not establish legal title'. From this you might suppose that he attaches no weight to military conquest and attaches significant weight to legal title. But hold everything. It's rather more complicated. Britain's claim, Jenkins goes on to say, rests on long occupation of the islands and 'the oft-proclaimed wish of these Britons [the Falkland islanders] not to become Argentinian' - considerations which are, he allows, strong in international law. So there's some more weightiness to put beside the weightlessness of military conquest.

However, look again and what do you see? Everything changes in the dance. 'But legal title is not all', says Jenkins, qualifying the just previously-acknowledged strength of those considerations in Britain's favour. And 'democratic consent' suffers a similarly precipitate weight loss: though 'always ­important', it is 'hardly an absolute'. (But does some shadow of it recur still later in the piece when we are told that Britain will have to negotiate 'because the world... will insist on it?') And military conquest, given the thumbs down at the beginning, seems to win a reprieve of sorts, Jenkins telling us that Britain was lucky to win the Falklands War for various reasons, and had it not done so, the Argentine occupation might have succeeded - as if this alternative possible outcome could now carry moral or legal weight unless military success carried moral or legal weight, which we know Jenkins thinks it doesn't when it's Britain's military success.

If you're dizzy by now, don't worry. There's one thing you can cling to while clearing your head - a single stable object around which the whirling rhetorical dance of Simon the Jenkins rotates. It's contained in the word 'imperial'. The Falklands became British through 'a crude act of imperial aggression'; and Britain's stance now is bound to be seen as 'imperial arrogance'; and 'Distant colonies are a post-imperial anachronism'. This is rich, truly rich, given that Argentina's very existence is the result of what can only be called an imperial adventure, in which colonization overwhelmed all indigenous claims and claimants to any prior legitimacy. That Jenkins and others who think like him prefer not to notice that national facts like Argentina - and Australia, Canada, the United States of America - came out of acts of colonization simply swallowing up, so to put it, the indigenous peoples of the relevant regions into an entirely new political legitimacy, and prefer not to notice that this legitimacy is virtually never now challenged; that they prefer not to notice these things while at the same time choking on the so-called post-imperial anomaly of the Falkland Islands is no reason for anyone else, anyone capable of intelligent thought, to overlook the ludicrously arbitrary nature of their reasoning.

Legal title, democratic consent, military conquest - praise or dismiss each one when it suits you, discount or invoke each one as the need may arise. Colonialism and imperialism - reject the results of these comprehensively except... except when the results have been most sweeping. This is the fare dished out by our veteran columnist.

Britain may like to enter talks with Argentina over ways of sharing the benefits of oil exploration should there be any, as an earnest of goodwill and in the interest of harmonious relations. It should not, however, give an inch over sovereignty unless it is by the express decision of the Falkland islanders themselves.

The best in the world without peer

That's Yu-Na Kim:

(Thanks: MK.)

Daintily put, Mr President

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has released a long report detailing rights abuses in Venezuela. But Hugo Chavez doesn't agree:

[He] called the 300-page report "pure garbage" and described the commission's president, Santiago Canton, as "excrement."

What say the Camden faithful?

Something fishy in this collapse of secularism

Reviewing a new book by Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse - and whether reporting on it accurately or not I'm in no position to say - Stanley Fish tries to persuade us of a logical hole within the secular liberal viewpoint. That viewpoint, according to Fish, hopes to exclude religion from the public and political realm, reserving matters of faith to the private sphere, but it cannot truly succeed in this, because secular reasoning has no normative content; to find a basis for knowing what to do, for deciding issues of actual policy, the would-be secularist has to smuggle the non-secular back in, so that he or she is relying on what had supposedly been banished beyond the boundaries of the public realm.

The whole argument rests on an expansion of the concept of the secular. Secularism I take to mean the view that the state should not concern itself with adjudicating between the claims of different faiths or between the claims of religion as such and non-belief. For the secularist these are not political matters; we are all free to pursue our own beliefs pertaining to religion. And within the polity none of these beliefs is privileged in arriving - through discussion, persuasion, the articulation of interests, democratic decision - at social and political policy.

However, possibly following Smith's book, Fish effects a shift of meanings whereby 'secular' comes to mean, not neutral as between different faiths or between different faiths and agnosticism or atheism, but just neutral, period. Secular discourse, in this usage, means something like: empirical and statistical data, the corpus of scientific results, naturalistic facts - all of this lacking any normative dimension. Secularism, in other words, Fish opposes not only to beliefs about religion, but to every type of moral or metaphysical commitment. It is but short work, then, to show that secular liberalism can generate no substantive policy decision, political programme or course of action. For the neutral information piled up 'just sits there, inert and empty'. To know what to do with it, or where to go from it, we have to smuggle in such principles as... freedom or equality or justice. Bingo! Neutrality is lost, and so, accordingly, is secularism.

Fish thereby collapses one issue into another - or so I see it, anyway. He shows that secular liberalism has some moral content. On this I think he is right. I have never been persuaded by the brand of liberalism that claims to be above all partisan commitments in the political sphere. That everyone has rights or is entitled to vote or should be treated fairly and impartially when they apply for some position - these are not neutral positions. They are more consonant with some ideological outlooks than with others. But Fish treats this conclusion - that liberalism is not morally neutral - as being identical with a deconstruction of secularism - that the secular state allows freedom to all faiths and to non-faith without restriction. He only succeeds in doing so by uselessly thinning down our stock of available meanings. (Via Ophelia.)

A sorry kind of grumbling

Call an apology made on behalf of some collective entity - an organization, country etc - an institutional apology. Then I think we can safely conclude that every time one of these institutional apologies is offered by someone not personally responsible for the act(s) for which the apology is thought to be due, there will be people moaning that the apology is a waste of breath or worse. There is confirmation of that generalization again this week. Gordon Brown apologized on Britain's behalf for the thousands of children shipped to Australia and other destinations, causing much hardship; and up pops Gerald Warner in the Daily Telegraph with an accusation of hypocrisy.

Warner at least spares the readers of that paper the philosophical non-starter frequently uttered in this connection: to the effect, namely, that a person can't meaningfully apologize if they aren't individually to blame. (Yes, they can.) However, Warner's argument is little better. It is that Brown could be apologizing instead for things for which he does bear some personal responsibility - like his mismanagement of the economy. Whether the prime minister should be apologizing for something else, I shall set to one side; because that has no bearing on the merits or demerits of his apology for the child migrants policy. It is easy to see why. If, as CEO of a firm which has mistreated one of its previous employees, you apologize to her though you had no part in whatever it was she suffered, while failing to apologize for a more recent and bad policy that you were central in instigating, then the fact that you owe a second apology doesn't in itself negate the value or importance of the first one. For evidence that Brown's apology this week was to the point, see here.

Warner also throws in the irrelevant complaint that Tony Blair apologized for the Irish potato famine but not for the war in Iraq. Has no one ever told him (Warner) that apologies offered by people in circumstances where they don't feel they owe one aren't worth anything?

Rules for writers

Rules and rules and rules, loads of them - from writers and about writing fiction. There's what looks to me like a lot of wisdom there (but then what do I know about it?), as well as much that you can ignore. There'd have to be plenty to ignore because if you tried to follow all these rules you might go crazy, or you might just end up writing something incomprehensible.

I like this one from Elmore Leonard: 'Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword.' Yes indeed. You want to start straight in on the story, not fossick about with preliminaries, especially when you don't get to know what these are really saying till you're some way further into the book. Colm Tóibín is a hard taskmaster. 'No going to London', he says. 'No going anywhere else either.'

Then there is also this, from William Shakespeare's 10 rules: 'Write ye not a new tale if't can at all be helped. Plunder thou yon histories, myths and pre-Renaissance Italian romances for plot, setting, character, structure, style and theme. If anyone notice, claim ye homage.'

The normblog profile 336: Catherine Hawley

Catherine Hawley is a bookdealer currently living in Yorkshire. She has a degree in English Literature and qualified as a teacher in 1996. She taught for five years, becoming a literacy co-ordinator, before leaving to concentrate on her book business, which she started in 2000. An MA specializing in the 18th century novel spanned these two careers, as did eight years as a GCSE assistant examiner. C L Hawley Books specializes in literary criticism, and Catherine has been a member of the book trade co-operative Ibooknet for nine years. She combines running her business with family life and her blog Juxtabook, as well as blogging for Ibooknet.

Why do you blog? > I blog because of the book community out there who read and write blogs. I work alone, which is a change after those years in the classroom, and it is nice to connect with real readers again via the comments on Juxtabook or by commenting on the blogs of others.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Meeting several very nice authors.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > Having emails requesting I take down a review (of Meyer's Twilight series) and suggesting that I knew nothing about books and was a moral danger!

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Take time to interact in your own comments threads and on the comments pages of other blogs.

What are your favourite blogs? > How to pick just three? I'll have to say Cornflower and Dovegreyreader, as they inspired me to blog, and for the third, Gaskella, who has been the source of a lot of new reading matter recently.

What are you reading at the moment? > Grasshopper by Barbara Vine.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Pride and Prejudice.

What is your favourite poem? > 'On a Drop of Dew' by Andrew Marvell.

What is your favourite movie? > The Philadelphia Story.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Narrative Theory by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. Now I see everything in terms of narrative. It was also the first book on literary theory that I 'got'.

Who are your political heroes? > None at the moment but I had a soft spot for the much maligned Castlereagh when I was nineteen.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > I don't know if you'd call it major, but I'd raise the legal age for driving to twenty-one.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > I already am.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Integrity.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Trying to change other people.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > I really enjoy hating stone circles, megaliths and other pointless archaeological detritus. In themselves they are nothing, and they only mean something because we know they're old. I enjoy winding my stone circle enthusiast husband up by suggesting that 18th century farmers who plundered these things for building materials were doing the Right Thing.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Drinking (and visiting stone circles).

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I'd have trained as an academic librarian instead of as a teacher.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Imelda Staunton.

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

What would your ideal holiday be? > A cottage in the country.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Er, reading!

What is your most treasured possession? > An audio tape of my late grandparents reminiscing about their early lives.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Full marks to Mum and Dad - I love my first name.

What talent would you most like to have? > To be able to sing, even a little bit, would be lovely. I am a terrible singer.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Librarian in a university library.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Victoria Wood.

Which English Premiership football team do you support? > Everton.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I'd stop selling books and just buy them.

What animal would you most like to be? > A much loved pet dog.

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Once more on Amnesty and Gita Sahgal (by Eve Garrard)

A few days ago I sent the email below to Amnesty International:

Dear Amnesty

I and my partner are long-term subscribers to Amnesty, who (along with many others) are very disturbed by Amnesty's partnering with members of Cageprisoners, and thereby giving them undeserved credibility as pursuers of universal human rights. I am even more deeply disturbed by your decision to suspend the Amnesty employee who released information to the public about her concerns over this partnership, and its implications for Amnesty's support for universal rights for women. And I am appalled at the defence that seems to have been offered by Amnesty and some of its supporters for this disgraceful suspension, namely the claim that Amnesty is committed to the protection of the rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. So it is, and so it should be. But nobody has suggested that Amnesty should not be so committed, and to raise that issue is to draw a red herring across a very unlovely state of affairs.

The real issue - and Amnesty must know this to be the case - is whether Amnesty should be partnering with, and thereby lending credibility to, people whose own commitment to universal human rights is in doubt. No adequate defence has been offered for this, and no adequate defence has been provided for suspending the employee who has blown the whistle on this topic, and whose own long-term commitment to universal rights for women is not in doubt.

I and other Amnesty supporters I know feel that we may have to reconsider our support should Amnesty not reinstate Gita Sahgal and also acknowledge the mistakes it has made in dealing with this whole issue.

Yours

Eve Garrard

Shortly thereafter I received the following reply:

Dear Eve Garrard,

Thank you for your email regarding the controversy in the media surrounding Amnesty International's work with Moazzam Begg, in light of statements by Gita Sahgal, an Amnesty International staff member.

Please allow me to explain the situation.

Contrary to Gita Sahgal's assertions to the media, she was not suspended from Amnesty International for raising these issues internally. In fact we actively welcome vigorous internal debate. Up to now we have maintained confidentiality in line with our policy but wanted to correct this misrepresentation. This is not a reflection on the organisation's respect for her work as a women's rights activist and does not undermine the work she has done over the last few years as the head of Amnesty International's gender unit.

Our work with Moazzam Begg has focused exclusively on highlighting the human rights violations committed in Guantánamo Bay and the need for the US government to shut it down and either release or put on trial those who have been held there. Moazzam Begg was one of the first detainees released by the US without charge, and has never been charged with any terrorist-related offence or put on trial.

When President Obama promised to close Guantánamo, Amnesty International hoped that we could wind down our campaign and focus more broadly on human rights abuses related to security and terrorism. However, as that promise remains unmet, Amnesty International continues to work with Moazzam Begg and other former detainees to ask European governments to accommodate those who cannot be returned to their country of citizenship without risk of torture or ill-treatment.

In this complex and polarised world we at Amnesty International face the challenge of communicating clearly the scope of our work with individuals and groups. Amnesty International champions and continues to champion Moazzam Begg's rights as a former detainee at Guantánamo. He speaks about his own views and experiences, not Amnesty International's. And Moazzam Begg has never used a platform he shared with Amnesty to speak against the rights of others.

Amnesty International has a long history of demanding justice - in the case of our Counter Terror with Justice Campaign we called for both an end to human rights abuses at Guantánamo and other locations, and called for those detained there to be brought to justice, in fair trials that respected due process.

However, our work for justice and human rights spans a far wider range of issues than counter-terrorism and security. Amnesty International has done considerable research on the Taleban and campaigns to stop violence against women and to promote women's equality. We continue to take a strong line against abuses by religiously-based insurgent groups and/or governments imposing religious strictures, Islamic or otherwise, in violation of human rights law. Sometimes the people whose rights we defend may not share each others views, but they all have human rights, and all human rights are worth defending.

We would like to thank you for sending us your views.

Kind regards,

[Signed for Amnesty International UK by a member of the Supporter Care Team.]

This is a prompt and civil response to my concerns. Unfortunately these are its only virtues: it is an entirely unsatisfactory treatment of the problem in hand, on at least two counts. Firstly, Amnesty does not explain why Sahgal was suspended, nor does it in any way provide a justification for the suspension. Secondly, the reply mentions at least four times that Amnesty has defended Moazzam Begg and other Guantanamo detainees against violations of their human rights. But no one has denied this, nor has there been any suggestion that Amnesty shouldn't be engaged in this defence. To continually emphasize this irrelevant point is to divert attention from the real issue here, which is that Amnesty has partnered with, and thereby provided credibility for, individuals and an organization whose own commitment to universal human rights is in doubt. I objected to this manoeuvre in my original statement of concern, and I still object to it when it's repeated four times in response to that concern. It's irrelevant, and Amnesty must know that it's irrelevant, since so many people have pointed this out. It's a puzzle that Amnesty won't address what I and many others are really worried about. By not doing so, the organization diminishes its own credibility as an impartial advocate for all universal human rights.

It's very disturbing to see Amnesty use just those devices - evading the problems being raised, and refusing to admit any errors - which are so often displayed by the kind of organizations that are normally Amnesty's targets. (Eve Garrard)

Five on an island

On planet Heart there lives a race of munahs. One fact about munahs you need to understand is that they don't know how to make anything. But they are able to find things and are quite good at this. A group of five munahs - Annabel, David, Tracy, Zeke and Rohit - were lost at sea in the year of that planet 1612. Luckily for them they fetched up, sooner rather than later, on a small island and set about finding things. Most munahs of that era observed a rule which they expressed as follows: 'finders keepers'. Munahs, you should also know, have five basic needs, and they classify all objects - findables as they are also called - according to those five needs. There is food, there is shelter, there is clothing, there is medicine and there are cultural resources (also sometimes called diversions, and also sometimes called meaningfuls).

Annabel, David, Tracy, Zeke and Rohit duly set about finding some findables to meet their needs. Annabel got herself a spacious and elegant shelter formed by a density of trees, creepers, and other vegetation of strange and wondrous names unknown to this writer. Zeke had a very smart hat within the hour. Rohit happened upon a spherical object near a river, a meaningful if ever there was. Rohit was soon throwing it up and catching it in a leafy glove. All of them found food of various shapes, tastes and textures that would suffice for the settling-in period.

The critical question was, would they find the medicine they all needed? The medicine they all needed was cenipill. Munahs, you see, are vulnerable to an illness they call bleyuughh. It's not fatal, but if you get it, it lays you low for a month (which is 37 days of the Heart calendar); it virtually incapacitates you and makes you feel a bit like the way the name of the illness sounds. Even reading is a profound discomfort, and throwing a spherical object around, that's agony. However, bleyuughh is instantly cured by just a taste of the powder cenipill - and by nothing else known to munahs, at least up to 1612.

Not long after landing on the island, the five munahs did find a quantity of cenipill. Or, rather, Tracy did. But Tracy decided to keep it all for herself, because cenipill is one of the few findables known to munahkind that has a double classification. Not only is it medicine when taken against the onset of bleyuughh; it is also a cultural resource, a diversion, a meaningful. If mixed with the substance brrehd (a munah food) and then ingested while reading, it lends the reading experience an extra zing virtually impossible to translate into human terms but most enriching. Tracy's mononoply of the only cenipill found on the island so far was to become a problem.

A word now about the political arrangements of this mini-community of munahs, and everything will be in place to enable me to describe a transformation that occurred in its affairs eight months after what came to be known as the Date of Settlement. Annabel, David, Tracy, Zeke and Rohit met weekly to agree on, amend or dispense with, the various rules by which they were constrained in their reciprocal dealings. By and large, the five of them respected these rules, once made, but in order to ensure that there was no backsliding, succumbing to temptation or cheating, they appointed two of their number, on a regularly rotating basis, to wield legitimate force against delinquents, as and when such force was required. (The mechanics of this use of force don't need to be described; they relate to specificities of the munah anatomy it would take too long to explain here.)

In any case, eight months after the Date of Settlement and after Annabel, David, Zeke and Rohit had each suffered from three bouts of bleyuughh, the weekly meeting of the island Chregm (council, in our language) amended the old rule 'finders keepers' to read: 'finders keepers - except that all finds of cenipill to be rewarded, for the finder, by a Sweelydeb Bonanza, and the cenipill to be shared equally amongst munahs'. (It was known to be the case, I should perhaps add, that munahs were struck equally often by the dreaded bleyuughh.) The vote in the Chregm was three to two in favour of the modification. Tracy - strangely, you might think - voted for it, along with Annabel and Rohit, having been persuaded by the two of them against her own self-interest and for reasons of fairness. David and Zeke voted against it, on traditionalist grounds.

Historians of this small island community have since debated whether the new rule, making the islanders more equal in the specific respect of now being entitled to the same cenipill holdings, nonetheless rendered them all less free. Some said it did, because the change in the rule constrained them: shares in cenipill were henceforth authoritatively assigned so that you were allowed to use only your equal share of cenipill and not the cenipill belonging to someone else. But others pointed out that the munahs weren't now less free; they were only differently free. For the old rule had also authoritatively assigned cenipill holdings. With as without cenipill-equality, there were rules covering the ownership of cenipill, its legitimate distribution; and these rules would be enforced if they had to be. There was one set of constraints and corresponding liberties of action, liberties of resource-use, or another set - that was the true picture; rather than its being the case that the laws of the island restricted people after the rule-change but not before it.

Most munahs, were they ever to come across a blogpost from planet Earth, put up yesterday by Julian Glover, would therefore disagree with his view that 'Equality is not fundamental to liberty. It is its intractable opposite.'