normblog

Obama at Bagram

We can't forget why we're here. We did not choose this war. This was not an act of America wanting to expand its influence; of us wanting to meddle in somebody else's business. We were attacked viciously on 9/11. Thousands of our fellow countrymen and women were killed. And this is the region where the perpetrators of that crime, al Qaeda, still base their leadership. Plots against our homeland, plots against our allies, plots against the Afghan and Pakistani people are taking place as we speak right here. And if this region slides backwards, if the Taliban retakes this country and al Qaeda can operate with impunity, then more American lives will be at stake. The Afghan people will lose their chance at progress and prosperity. And the world will be significantly less secure.
.....
Our broad mission is clear: We are going to disrupt and dismantle, defeat and destroy al Qaeda and its extremist allies.

Formerly known as the war on terror and still that, whatever he prefers to call it. Contrary to what the president says, the war was chosen: but justifiably, as an act of self-defence; and justifiably still pursued, in part for reasons of security and in part, as he also says, on behalf of the people of Afghanistan.

Happiness imperialism?

A movement for happiness? Well, I'm all for happiness but as for a movement for it, let's see:

All you need to remember is "Great" - giving, relating to other people, exercising the body, attending to the world around and teaching yourself something fresh.

Each precept is demonstrably true. On average, people are happier the more they care about other people's happiness and the less they care about their own. In this sense, happiness is a by-product of focusing on the happiness of others. Relationships are central to this in our increasingly atomised society. But we also need to exercise our bodies: we were not constructed simply to sit around. Attending to the world about us means savouring whatever comes our way and living more in the present than the future or the past. And exercising the mind by learning something new is always revitalising.

Notice two features of all that. First, the movement for happiness will need to tell people not to take their own happiness as the central focus, but rather... giving, caring for others, relationship. Second - and therefore - other things than happiness will have to figure centrally, such as... friendship, charity, compassion, possibly equality and/or reciprocity and/or justice. And since we need to exercise our bodies and attend to the world around us, also free time and congenial spaces and a healthy and beautiful environment. And since we need to learn, also education and opportunities for further and continuing education. And since we need to be able to make choices in these areas and not have it (whether 'it' be exercise or continuing education or compassion or whatever) imposed on us, also a wide degree of freedom. The movement for happiness must be a movement, consequently, for a range of values, practices and institutions, and one may wonder why it needs to be unified under the single title of happiness, particularly since some of these other values, which are indeed often means to happiness, can also sometimes conflict with it, and when they do, it isn't obvious which one should prevail.

Playing on

If music be the food of politics:

A lunchtime performance by the Jerusalem Quartet at London's Wigmore Hall, being broadcast live on BBC Radio Three, was taken off air partway through the concert on Monday afternoon after protesters disrupted the event. But the musicians played on and completed the Mozart and Ravel concert programme.

Read further and see how Mozart and Ravel come to be rendered objectionable. (Via.)

Shut up about that

Those who have a strong case generally make it. They don't need to resort to diversions. Interviewed by Spiegel Online and asked about the Armenian genocide, Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says that it 'is not a matter for politicians like us, but one that needs to be studied by historians'. The interviewer disagrees with this attempt to exclude politicians from having a view and so presses the point. Erdogan responds:

A word doesn't become more correct because a president uses it. And besides, the United States is not a party to this matter. America, like other countries, is merely a bystander here. We and the Armenians are the only participants.

Of course, a word doesn't become more correct because a president uses it, but on the other hand the issue of genocide - any genocide - isn't private to the Turks and the Armenians. Did you ever hear the suggestion that only Germans and Jews can have a view about whether the Shoah occurred or was a genocide? Me neither. What can explain these bizarre exclusions? Perhaps the Turkish PM's meaning is best captured, if inadvertently, when he says 'There can be no talk of genocide against the Armenians'.

Doing good and its limits

Yesterday I came across this:

Every man is also responsible for all the good he didn't do. - Voltaire

If we take it at face value, it's got to be wrong. You can't be responsible for what you have no ability to do, and all the good you didn't do is such a huge amount of good that you could never have done it all even if you'd seriously tried. Suppose you could have helped A who needed your help, by going around to his house for a couple of hours once a week and doing whatever it was he needed in the way of help. But you could also have helped B who needed your help, by going around to her house for a couple of hours once a week and doing whatever it was she needed in the way of help. And one can continue this series from C through Z, and then A1 through Z1, A2 through Z2, A3 through Z3 - so there will be more hours of potential good-doing than are to be had from a single week. It is a certainty that there is a greater number of people you can help in this particular way, and in serious need of your help, than there are hours in which to help them. And any other potential form of good-doing (charitable donation, working for a cause etc) can be handled similarly to show there is a crushingly impossible burden of responsibility, the world and the needs of those who live in it being what they are.

Mere pedantry, it might be suggested. Though the quote says 'all the good he didn't do', intellectual charity dictates that we should interpret it as meaning something like 'all the good he didn't do and could have managed to do'. But it, too, is wrong. If you or I are judged according to this way of understanding the dictum, then we must use our time to the very limit of what's possible, doing good rather than pursuing an interest or pleasure of our own that does less good. So, never mind that I didn't help some of those people, A through Z3, seriously needing my help; provided I helped as many of them as I could, and never took time off to watch football when that time could have met someone's more serious need, I would have fulfilled my putative obligation to do good.

This must mean, however, that no one should do anything more frivolous, less worthwhile than, for example, relieving hunger, relieving pain, acting to put an end to torture or other grave violations of human rights, acting to expose and fight against injustice. It's not only watching football that would be ruled out. Could you justify chatting to friends, taking your children on a picnic, playing the violin, going for a ride on your bike, belonging to a book group, and so forth? (And this is not the end of it either. Imagine someone who gives 60 per cent of her time to helping others but doesn't spend that time optimally; in the same time she could do more good than she actually does. Must we hold her responsible for the net deficiency in her good-doing?)

Even the requirement that you do as much good as you conceivably can do would mean that none of your time was any longer your own; you would be, to all intents and purposes, a slave to the needs of others. That is not compatible with the idea that each of us has a right to freedom, and that our freedom may properly be used to pursue our own ends and to give some priority to the needs of those to whom we are closest.

I believe we do have such a right and that our freedom is properly used when we give a significant amount of time to using it for personal ends. We do also have a more extensive obligation to help others than most of us either admit to or act upon. But precisely where to draw the line in this matter - between the right to freedom and the obligation to help others - is not a question I know how to answer.

Writing free

The Israeli writer David Grossman has been in China for an international literary festival. Interviewed here, he has some interesting things to say - about the perceptions of an Israeli in China and about literature more generally. When asked about writers being silenced, he says:

I think you can imagine what I think. Literature and art should be free. It's the primal interest of humanity that artists be able to express their deepest layers and desires and passions and opinions without any censorship.

Has he always thought of himself as a political writer?

Not at all. To me, the most interesting thing is really to document the inner life of the individual.

He's talking about literature rather than movies, but contrast the spirit of that answer (and of the other one for that matter) with the line-toeing of Slavoj Žižek.

Jazz 22: Waltz For Debby

It's a mighty long time since I did one of these. Over a year, in fact. Which just goes to show you, though what it goes to show you I wouldn't care to say. Anyway, a jazz collection lacking Bill Evans wouldn't be right, and so today I'm recommending Waltz For Debby (1961 - 66 minutes). This is piano trio as immortality - Evans with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian on bass and drums respectively. The three musicians play with a precision and mutual empathy that have left a benchmark for the ages. The opening track, 'My Foolish Heart', should be enough to convince you. There's a review here.

[Links to the rest of the series.]

Maggie O'Farrell rocks

Tweet: 'The divine Maggie O'Farrell's new book reviewed by Harriet Devine. http://bit.ly/dhlU9J Don't miss the promotional vid. http://bit.ly/aZ8wvw'

Peter and Christopher

I have... the more modest hope that he might one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault, and that religion does not poison everything.

A tale of metaphysical difference and brotherly reconciliation.

Illiberal imagination

Is it possible to enjoy a movie, and more than that, judge it to be a good movie, when you think there's something wrong with the politics of it? This is one, I would say, that's not for John Rentoul's 'Questions to Which the Answer is No' series. The answer to it is so obviously yes unless you have a cramped imagination. Welcome, once more, to Slavoj Žižek, who's writing on the London Review Blog about The Hurt Locker. As I've already said my piece about the film, I won't repeat my positive assessment. But here's Žižek:

The film largely ignores the debate about the US military intervention in Iraq, and instead focuses on the daily ordeals, on and off duty, of ordinary soldiers forced to deal with danger and destruction.

After referring to a couple of Israeli films that I haven't seen and won't therefore comment on - in one of which, according to him, 'most of the action claustrophobically takes place inside a tank' - Žižek judges the focus of such movies as politically disabling and a mark against them:

In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.

Now, Žižek's judgement of The Hurt Locker is itself open to question. The claim that it shuts any intelligent viewer off from questioning what 'our boys' are doing in Iraq doesn't square with the movie as I, and others, saw it. Furthermore, Žižek allows no mileage to the idea that 'dismantling terrorist networks' might have something to be said for it. These responses of his, however, are predictable. They are no matter for surprise.

What is more revealing is the assumption that a film set in Iraq that 'largely ignores the debate about the US military intervention' must be defective. Why must it? What if The Hurt Locker is (though I dispute that it is) too narrowly, exclusively, focused - on the mind and the job of a man who is a member of a bomb-disposal unit? Must that necessarily detract from its quality? This last question does belong in John Rentoul's 'Questions to Which the Answer is No' series. To think about movies in this way is truly cramped, the product of an illiberal imagination. If the thing doesn't include your orthodoxy, there must be something wrong with it.

I am put in mind of a movie I liked so much when I first saw it that I went back to the cinema the next night with a friend, in order to 'show' it to him, and then we both went back again the night after that so that he could get a second look and I a third. It's one of the great pictures of the 1950s: Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. Subsequently I read a number of put-downs of On the Waterfront from French film critics of the left, who pronounced it to be anti-trade-unionist and an apologia by Kazan for his having given testimony and named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Did I amend my rating of this great movie? Strangely, no, I never have.