normblog

Poor comparisons 2

Here's a question and answer from Deborah Orr:

Who, after all, could be more deserving than suffering children, who are in no way responsible for the economic circumstances in which they find themselves?

Plenty of people, actually - people who were once poor children themselves, but who, in the rush to focus on helping the plainly innocent, were assumed to be guilty of fecklessness or worse.

I suppose one could get this to fly by insisting on the meaning of 'deserve' according to which children wouldn't yet deserve anything, not having done what they need to do to earn it. But on another meaning of 'deserve', the idea that children are as entitled as anyone is to be a target of concern and care makes good sense, since they are more vulnerable than most adults and they should not be made to suffer neglect, misery or what have you. In order to think that this is so, one isn't obliged to deny that there are also deserving adults, blameless and in need. Conversely, in order to think that there are such adults, one doesn't need to make light of the rights of children.

Poor comparisons

There are some things right with this article by Antonia Senior (and here on the new Times site) but there's also something seriously wrong with it. Senior is right, in particular, to be impatient with those alienation-merchants according to whom we are all being made more lonely by the facilities that ease rapid long-distance communication. As she says:

[T]he evidence that modern technology somehow increases loneliness rather than defeats it is flimsy and seems to have its roots in the happy-myth rejection of modernity. In the world of e-mail, Skype, social networking, cheap travel, webcams, television and radio, the notion that we are lonelier than in a pre-technological age simply does not stack up.

... Pretending that the modern world has a monopoly on loneliness is unhelpful and distracting.

Senior also has some salutary remarks on the need to take a realistic view about the dream of happiness. That 'the human lot is to bumble along in a dissatisfied and acquisitive haze that is occasionally punctuated by great joy or great despair' perhaps understates the degree of long-term contentment that some people can achieve, and that '[t]he land of happy... is bunkum' maybe overlooks the extent to which there are preconditions that at least give people a better chance at happiness. But it's as well to be reminded that an all-dancing, all-smiling utopia is not on the cards for the species as we know it, and that happiness for most of us, even when we have it, has its ups and downs and its interruptions.

What is rather less compelling, however, are Senior's preferred comparative reference points when she refers to poverty. I mean this sort of thing:

The problem for some thinkers is that capitalism has so demonstrably worked. Once, the definition of multidimensional poverty would have been "can't afford bread, meat or potatoes." The extraordinary wealth generated in the West in the postwar era has eradicated the type of penury that used to be ubiquitous - that a theorist could define as "multi-starving-to-death-type incidents".
.....
[W]hen the happiness myth is applied to poverty it obscures the very real progress that we have made in this country in making sure that all our citizens are clothed, fed and housed.

It also seems disrespectful, somehow, to those places in the world where real poverty of the grinding, starving variety is rampant.

There's a valid point even here. Anyone who fails to register, who is unaware of, the differences in this regard between now and then, or between rich countries and poor ones, can do with having their attention drawn to it. Yet, as Senior's topic is happiness, she might think about why these comparisons are the only relevant ones. After all, she herself insists that it is part of the human make-up to want better things and a better situation. Why would people not be troubled by being cut off, if they are, from housing or education or transport or other resources they consider adequate, or why others not be troubled on behalf of the worst-off in this category? It implies no disrespect at all to someone even worse off in a very poor country, to be concerned about the least advantaged in this one - not unless everyone but the world's very worst off people should just shut up (which I cannot imagine Senior thinking). You only have to consider how those enjoying life in Britain in, say, the top 10 per cent bracket would feel about being plunged into the bottom 10 per cent bracket, to be able to understand why these comparisons also matter.

Approving America's leaders

Courtesy of Gallup, here are some figures for the approval ratings of 'the job performance of the leadership of the United States' across the world in 2009. Outside Africa the highest scores come from Kosovo and... Ireland. Median approval of US leadership was 51 per cent, as compared with 34 per cent in 2008. (Via.)

Steel trap

Riffing on the theme of Labour leadership candidates discovering their opposition to the Iraq war rather late in the day, so to speak, Mark Steel proposes holding protest marches against wars that have already taken place. It would make those protesting feel better after the march to learn that the war they opposed was in fact over. Steel's a funny man. He thinks, for example, that the only reason people thought Saddam had WMD was because the government to which David Miliband belonged said he did. But his suggestion may not be such a bad one in any case. It would enable the section of the left with which Steel is best acquainted to return, again and again, to the question why its members always - over the Falklands, the first Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan post-9/11, Iraq - seem to favour that political option which will leave some rank dictatorship in place at home and/or in occupation of someone else's country, with murder or other mischief on its mind.

Sydney vs Melbourne

Long-time readers of normblog may remember that during the northern winter of 2006-7 I was in Australia, following England's attempt to retain the Ashes - in which they rather failed. Anyway, having visited all five of Australia's five biggest cities, one evening I offered my own personal ranking of them, as follows:

Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth

The friend with whom I was then staying - who lives in Melbourne, it should be said - looked at me in a pitying sort of way and said, as if it was beyond all doubt or chance of controversy, that though my ranking was mostly sound, I'd got one thing wrong: Melbourne is better than Sydney. Melbourne is indeed a lovely place, but my ranking remained unchanged. I walk, however, in the shadow of the look I received that night during the MCG Test.

All of which is mere preamble to my wondering what reactions will be today in Victoria's capital city to learning that Sydney has beaten Melbourne by eight places in the 2010 Mercer Quality of Living Survey.

Serious countering

President Obama made a speech at the US Military Academy at West Point on Saturday, from which it is possible to get some purchase on the point of the new terminology adopted in place of the 'w** on t*****'. In this speech Obama spoke explicitly (as Marc Ambinder had flagged up the President would be doing from now on) about 'countering violent extremism', and his speech contained one or two other concordant locutions: it had 'violent extremists', as well as 'extremists' tout court. These were also referred to as 'common enemies'.

However, just in case you might think that his calling them 'enemies' meant that Obama was falling back into the bad old way of thinking about the countering of them as a kind of war... you'd be right. This was a war, he said, that only began because 'our own cities and civilians were attacked'; and it was 'a different kind of war' because there would be 'no simple moment of surrender to mark the journey's end'. And those common enemies, the violent extremists? Who in heaven's name are they? Why, they are - one, two, three, four, and five times - terrorists. Thus has the terminological show moved decisively on.

Pinpricks

I gave you a little preview on Friday of the sort of thing one might expect to hear at the 'We Need to Talk about America' session at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Well, Janet Albrechtsen was there. Hers is only one report, to be sure, but she makes the session sound as if it might have been a good one to miss: 'five voices all nodding and shaking their heads to the same anti-American melody'; '90 minutes of bashing America in general, and conservative America in particular'; 'Americans are fat, inarticulate and ignorant. They're demanding, imperious and spoiled'; 'the enormous similarities between Iran and America'; and (as you might have guessed by this point) 'smugness'.

Rocking the bedrock

In an interview given by her to National Review Online, Melanie Phillips says a fair bit by way of lamenting irrationality and the repudiation of reason. She emphasizes the value of 'follow[ing] the elementary rules of logic'. In view of this, I find the following answer of hers problematic:

LOPEZ: What does a self-described "agnostic" care about God?

PHILLIPS: You don't have to be a religious believer to understand that if religion - more specifically, the Hebrew Bible and the Christianity that built upon it - underpins Western civilization and the codes of right and wrong - putting others above yourself, freedom and equality, and belief in reason - that form the bedrock of that civilization, then eroding or destroying that religion will erode or destroy those virtues and the civilization they distinguish.

But if as an agnostic Melanie herself can subscribe - as it is safe to assume she sees herself as doing - to these codes of right and wrong, these virtues, then religion isn't their indispensable basis. She might, I suppose, reply here that she and others like her (agnostics, possibly also atheists) can rationally support the values forming the bedrock of Western civilization while doing without the aid of religion, but other people, just as a matter of sociological fact, do need that religious aid. But then isn't she appealing to the need for an irrational - or at least non-rational - form of assistance while lamenting the repudiation of reason in other forms of which she disapproves? That would have been my next question had I been conducting the interview.

Now we are five

With Rose Melikan's post immediately below the Writer's Choice series completes its fifth year. That's five times 52 weeks, every Tuesday and not one missed. There have been times during those five years when I thought the first 'gap Tuesday' was looming up, with only a few days to go and no copy in the locker. But this calamity has so far been avoided, I'm happy to say, and the series marches on. For that I owe a debt of thanks to all those writers, and though I have thanked each of you before, I do so here once more: Because of you there's a song in my heart. Thanks, people.

The Grand Index for the series is here. Each of the five years is indexed separately, by name of contributing writer, under the following links: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

Writer's choice 260: Rose Melikan

Rose Melikan is a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Her 'day job' is in Roman law and English legal history, but lately her days (and nights, and weekends) have been taken up with historical fiction. Her first novel, The Blackstone Key, was published in 2008; The Counterfeit Guest followed in 2009, and the latest is The Mistaken Wife (2010). You can find out more about them on Rose's website. Here she writes about Count Hannibal by Stanley Weyman.

Rose Melikan on Count Hannibal by Stanley Weyman

From my earliest days as a reader I have enjoyed works of history. I read every book in the 'Childhood of Famous Americans' series that my elementary school possessed (John Paul Jones and Jim Bowie were my favourites) and I grew up with Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and the historical adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle. (Who cared for Sherlock Holmes so long as Sir Nigel Loring held the lists for England?) Such has been the mystery, excitement and challenge of history that it is not surprising that I became an historian myself. All scholarship entails a search for meaning, but I particularly appreciate the barriers of time and place; the sense that the people of the past are both with us, in the tangible evidence of lives led, and not with us - their hopes and fears cannot be wholly ours. The challenge, I find, is equally important in historical fiction and non-fiction, albeit in different ways. The historian is trying to recover a world that really existed, while the historical novelist strives to bring verisimilitude to an imagined past that is nevertheless shot through with real people, places and events. Writers in both genres experience the sense of being not quite able to touch their subjects - but almost.

Since becoming a writer of historical fiction, however, I have gained a new appreciation of authors who can bring us closest to that imagined past. One such is Stanley Weyman, in his time an extremely popular novelist, and one who deserves a wider audience today. Born in 1855, he read history at Christ Church, Oxford, before being called to the bar in 1881. His legal career faltered and he turned to writing, publishing his first novel, The House of the Wolf, as a serial in 1888-9. Over the next 38 years he wrote a further 28 novels and collections of short stories. Most were historical and set either in England or France, although he also ventured to Ireland, Germany and Switzerland. I have read nearly all of them, but for me the best is Count Hannibal, which takes place during the French Wars of Religion. In brief, the story concerns Hannibal de Saulx, Comte de Tavannes, the fictional brother of Gaspard de Tavannes, Marshal of France and hero of the battle of Jarnac. Nominally a Roman Catholic, Count Hannibal concocts an audacious plan to secure the affections of a young Huguenot woman, not merely in spite of her fiancé and the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, but by bending the terror, violence and turmoil of the situation to his will. The plan ultimately miscarries, and the three chief protagonists must flee, pursued by a common enemy and racked by mutual suspicion and dismay.

The story works on various levels. It is a superb adventure, in which life, love and honour are risked against great odds. The use of language is judicious. The scenes of violence chill without relying on the visceral:

Along one of the lanes a troop of children, the biggest not twelve years old, came dancing and leaping round something which they dragged by a string. Now one of the hindmost would hurl it onward with a kick, now another, amid screams of childish laughter, tripped headlong over the cord; now at the crossways they stopped to wrangle and question which way they should go or whose turn it was to pull and whose to follow. At last they started afresh with a whoop, the leader singing and all plucking the string to the cadence of the air. Their plaything leapt and dropped, sprang forward and lingered like a thing of life. But it was no thing of life, as Tignonville saw with a shudder when they passed him. The object of their sport was the naked body of a child, an infant!

At the same time, the natural imagery deepens the characters' experiences without checking the narrative. Here, the protagonists have camped in a wood during their flight from Paris.

The Countess long remembered that vigil - for she lay late awake; the cool gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke indeed of a supreme Ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions.

Throughout the language feels authentic, whether in the characters' speech or the description of a Paris street. We feel steeped in the period but never that we have been receiving a history lesson.

The characters, however, are what set the novel apart. They are complex, intriguing, and with 'flaws' that resonate with a modern reader but take a particular shape because of the historical context. The three protagonists are introduced in a scene that might easily occur in a contemporary novel. A young woman, shy and inexperienced, attends a party with her boyfriend. They become separated and she suffers agonies of embarrassment - conscious that she is alone among strangers, yet cringing when one of them flirts with her. Not surprisingly, when the boyfriend returns, a quarrel ensues, and we smile and feel that we know these people. But how can we? The 'party' in this case takes place at the court of Charles IX, and in his private rooms the final preparations for the Huguenot massacre are being made. The young woman is no stranger to religious persecution, and her two suitors have shed blood on the battlefield and in private disputes. All three adhere to an heroic code, leavened in places by notions of chivalry and Christian mercy, but which ultimately glorifies violence and personal honour. This is not, after all, the usual case of a love triangle!

And yet their story grips and holds us because they are so well drawn and we appreciate the consequences that familiar feelings such as jealousy, fear, gratitude or humiliation can have in their world. As the story progresses, moreover, character comes to the fore. Crucially, the protagonists' initial peril is a physical one created by external circumstances, from which we know that they must escape. After this, however, the dangers become moral, emotional and psychological, and are created by the characters themselves. They repeatedly test one another - actively playing upon weaknesses and supposed strengths – and in these duels the outcome is far from certain. Or perhaps I should say 'far from certain to us', for we sense that Weyman knew his characters and their world through and through. Under his guidance their decisions may be either troubling or satisfying, but they are always true.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]