normblog

Another Iran

Nothing is so surprising, when it happens, as a major political change. How things were before seems to have been set in stone. But occasionally one can have an idea of the future before it happens. Karim Sadjadpour offers a glimpse:

The WikiLeaks revelations make clear that Arab officials believe Iran to be inherently dishonest and dangerous. The feeling is probably mutual. But they hide perhaps a more interesting issue, namely what type of Iranian government would actually best serve Gulf Arab interests.

President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad and the Islamic Republic may be loathed, but equally the advent of a more progressive, democratic Iran would enable Tehran to emerge from its largely self-inflicted isolation and begin to realise its enormous potential. In the zero-sum game of Middle Eastern politics, a democratic Iran would pose huge challenges to Persian Gulf sheikhdoms.

Hasten the day.

Questions for science

The Guardian's G2 has a feature today on 'Ten questions science must answer'. It's introduced by Martin Rees, and then 10 other people nominate 'the puzzles they would love to see solved'. There's some food for thought, and here are three thoughts of mine about three thoughts of theirs.

1. Mark Miodownik talks about a new technology that's going to enable us to have - because to make for ourselves - highly individuated things, so that we will no longer be subject to the uniformities of mass production. Well, that's fine by me; but I resist the 'giv[ing] us back our individuality' suggestion of Miodownik's title (whether or not he chose it himself). Individuality doesn't depend on not owning or using the same kinds of thing as other people do. Like... 'Oh dear, I see that you too have a phone. And a television set. And books as well, begorrah!' Or from an earlier era: 'Sigh - not another vehicle with wheels.' There are many reasons why our individuality isn't just dependent on the objects we have and use, but one of them will be evident if you visit a few dwellings. You'll find that although people have phones and TVs and fridges and books and garden implements and furniture and pictures, the insides of their houses don't all look the same. They put some individual stamp on these through the variety within what they have, the arrangements and so on. Good for this new technology, but it wasn't all that bad before.

2. 'Can we make a scientific way of thinking all[-]pervasive?' asks Brian Cox. If he's just asking if we can get a scientific way of thinking to prevail where it needs to prevail, that's one thing. But if he really means, can we get it to pervade everything? - then it looks like being a candidate for John Rentoul's series 'Questions to which the answer is no'. Would you even want a scientific way of thinking to be all-pervasive? You're snuggled up with your one and only, feeling full of love and on top of the world; when a voice in your head says 'You are not really on top of the world; you should understand the biology here'. I don't think so.

3. I'm glad to see Marcus du Sautoy choosing 'Is there a pattern to the prime numbers?' Whether or not finding the answer to this question proves to be useful, it's just wonderful that there are questions like it that engage human curiosity. I've always loved this question about primes, it would be great to get the answer to it, and bravo to humankind that we pursue such things. (Thanks: E.)

Buy Israel Day

That's what day it is today, apparently. If only I could afford to buy Israel. I'll have to think of other ways of helping.

In googling for that link, I also found this one: Buy Nothing Day - in protest against consumerism. This I can afford. It's a bit of a problem, though, if you've got no food in the house and aren't entirely self-sufficient in a food-production way. I suppose you could borrow or beg some food from friends and neighbours. But doesn't that buy (!) in to future consumerism? In any case, I don't think buying nothing goes far enough, myself. There should be a Throw and/or Give Something Away Day, in repentance against your many earlier purchases.

Writer's choice 286: Joanna Troughton

Joanna Troughton was born in London and studied Art and Design at Hornsey College of Art. She has written and illustrated many picture books, one of which, How the Birds Changed Their Feathers, was highly commended for the Kate Greenaway Medal. She is best known for her own series 'Folk Tales of the World', published by Puffin, which includes How Rabbit Stole the Fire, What Made Tiddalik Laugh, Tortoise's Dream and The Tiger Child. Several of her books have been made into short films for the BBC and Channel 4. Joanna has also illustrated books by other authors including: Adèle Geras, Kevin Crossley-Holland, James Reeves and Jamila Gavin. She has taught illustration part time in art schools, and has visited schools and libraries all over Britain to talk about her books. Her most recent work is the illustrations for Ghosts, an iPad app for children written by John Cunliffe. Joanna lives in North West London with her husband Brian Melling, who is also an illustrator. They have two sons. She blogs about her work at Joanna Troughton. Below she discusses Kathleen Hale's Orlando: A Seaside Holiday.

Joanna Troughton on Orlando: A Seaside Holiday by Kathleen Hale

I think I was about six years old when I was given Orlando: A Seaside Holiday, by Kathleen Hale. I still have that copy, which was published in 1952, one of the later books in the Orlando the Marmalade Cat series that Kathleen Hale began writing and illustrating in 1938. I loved Orlando: A Seaside Holiday as a child, and I still love it now 57 years later.

Kathleen Hale was born in Manchester in 1898. Her outstanding artistic talent was recognized when she was still at school, and after attending art courses at Manchester School of Art and then Reading University, she arrived in London and supported herself by doing various jobs while pursuing her dream of being an artist. After a rather racy Bohemian life in London during the 1920s and 1930s, she finally settled down, married a doctor, moved to rural Hertfordshire and had two sons. It was for her young sons that she first created the stories of Orlando, inspired by her son's beloved ginger cat.

Orlando: A Seaside Holiday is a large format picture book with a bold sans serif typeface and cat's paw print endpapers. It is the story of a cat family: Orlando is the kind, brave, resourceful father, Grace his devoted wife, and mother to the children, Blanche, Pansy - the good little girls - and the naughty boy kitten, Tinkle, who Kathleen admitted was based on herself as a child. She says in her autobiography, A Slender Reputation, that in the stories of Orlando she was trying to create the type of happy family life that she herself had never had as a child; her father had died when she was five and she was sent to stay with relatives until she was nine, as her mother was forced to become the family breadwinner.

Why do I love this particular book so? From an early age I knew I wanted to be an illustrator. I drew all the time. My father, who was an actor, used to let me have his old scripts, which were blank on one side, and I drew on these, illustrating the stories that were in my head. So at first it was the pictures in Orlando that I loved. Kathleen Hale was a superb draughtswoman who was forty years old and at the peak of her artistic powers when she produced the first Orlando book. She loved animals and drew them wonderfully. Her animal characters were expressive and full of movement but realistically drawn. I was mad about animals too as a child, and like Kathleen's family, we had cats, dogs, rabbits and guinea pigs. I particularly loved drawing horses and remember being fascinated with the aerial view of the Shire horse Vulcan on the opening page of the book. Kathleen says in her autobiography that she liked to draw people from above so that all you saw was a head with two feet protruding from it.

The colour quality of the illustrations was quite unlike today's full colour printing. The copyright page tells you that the pictures were drawn by the artist directly on to transparent plastic sheets and then lithographed. Kathleen Hale said that she had to produce 128 plates for each book, using a black wax litho chalk, as the colours had to be separated. She had to '... carry the colours in my mind and hope to high heaven that the printed result would pass muster'. When I first started work as an illustrator, I had to do colour separations for some books and hated it as it was unrewarding and tedious. So the beautiful, subtle colours that Kathleen produced in the Orlando illustrations are a real feat. There are so many memorable pictures in Seaside Holiday: Grace lying on a sofa which is really a dachshund called Daisy; the Lord Mayor using a claw foot bath as an umbrella; the kittens holding on to the horses' hairy ankles during the storm scene, so as not to be blown away. They are imprinted on my mind and have stayed with me from the age of six. It is not enough to be able to draw well if you want to illustrate books, you have to be able to make up pictures in your head, and Kathleen Hale created wonderful unforgettable images.

The Seaside! That magical place meant so much to me as a child and still does. It was freedom, wide open space, swimming in the sea, exploring rock pools. The opening illustration of Seaside Holiday is of the cats lolling on the stairs on a baking hot summer's day in London, with the front door wide open, to let in a breeze. They were longing for a seaside holiday. The double page spread beach scene in the middle of the book is like all the beaches you have ever known as a child, and then with your own children: sand, buckets and spades, ice cream, seaweed, crabs, shells and starfish.

The story starts off as gentle domestic tale of the cat family going on holiday to Owlbarrow-on-Sea (which is really Aldeburgh in Suffolk): '... it glowed like a fairy city in the heart of a coal fire, beside the flame coloured sea.' I love the page of the cats looking down on the sea and the town as they ride into Owlbarrow in Vulcan's cart. It reminds me of arriving on the first day of my own wonderful childhood summer holidays, when I looked down on St Ives Bay in Cornwall. Then the book suddenly changes tack and becomes an adventure story with Orlando manning the life boat in a storm and rescuing African Queen Catalpa and her crew from a sinking sailing ship. This part of the story now seems quite strange and surreal, but I totally accepted it as a small child and loved the idea of Catalpa falling in love with grumpy Mr Curmudgeon and staying behind to marry him when her newly built ship (shaped like a ginger cat) sailed back to Africa. The text is witty and lively, with jokes that children will understand and find funny – my brothers and I always talked of scrambled eggs as 'scrambled legs', as that is what Tinkle called them. Kathleen didn't talk down to children in the text. Her books were never childish.

Kathleen Hale was made an OBE in 1976. She died when she was 101 in 2000. In 2001 I saw an exhibition of her work at the Redfern Gallery. Some of her original illustrations were for sale but I couldn't afford them. I did buy a print however, a lino cut of a jersey cow sitting down on the grass. It hangs on my studio wall and is one of my most treasured possessions. Kathleen says at the end of her autobiography: 'But I am one of those who impatiently shake the metaphysical apple tree, eager for change and adventure, often bringing down immature fruit and trampling on some with hasty feet.' This exuberance and determination to live life to the full can be seen in all her work. It's what I recognized in Orlando: A Seaside Holiday as a child, and was a source of inspiration to me later, when I became an author and illustrator of picture books myself.

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

Doubly indefensible

Two psychology researchers, it is reported here, propose the hypothesis that a motivation of many who support 'harsh interrogation techniques' - otherwise put, torture - is retributive rather than utilitarian. It isn't about whether or not torture results in good information so much as it's about punishing the detainee for 'past (immoral) behavior'.

Even if the research is about motivation, and not overtly about justification, its result is revealing if true. It shows that, in the way it is thought about by some of its supporters, torture is not merely indefensible; it is doubly indefensible. It is indefensible, first, because it violates a human right that ought to be considered absolute; and it is indefensible, second, in so far as it is thought appropriate as a punishment for people whose guilt has not been established by due process.

517-1

What can a person say other than agheghm? Five hundred and seventeen for one wicket lost! There must have been times these last two days when the Australian team wished they'd been playing this game instead. Or singing. Or trying to emulate Bradman. Oh well... (Thanks: IH.)

Future envy

Why don't we envy future persons? The question is Chris's. It's posed by him in the context of noting that generally we aren't troubled by the possibility that future persons might be better off than we are in various ways. I have two suggestions.

One reason is uncertainty. We can't know the overall situation of the putative future persons whom we're considering whether to envy or not. They may, for example, be a bit better off in some respects, but much worse off in others, so that our envy would be 'wasted'. For all we know, their situation may be dire. Envy doesn't work that way: fixing on people distant from us in time and whose state of being we can only speculate about; and then feeling envious of them on the chance they may be better off than us.

My second suggestion follows closely (in a logical sense) on the first. Envy isn't merely the abstract thought that, were I given the choice between p, q, r, s etc now (my own current bundle of circumstances, goods and not-so-goods) and t, u, v, w, etc in the year 2060 (someone else's bundle), I'd rank theirs above mine. Envy engages the emotions; indeed it is an emotion. It tends to fasten on others relatively close to, rather than distant from, the envious subject. The context of Chris's question calls for the envied to be so distant that they don't even exist yet. Envying them isn't merely futile, it's pyschologically hard.

And that's if you're given to envying anybody in the first place.

On debunking

Defending the teaching and study of the humanities, Joanna Bourke writes:

What about the conception of the humanities as fulfilling the job of "worrying" society? The humanities help develop a critical, questioning attitude towards the world. It is engaged in debunking the commonsense of its time. It is fundamentally about critique of the given, and resistance to what makes life unjust and ugly.

Apart from the fact that the humanities are worth studying just because the world is worth studying and the humanities encompass different 'regions' of the world - its history, its literature, its music, ethical and other philosophical ideas as thought by its most interesting thinkers etc - I half agree with what Bourke says. A 'critical, questioning attitude towards the world' is very much worth cultivating. It is part and parcel of educating people in the importance of trying to get at the truth of things, whatever those things are, since the best way of doing this is not to receive unquestioningly what one is told, what one has merely on someone else's authority.

Where I don't agree with Bourke is over her claim that this must involve 'debunking the commonsense' of the time. Yes, when there are reasons for thinking that the common sense of the time is wrong; but not if it's right. And common sense sometimes is right, while those who debunk it aren't always. Some examples that spring to mind... It's common sense that there's a human nature, and many people, probably most, think so as a matter of common sense. Some people - often arts graduates, social scientists or postmodernists - debunk this belief, but when challenged, can only defend their debunking of it by retreating to a more feeble and boring claim, such as that some traits which are claimed to be part of human nature aren't. It is part of the common sense of the citizens of many countries today that democracy is a better form of political order than non-democracy is. There seems to be good reason for not debunking this thesis. Bourke presumably wouldn't want to debunk the view, common within academic life, that the humanities are worth studying. And so on.

That common sense should generally be debunked is one-sided in the same way that 'speaking truth to power' is. Of course, one should speak truth to power, but this is because one should speak truth more generally. There are plenty of people, though, who don't have power, or much power, and who need to hear the truth. I've got a little list: conspiracy theorists of one stripe and another; individuals permanently aggrieved but without good reason; the SWP; people who make excuses for terrorism; people who make excuses for torture; those who think that because they've succeeded in life through their own individual efforts, everyone else is equally well-placed to do the same. I could go on but I won't.

A question of age

There's a well-known belief that people have a tendency to become more conservative as they get older. This item reports on research purporting to show that the belief is true: older people, apparently, 'have a strong unconscious incentive to embrace culturally conservative values' because it 'bolsters their self-esteem'. How that's supposed to work is as follows:

Van Hiel and Brebels argue that old age is a time to take stock of your life and attempt to find meaning. For most, this means looking back at your experiences and accomplishments in the context of your social environment. A social-conservative belief system, which values your culture or society above others, would elevate your own personal status, thus propping up your self-esteem.

I'm in no position to question the data of the researchers, not having seen it. But their explanation strikes me as too easy. Of course, it might work that way: Fred and Glenda have enough satisfactions and achievements in their lives, in a manner endorsed, so to say, by the cultural norms prevailing, so they tend towards the defence of these in the face of criticism of them. But what about people unhappy, or less happy, in old age than Fred and Glenda, and this on account of failures, or mishaps, or misfortunes which can be put down, wholly or in part, to the 'rules of the game' as it is played? Wouldn't that incline them to become more radical, or at least to maintain whatever radicalism they had when young?

A universal duty of states

It [humanitarian intervention] is a universal duty. The obligation to stop a massacre falls on any state or coalition of states capable of acting effectively... State action of a forceful kind is required here. The goal is to stop the massacre and then help to install a non-murderous regime.

That's from a lecture by Michael Walzer at the NYU School of Law (for the quoted passage start 20 minutes in). Its subject is much broader, delineating the scope of global justice, as set against the ways of particular national communities - these being the necessary vehicles, within the minimal constraints of global justice, for securing a decent life for their citizens.

But I urge you to think about the forthright logic of the words of Michael's I have quoted. If humanitarian intervention is a universal duty of states when they can act effectively to save people from man-made calamity, then this entails that humanitarian intervention is also a right. For no state can have a duty to do what it has no right to do. If, consequently, there is (as some would have it) no right of humanitarian intervention even in the face of massacre and the like, there can be no general duty of it either. From which it would follow that people being massacred have to hope they'll be saved either by someone's benevolence or by the way things happen to fall out politically, for example at the UN. Otherwise, it's just tough luck. They aren't owed anything morally by the rest of the world. Embrace this morality those who want to. Me, I'm with Michael Walzer.