normblog

Betting on gay marriage

Here's another of those conservative attempts to hold off the possibility of introducing same-sex marriage. Jeff Jacoby tries to keep the institution of marriage fixed by insisting on just one of its functions as definitive:

The essential, public purpose of marriage is to unite male and female - to bind men and women to each other and to the children that their sexual behavior may produce. It is rooted in the belief that every child needs a mother and a father. Gay marriage, whether enacted by lawmakers or imposed by judges, disconnects marriage from its most basic idea.

He starts with a conjunction - 'to unite male and female' and bind them to their biological children - but finishes only with one of the items paired. For, if marriage can unite a man and a woman, there's no reason it can't also unite a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Therefore Jacoby has to rest his case on binding the married couple to the children they produce. But as it is, some marriages don't produce children; and nearly every marriage has other important purposes and functions than producing children. So his is an attempt to freeze the institution of marriage by arbitrarily making it less than it has always been.

Jacoby reckons same-sex marriage will 'eventually collapse'. If I could be around long enough to collect on the bet or, less probably, pay out on it, I'd be willing to put up a sum of money against him on this.

Johann Hari and the meaning of plagiarism

By now anybody who's interested is likely to have made up their minds about the Johann Hari business: about how serious or otherwise a misdemeanour against jounalistic ethics his way of writing up interviews has been; and about whether an apology from him should suffice. I make no attempt here to offer judgement on the first of those two issues. But on the second I would say that an apology from Johann would suffice if it were clear, non-evasive and acknowledged in full what was wrong about his interviewing 'technique'.

I don't think his apology meets this standard. Johann says that the accusation of plagiarism against him is 'totally false', and in support of the claim he writes that:

Plagiarism is presenting somebody else's intellectual work as your own - whereas I have always accurately attributed the ideas of (say) Gideon Levy to Gideon Levy.

But this is subtly - and self-servingly - to narrow the meaning of the word 'plagiarism'. By saying, first, 'intellectual work' and then segueing from that into 'the ideas of' Gideon Levy, Johann omits forms of plagiarism that involve using the work of others without making due acknowledgement. This is certainly a meaning of plagiarism. If I report as having happened to me an encounter on a New York street with Wayne Gretzky, using the exact words of someone who really did meet Wayne Gretzky on a New York street, and I pretend it happened to me, then that is plagiarism. I'm not stealing anyone's 'ideas', in the way that this is usually meant; I'm not passing off as my own an argument, or conceptual proposal, or novel thesis, of some writer or thinker. But I am improperly drawing on the work of others. The New Shorter Oxford gives for 'plagiarism': 'The action or fact of plagiarizing a work, idea, author, etc.; literary theft...'; and for plagiarize:

Take and use as one's own (the thoughts, writings, inventions, etc., of another person); copy (literary work, ideas, etc.) improperly or without acknowledgement...

This covers what Johann was doing. The fact that he didn't try to pass off the ideas of his interviewees as his own doesn't eliminate the plagiarism involved in passing off something of the work of other people than his interviewees as his own.

If you were accused of a theft at the Oversight Hotel, it wouldn't establish that you were innocent of the charge merely to show that you hadn't stolen anything belonging to the hotel itself.

Whether for these reasons or not, an online poll at the Guardian suggests that by a ratio of 3 to 1 people aren't persuaded by Johann Hari's apology.

Runs on the Board

In case any of my readers thinks that I haven't devoted enough space on this blog to recommending the attractions and the virtues of cricket, I draw your attention to this item about an upcoming exhibition in Barnsley that records the contribution of older cricketers. As you will learn, if you weren't already aware of it, 'Cricket is one of those pursuits allowing those of advanced years to stay active'.

See no reasons, 'cos there are no reasons

Here's more on Philip Roth and the novel. In a recent interview in the Financial Times, Roth has said:

I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.

When asked why this is, he replied: 'I don't know. I wised up...' Taking off from his comment, Laura Miller at Salon writes a piece in which she explores whether there's something more general at work here; for, she notes, Roth isn't the only writer to have lost a taste for reading fiction on getting older.

As I see it, Miller should have saved herself the trouble. Some people read and enjoy fiction. Others don't; they prefer non-fiction. And then there are people whose reading patterns change over a lifetime - they might read more fiction at one period and less, or none, at a later period; or vice versa. There is no more reason to think general forces are at work in turning a reader away from fiction as they get older than there is to think that reading fiction is - in general - a less appealing activity than reading non-fiction is. The two types of reading just grab different people, or the same people at different times, or grab people in different doses or combinations. Miller will no doubt be able to find many, many older readers of fiction, and even some who read more fiction than they did when they were younger.

Moreover, I don't believe Philip Roth. What I mean is, I don't believe that the reason he's no longer reading fiction is the one implied by what he says when he says, 'I wised up'. That goes beyond the statement that he no longer enjoys or finds interest in fiction; it says that reading fiction is unwise. Now, if he really thought that, why would he have in mind - as he lately confided to Mark Lawson on 'Front Row' - writing another novel himself?

Death penalty for libertarians?

Chris proposes three reasons why libertarians might support the death penalty. I have my doubts about the first of them, which says that 'If the victim would have wanted the death penalty enforced, then it should be' - this because for a libertarian only the victim counts. Even so, the assumed wants of the victim can't be a sufficient consideration. What if he or she wanted punishment of the perpetrator's descendants unto the twelfth generation? But, anyway, Chris's second reason for libertarians is the one I mainly wanted to focus on:

Libertarians are libertarians because they believe that freedom is colossally valuable. A lifetime in prison, without hope of freedom, is therefore a crueller punishment than death. Capital punishment, then, is more humane than imprisonment...

Yikes. I would hope that some libertarians might think freedom would be scarce for them whether they were dead or in prison, but at any rate they'd like the choice of prison, in view of the final nature of the alternative to it; might think that, as reduced as their freedoms would be in prison, they would have more freedoms there than they would once no longer in the land of the living. Other libertarians might think differently, of course.

Empty resistance to same-sex marriage

New York having become the latest US state to legalize same-sex marriage, you might like to look at a couple of arguments against this trend. They come from George Weigel. This is one of them:

Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality.

It is a totalitarian temptation to try to remodel reality against the grain of what is possible or what is wanted by people, but there's something which states do, including non-totalitarian, liberal-democratic states, and that is to reform old laws to reflect changing realities when the changes in question are for the better. Just states should only protect old institutions when they can be defended as morally superior to the alternatives that might replace them. Weigel's assumption here, which he neither defends in general nor argues for in the case at hand, is that older must mean better. But when it doesn't, yielding to or facilitating change isn't necessarily totalitarian.

Weigel also tries to use the old meaning of marriage to his advantage:

There is a curious rhetorical fact that has usually gone unremarked in these debates, but which is worth pointing out. That what the New York state legislature approved has to be described, not as marriage, but as "gay marriage" or "same-sex marriage" is itself a verbal indicator that what is being done here is counterintuitive. We all know, or thought we knew, what marriage is, and to add the qualifier "gay" or "same-sex" is a tacit admission by the proponents of the practice that it requires an appeal to authority to enforce what seems strange, odd, not right. The verbal tic of "gay marriage" or "same-sex" marriage is thus itself a rhetorical warning sign that what was done in Albany was an exercise in raw state power, the state's asserting that it can do X simply because it claims that it has the power to do so.

This is just plain silly. The qualifiers 'gay' or 'same-sex', to go with 'marriage', are required so as to register that a type of union not previously recognized by the law as marriage from now on will be. To that extent, they also register that the meaning of the word 'marriage' is being extended. But it is no more a sinister signal of arbitrary power than if a law providing for such-and-such procedures to cover adoptive parenthood were to include the word 'adoptive' before the word 'parenthood'. Weigel may be against same-sex marriage and have some real reasons for being against it, but the bare use of qualifying adjectives doesn't prove, as he implies it does, an illegitimate use of 'raw state power'. (Thanks: LM.)

Long slow narrative distance

In the short exchange below (from 2009) with Tina Brown, Philip Roth explains why he thinks hardly anyone will be reading novels 25 years from now. It will become a cultic activity, for a very small group of people. The problem, Roth says, is not the Kindle; it's the print. Reading novels requires concentration, focus, devotion, and these are now hard to come by, given competition from the movies, TV and computers.

Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

I hope Roth is wrong about this. But I also think that he must be. Movies and TV have been around for long enough and there are still large numbers of people reading fiction. That suggests that it yields its own satisfactions, satisfactions different from those provided by screen versions of the narrative form. I wouldn't care to try and give a complete account of what these are, but speaking only for myself - and I've been an avid movie-goer and movie-watcher since I was a boy - I'd say that amongst them are the possibilities that written fiction provides through 'long slow distance': to explore things in greater depth and detail, to 'go inside' characters and what they're thinking and feeling, to play off one interior world against another, to build a situation more gradually, to accumulate 'colour' and detail more richly. I'm not saying that film is closed off from all of this, but it doesn't hold every advantage. (Via.)

Meaning and Purpose (by Sean Coleman)

[What follows was sent as an email to me and is posted with Sean's permission.]

Your brief discussion of Marcelo Gleiser brought to mind a quote from the tremulous opening of Fear and Trembling, whose rapturous gloom sustained my Catholic late-adolescence:

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

I date my own religious scepticism - like many - from around this time, and something about this line always struck me as especially marvellous: for even without God, how could one not exalt an emptiness that could produce such a grandiloquent, vaulting, beautiful sentence? Even without God, there was lyricism - Shakespeare and Yeats and A Love Supreme. And girlfriends, and ice-cream, and sport and everything else. Subsequently, for me, there was a sudden death in the family; I discovered Camus; lost my faith and became a philosophy undergarduate trying to get it back. I then thoroughly divested myself of any kind of religious attachment altogether. (I remember saying to a religious friend, in high dudgeon, that the whole thing was a 'massive superstructure of fraud and superstition' - I actually spoke just like that).

Later, when I returned, circuitously, to religion, it was with a halting version of the title of your post: that even without a plan, there was a point. But I supplied an addendum that, despite this, I believed that there was a 'plan' - frankly, an otherworldly rationale, a higher supernatural meaning to existence, revealed in Christianity. This is the normal stuff of Church doctrine. And yet for the Church and its apologists to so often turn and remonstrate that, in terms of metaphysics, the obverse is the case - that without God, there is nothing but despair, no 'point' - is a disgrace to humanity and an affront to me. For surely (I argue to religious folk) there is an intrinsic goodness in the blues, in ice-cream, in friendship, that requires no higher ethereal ratification, no teleological purpose?

Simply put - there is no need for any kind of dichotomy here between secular and religious mindsets. Everyone can enjoy, and recognize, the intrinsic value of a sonata, or a sentence, or a game of beach football. Therefore, as someone who does think that there is some preordained metaphysical purpose to existence, I would nevertheless endorse wholeheartedly your view that it is plain nonsense to think that 'there can only be a point in being alive if there's some preordained metaphysical purpose'! (Sean Coleman)

Talking silences

What does it mean to silence someone? Well, here are a few possible answers. An oppressive regime doesn't like what someone is saying so it kills him. Or it locks her away where her voice can no longer be heard. Elsewhere, a law is passed laying down draconian penalties for publicly articulating some view or other. At a meeting, the audience shouts down a speaker so that he or she cannot be heard. There may well be further tyes of instance, but that's a start.

The philosopher Jason Stanley, however, proposes a more expansive meaning of silencing. It would accommodate putting about untruths about a politician that are designed to discredit him or her. Stanley writes:

Silencing extends to politics when outlandish claims are made about public figures. Suppose that President Obama really was a secret Islamist agent, or born in Kenya. In that case, he would be grossly insincere. We would have no reason to believe what he said in any situation. The function of disseminating such claims about the president is not to object to his specific arguments or agenda. It is to undermine the public's trust in him, so that nothing he says can be taken at face value.

To me this suggestion is grotesque. As president of the United States of America, Barack Obama is in one of the very best positions of anyone in the world today to have his voice heard. I can't see the point of the conflation of meanings: telling lies about someone is not, in general, good for them. It may make it more difficult for them to persuade some others of their views; but it isn't the same as silencing them.

Here's another of Stanley's examples of putative silencing:

Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it is difficult to have a reasoned debate about its costs and benefits when the invasion itself is called "Operation Iraqi Freedom."... It is difficult to have a reasoned debate about the costs and benefits of a policy when one side has seized control of the linguistic means to express all the positive claims.

Yes, people tend to use language in ways helpful to themselves and not to their opponents. But in the case at hand - the Iraq war - nobody 'seized control of the linguistic means to express all the positive claims'. Since when did supporters of the Iraq war monopolize the means of expression? In fact, they didn't; critics of the war had plenty to say and said it.

Stanley says 'In silencing, one removes the ability of a target person or group to communicate', but these two examples of his are not apt. There are, as he warns, 'dangers [in] the manipulation of language', but the above are not compelling instances of it - whatever one might think of the example (of pornography) from which he begins.

The normblog guide to soaps 5

Today's recommendation keeps us where we were last time - in the garden. It's this Geranium Rose Soap, and not only does it leave you smelling of the said floral combination, it also has embedded in it dried rose petals. The surface of the bar therefore abrades your skin, though in a mild rather than brutal way. I'm sure you'll like it. The only drawback I can think of is that should you be feeling a bit groggy late at night or in the early morning when you go into your bathroom, you may get the sudden impression that it's housing a giraffe and take fright.