normblog

The late late show

> I did my books of 2012 too early this year. I knew it was too early, but was influenced by the mainstream media, full of book roundups for the year when there was still a month to go. I won't make the same mistake again. Anyway, a consequence is that a few books that should be in there with the 'really good reads' have now to be signalled here: Pure by Andrew Miller; Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor; The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch; and No Signposts in the Sea by Vita Sackville-West.

> Did you know about the Car Park Theatre of Detroit? Me, I didn't, not till today. Somehow seems like a suitable set of images with which to usher out the old year. (Thanks: HD.)

> 'A Victorian who went trekking in New South Wales' Blue Mountains with only potatoes and naan bread has copped a fine for being underprepared.' He should have taken cake and dried fruit - and maybe some biltong.

> A very Happy New Year to all (especially with that pair of fiddles in the final 45 seconds).

Journalists and the humanitarian imperative

I was interested by a discussion of the following question in journalistic ethics: how far is it acceptable to step beyond the neutrality of the reporter's role on a story one is covering, by contributing humanitarian help? The question is posed in the first instance with reference to the actions of Toronto Star columnist Catherine Porter, who offered to pay for the annual school fees of a young girl, Lovely Avelus, saved from the Haitian earthquake of January 2010. But Jillian Bell - author of the article here - also goes on to write about the issue in more general terms, eliciting the views of others within the profession.

This is how she delineates the problem:

Journalists have traditionally been instructed to turn their own emotions off and avoid getting personally involved with the story they're covering, no matter what tragedies they witness. For example, the Canadian Association of Journalists' ethics guidelines call for journalists to be "fair and impartial observers," while in the U.S. the Society of Professional Journalists' ethical code mandates that reporters "be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know."

The rationale for this disinterested approach is that if reporters get too emotionally invested, it gets harder to report without bias. You're supposed to gather the facts, write the story, and move on...

But try as they might to be perfectly objective, journalists are human beings. What if their sense of humanity outstrips their journalistic training? What if sometimes it's impossible not to step in and help?

I have neither journalistic training nor knowledge of the codes of practice taught to or influencing the conduct of working journalists, but I'll offer a few observations nonetheless, just on the basis of thinking about the question cold. I'd welcome the reactions of journalist friends and/or readers.

The first thing that occurs to me is that objectivity, impartiality and fairness in covering a story are not the same thing as complete emotional detachment from its content. One wouldn't expect someone reporting a massacre to have no feelings about it one way or another - provided that those feelings didn't influence them to misreport the facts so far as they had been able to ascertain them. Equally, I'm not aware that journalists reporting on conflicts about which opinion is very divided are expected to have no opinions themselves. Objectivity and impartiality in this domain consist in not allowing one's opinions to sway one in the presentation of the events one is reporting. (And this is an ideal, it should be said, that is often fallen short of in practice.) So, the engagement of a journalist's humane feelings on a story she is covering doesn't seem to me to be a special case, but rather an instance of a much more general danger: namely, that of letting personal opinion or prejudice distort one's reporting of the facts.

Second, I don't think this difficulty is essentially changed by a reporter's decision to help one (or some) of the victims of a disaster or tragedy that he is writing about. Whether he only feels sympathy for them or goes on to act on that sympathy by offering help, either way it doesn't rule out the possibility of his reporting on their situation in an impartial way. Maybe objectivity is more difficult the more engaged one is, but simply by not giving (helping etc) one doesn't guarantee anything in the way of objectivity anyway, and so I don't see why a line should be drawn against doing so.

Third, the ethical requirements of professional journalism surely can't, in all circumstances, override the ordinary impulses of human compassion. One would hope that at least in some, more extreme, circumstances they would not. Should a journalist not save someone else's life if she can and is uniquely placed in being able to do so, just because that someone else is part of her current 'mission' as a reporter? I presume the right answer is that she should, and I can't see why help at lower levels than life-threatened ones should be any different. If this creates the possibility of clashing interests for the journalist, these can be stated upfront, with others left to judge whether they have affected journalistic judgement.

Finally, I wonder if this is a problem specific to journalism anyway. Other professions are also peopled by people, that is, by individuals whose professional standards will sometimes rub up against the expectations on them as morally conscious human beings. May a lawyer feel sympathy for a client? Presumably yes, provided that he behaves properly towards all his clients. May an academic who studies world poverty and teaches about it feel - even passionately - about those who suffer its effects? May she contribute to relevant charities? The answers, I think, are obvious. They won't acquit the academic in question from the need to produce work that measures up to academically demanding standards of objectivity.

Why is there space?

This I like:

I am reminded of that old joke about time being God's way of preventing everything happening at once, while space is His way of preventing everything happening at Cambridge.

Old it may be but I'd never come across it before, not the last bit anyway.

Figures from a dark time XV

In a piece at Engage on the sociology of anti-Semitism Bob Fine writes that it has become 'almost a fashion to say that we go on too much about the Holocaust'. There are fashions one must do one's best to combat.

Soon after the festival for the man whose death the Christian world has remembered for nearly 2,000 years seems as good a time as any to point out that Jews and others who want to remember what happened in Europe just a few decades ago aren't overdoing anything. In this remembering we should make sure to reserve a place also for those who did what they could to save others in peril and thereby uphold something of the good name of the human species.

53. Michail Zaslawski and his family:

Michail Zaslawski [is] the sole survivor of one of the biggest crimes committed by Romania during World War II - the Odessa, Ukraine massacre of Oct. 22-24, 1941. In this short stretch of time, the Romanian army, which was occupying the area as an ally of Nazi Germany, rounded up some 23,000 Jews from around the city and killed them, shooting many and burning others alive in warehouses. Soldiers lobbed grenades at people who tried to flee.

Zaslawski's parents, three sisters and brother - his entire family - were murdered. The massacre was in reprisal for a bomb attack by Soviets on the Romanian military headquarters, and was personally ordered by the then pro-fascist dictator Ion Antonescu.

54. Zoltan Zinn-Collis and his family:

He was born in Slovakia in 1940 to a Jewish father and interned as a child at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp along with his mother and his two sisters and a brother, all of whom died there.

His older sister Edit survived the Nazi extermination along with Zoltan when the Red Cross rescued them in April 15, 1945.

His father is believed to have died at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944.

Dublin paediatrician and rugby international Bob Collis, who was among the Red Cross contingent, adopted Zoltan and Edit and raised them in Ireland.

55. Ernest Mason:

Ernest Mason was 10 years old on the September day in 1944 when Raoul Wallenberg saved his life.

Mason's Jewish family was seeking asylum from the Hitler regime. Millions of Jews had already been exterminated by then, including Mason's older brother Laszlo. Wallenberg gave Mason's family Swedish citizenship papers and put them in a safe house, where they remained until the end of the Second World War.
.....
Mason spent much of 1944 in hiding with his family. His father and older brother Laszlo were sent to a work camp, where his brother was killed. Another older brother went to Auschwitz, while his older sister lived with a friend, posing as a Christian.

Mason lived with his mother and 18-month-old brother near Budapest in the fall of 1944, posing as Christian for six weeks before they left for fear they were endangering their host family.

His mother headed to the Swedish embassy, where rumour had it they could get citizenship papers. But the line was impossibly long, and Jews were not allowed on the streets after 4 p.m.

Carrying Mason's little brother, his mother led the boys around to the back of the embassy, looking for an alternate way inside. That's when his mother found a man in a gated garden. She spoke German to the man through the fence, and he let them inside. Mason later learned that was Raoul Wallenberg.

Wallenberg disappeared in 1945, captured by the Russians. He is believed to have died in captivity in 1947, although some believe he lived imprisoned into the 1980s. His body has never been found.

56. The figure 80 percent:

Historians still agree that the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews were killed by the Germans, first in overcrowded ghettos under conditions calculated to kill slowly, and then through deportations to the death camps, a process mostly completed by late 1942. But they estimate that some 10 percent of Poland's Jews escaped deportation and sought shelter in villages and forests, often in large family units. The great majority of these Jews (probably more than 80 percent) did not survive until liberation because Poles helped Germans hunt them down.

In their studies of rural Poland, the Polish historians Jan Grabowski, who teaches at the University of Ottawa, and Barbara Engelking, of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, have shown how this happened. First, German police and Polish village leaders enlisted peasants to comb the forests for Jews who were attempting to survive, often in hand-dug caves and bunkers. Once discovered, the Jews were usually executed on the spot, often by German policemen but sometimes by Polish ones. Jews who took shelter with Polish peasants likewise were usually hunted down and killed. This was due not to frequent patrols by the German police, who were actually few and far between, but to the watchful eyes of other Poles, recording in an invisible ledger every commonplace fact, such as extra portions of bread or milk being consumed by a given household. The members of one Polish family lost their lives when German gendarmes - tipped off by the family's neighbors - discovered stores of food intended for Jews in hiding (who were also discovered and shot).

Polish historians have long known about Polish collaborators, whom they described as marginal, the dregs of society. Now a consensus is arising among researchers that the denouncers came from all walks of life.

57. Ida and Louise Cook:

Ida and Louise were to become among the most effective British transporters of Jews out of Germany between 1937 and the outbreak of war.

During those years the sisters made numerous quick trips to Nazi Germany, avoiding the suspicion of German border officials by taking flights from Croydon and returning via Holland and ship to Harwich. It isn't clear how many Jews they saved - the record speaks of '29 cases' but many cases were families rather than individuals so the number may have been 50, 60, or more.
.....
In 1965 the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Authority in Jerusalem bestowed on the sisters the honour of 'Righteous Among the Nations'...

(For an index to the whole series, see here)

A walk on the wild side

From 1979 until the late 1980s I was a jogger. For the first few of those years I'd go for a run most days, and then it got to be fewer and fewer days until my jogging fizzled out. Early in 1992 I took up walking instead, trying to do a 3- or 4-mile brisk walk (sometimes further) five or six days a week. That habit I have kept up until now, though in busier or 'lazier' periods I'll be doing it three or four times a week rather than five or six.

All this is by way of explaining that I really like walking and haven't ever got bored with it in the way I did get bored with jogging. And I therefore agree with Lynsey Hanley when she says in today's Graun that walking is good and, more particularly, that it gives you knowledge of your local environment. This latter is a good in itself, whatever beneficial byproducts it might also throw up. I know that when Adèle and I moved from Manchester to Cambridge just over two years ago, I found it enormously satisfying using my afternoon walks to 'map out' the neighbourhood in which we now live, seeing how everything connected up and feeling more in control (rather than the total stranger I'd been to begin with) as bit bit by bit I made my way around south Cambridge.

What I'm much more doubtful about is Hanley's way of connecting walking and the knowledge it yields, as opposed to not walking and the ignorance it yields, with the interests of... capitalism. She has come to believe, she says, 'that there is a vested interest at work in capitalism that ensures we do as little of it [walking] as possible'. The supporting argument for this belief of hers is that walking is 'one of a number of antidotes to ignorance, binding us to our environment through the accumulation of local knowledge'.

One of the reasons I'm sceptical of Hanley's view is that I don't think it's remotely plausible to say, on the basis of the historical record of capitalist development, that there has been a vested capitalist interest at work in maintaining ignorance. In fact, I think this would be a preposterous claim. There may be specific interests amongst capitalists at any given time in preferring ignorance of certain matters to knowledge about them. But, overall, capitalist development has also helped to disseminate education and knowledge, from basic literacy to the acquisition of technical skills, from impelling scientific advances to making the products of culture more widely available, in a way that was historically unprecedented. Furthermore, the experience of walkers, as valuable as it is, isn't uniquely privileged as a source of information and knowledge. Cyclists, users of public transport and, yes, even drivers of private cars acquire their own kinds of knowledge from their respective activities, knowledge which is also relevant to the making of sound and/or just public policy.

The theme walking-is-good-and-(therefore)-opposed-to/by-capitalism is all too familiar as a variant of the idea that capitalism is all bad and that nothing good has or can come of it - an idea that is as false today as it always has been.

On the inner history of reading

There's an interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the growing interest in, and research into, the reading experiences of the past. It's about 'the hunt for evidence of how people over time have interacted with books, newspapers, and other printed material'. Future researchers in this area are going to be glad of today's book-bloggers and other bloggers, as well as of Twitter and Facebook. Just one more way in which the internet has improved the world. (Via.)

Is there a best way of charitable giving?

I am troubled by a column of Peter Singer's in the LA Times. In it he raises and responds to the question of where one should be directing one's charitable donations. His answer is that you should be giving in such a way as to do as much good as possible: so, not for building new churches or improving already excellent educational institutions or public art collections and such; but rather to making a difference for the better for the world's poor. Singer writes:

Given the huge discrepancy between how much most Americans have and how little the world's poorest people have, your dollars are likely to do more good if you give to charities helping people living in extreme poverty in developing countries - as long as you are careful to give only to the most effective ones.

He concludes his column by saying you should 'give where you will have the most impact'.

What troubles me about the argument is that I find what Singer says to be useful as a rough-and-ready principle but not as overriding every other possible consideration. Naturally, we should try to ensure that our charitable efforts are more rather than less effective, and poverty of the kind Singer focuses on is a quite proper object of charitable remedial effort. At the same time, I cannot see how to justify a principle which says in effect, 'Do no good for others unless that good is the best possible good you can do'. Not only is this impractical since you won't always know how to optimize your efforts, but it means you must override considerations like love, loyalty, gratitude, the spontaneous impulse to be helpful to proximate others, or others you just happen to know about, or others for whom you have some special sympathy (for whatever reason), and so on.

World poverty is indeed an evil in need of eradication. But the field of problems in need of remedial attention is a crowded one. I doubt there is any simple formula for directing people's efforts in helping others. (For two related posts see here and here.)

50 women writers - Boxing Day literary quiz

The fifth normblog Boxing Day literary quiz is a celebration of women novelists. There are 25 questions, each of which elicits the names of two writers. A few of the pairs are linked by a common first name. (Thus, for example, you might – though you don't – have the clue 'Jane sounded happy at the prospect of having to watch over them', to give you Jane Smiley and Jane Gardam.) More often the writers paired hide behind allusions to titles of their books. (So you could – though you don't – have the clue 'King of the castle in modern times', to yield Susan Hill and Linda Grant.) And sometimes the clue mixes one writer's name and a book by another writer.

1. She lost her earring in the bookshop.
2. Sounds like Barbara took a bit of a drink while trying to unlock the riddle of monarchy.
3. Both nice and good to a fault.
4. It threw its light upon the waters.
5. It's as if she found Richard Burton in Knutsford.
6. Were they homesick for Newfoundland?
7. A rose for the home.
8. Hard times in the family but not at the Priory.
9. Didn’t Anita make a fortune out of that hotel?
10. A Ghazzah Street in Jerusalem.
11. They were younger sisters (but not dotty).
12. Beloved pursuit.
13. After Esme disappeared the marriage was over.
14. As the mother said to her daughter, 'The damage they did in Troy was lasting.'
15. What was lost was a little boy.
16. Did Elizabeth really feed an olive to her tortoise?
17. She wrote fondly of Jane but not of Jane.
18. No theory unless based on praxis.
19. It sounds like you might put her in a salad, but please leave out the oranges.
20. It was their custom to march through the middle of the country.
21. No passion left, only solace.
22. Were the saplings in that war on the side of the angels?
23. A real deceiver but one of scarce resources.
24. Could that be a Rubens I saw over at the Tates (and why, by the way, were the two of them fighting)?
25. She kept company with believers.

Entries to my normblog email address by 2 January, please. The judges (WotN and I) will award book tokens worth £20.00 each to the two entries with most correct answers.

(For the answers, see now here.)

The Tree by Wendy Cope

I am honoured to be able to wish everyone a very happy Christmas - as I duly do - with this poem by Wendy Cope. I post it here with Wendy's kind permission.

The Tree

We had to leave our home. We travelled here
With all our worldly goods - box after box
Of crockery and books, our furniture,
Our pictures, mirrors, lamps and rugs and clocks.
In its pot our precious Christmas tree,
A straggly adolescent, four years old,
Survived the journey, waited patiently
Till it was time to come in from the cold.
Now it's lit up in all its annual glory,
Hung with treasures taken out of store.
Every little trinket tells a story,
A memoir of the life we had before.
We got through the disruption and the pain.
The tree is telling us we're home again.

Evidence of the affair

Today, or in one of the days ahead, you might like to take a break from whatever it is you're doing and read a short story. If so, here's one from Sophie Hannah for you. It's called 'My Plagiarist'.