The start of a debate not the end of it

Thanks to Normblog I come across this from Peter Tatchell - a discussion of "the left's retreat from universal human rights".

"Liberal humanitarian values are under threat. Much of this threat comes not from the far right but from the left's moral equivocation and compromises. Sections of progressive opinion are wavering in their defence of universal human rights. In this era of post-modernism and live-and-let-live multiculturalism, moral relativism is gaining ground."

And later ...

"The same curious morality applies to Iraq. The Stop The War Coalition was right to oppose the US – UK led invasion, but utterly wrong to ignore Sadaam’s terrorization of the Kurds and Shias, and of socialists, democrats and trade unionists. The STWC’s failure to support the democratic and left opposition to Saddam ranks as one of the great moral failures of our era. It’s “do nothing” and “take no sides” policy failed to challenge Sadaam’s tyranny. Proposals for a campaign of international solidarity to help the Iraqi people topple the dictatorship and liberate themselves were decisively rejected by the STWC."

I find an audience and then alienate him

Given that he is the first person ever to log a comment on my blog, it may be foolish to take issue with Doc Richard. But I was dismayed to discover from his website that there are some people seriously prepared to argue that Bush's election victory was the result of a giant fraud.

The counter-factuals to this claim seem so strong on the face of it that it does make me wonder once again about the great appeal of the conspiracy theory. More than anything, conspiracy explanations allow us not to face up to complexities and disappointments. Of course, constructing a conspiracy theory is not the only way to avoid facing up to things. My two gripes about the British liberal/left response to the Bush victory are that:

1) There is a tendency to caricature the Bush's supporters. One would be forgiven assuming from much of the commentary that they are predominantly fundamentalist Christians and/or neo-Con zealots and/or Forest Gump-like simpletons. In reality Bush's victory relied on a broad alliance of people, many of whom had little stomach for his social programme and had mixed feeling abut the Iraq war. As my exasperated 12 year old daughter concluded a political discussion with my American cousin 'you voted for Bush but you didn't agree with him'.
2) The continued focus on the States is a way of not thinking about a British dimension: Bush is the baddie and Blair is either led astray by him or else is a calming influence on him. The Bush victory should have got us beyond this but there is little sign so far.

Hopefully I haven't alienated Doc Richard with this. As compensation I will try and find out more about the "generator" theory of brain consciousness relationship.

Rollover

Jon Ronson's new blog tells us The Daily Mail is unhappy that National Lottery Good Causes money has been allocated to the following organisations:

* A choir of homosexuals in Yorkshire called Gay Abandon.
* A trust helping improve guinea pig-breeding methods to feed peasants in Peru.
* Northern Ireland's Filipino community and its touring dance troupe.
* A group helping to develop non-governmental and community organisations in Bulgaria.
* A “pro-IRA organisation.”
* A “group which helps unruly children fight expulsion orders.”
* A “group which teaches children how to hide drugs from their parents.”
* “People undergoing sex change operations.”
* Dynamo Dykes Volleyball Club, “which provides professional coaching to lesbian volleyball players.”
* “A group which brings people from the gay and martial arts communities together.”
* “A group which has campaigned against the Robertson's Golliwog and promotes politically correct books and toys.”

I now feel quite guilty about never buying a ticket.

Change the world in 5 years

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust is looking for "6 visionaries who can make the world - or part of it - more just and more peaceful."

Oh no, it's the anti-war Right

Quite interesting article on the 'anti-war Right' by Lawrence Auster. Best quote:
"It was exactly the kind of resentment normally associated with the left, the impotent fury at a traitorous father figure or a supposed "oppressor" whom the supposed "oppressed," seeing himself as powerless and therefore not subject to any responsible restraints, feels justified in striking back at in any way he can. One of the typical forms this resentment took was the notion that the oppressor has no rational basis for doing what he's doing, but is acting out of insane or evil motives."

Your point being ...

Frank Ferudi on love experts

Again from Ode
"Therapy culture frames the experience of everyday life as a struggle that ordinary people can not survive without professional guidance."

" ... therapy culture has shifted our attitudes toward love, by heightening our fears and inflating our expectations of failure and disappointment. Even worse, it has reduced intimate relationships to a kind of emotional business deal with a permanent opt-out clause. And that is not what we need to sustain human culture."

Another pathology of self management?

Ode reports:
'Obsession about being healthy can make you sick. This condition even has a name: orthorexia, a term introduced in 1997 by American specialist in alternative health physician Steven Bratman. Orthorexia sufferers spend an unreasonable amount of time each day worrying about what they should and shouldn’t eat. As Bratman notes in Psychology Today (September/October 2004): “If your focus on healthy eating is interfering with your happiness and social life, you might have a problem.” Other specialists claim there is little difference between orthorexia and anorexia. Both conditions involve weight loss and their treatment is nearly the same. Psychology Today is concerned that all the recent coverage of low carb diets and the obesity epidemic will mean a rise in orthorexia.'

Nine (well eight) Lords a' leaping

"The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."

From the judgement of the UK Law Lords who have ruled by an 8-1 majority that the indefinite detention without trial of foreign terrorism suspects was unlawful under the European convention on human rights

"We were arrested in December 2001 and taken straight to Belmarsh prison. We know that the police in this country have enormous powers to investigate suspected terrorists. Why did no one ever speak to us? Why were we never asked a single question before being locked up as terrorists? We have never had a trial. We were found guilty without one. We are imprisoned indefinitely and probably forever. We have no idea why. We have not been told what the evidence is against us. We are here. Speak to us. Listen to us. Tell us what you think and why. If you did, you would no longer believe we were a threat to this country. You would think perhaps that there was not the emergency you have imagined here. Everyone is giving their opinion about us. Why not think of coming to us first, rather than locking us up and never speaking to us?"

A letter from the detainees in The Guardian, 26 Feb 04. See also the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities.

Polly Toynbee again!

This Polly Toynbee thing is getter out of hand. I have now discovered another brave, admirable article by her, this time on assisted death. Writing just 3 weeks after her mother's painful and undignified end from cancer, Toynbee discusses the guilt of not fulfilling her mother's wish to be released from her misery. Toynbee criticises the current legal and medical context that, she argues, wrongly insists that people should and can have a good, natural death through palliative care.

Given the circumstances of writing, I feel awkward at challenging anything Toynbee says but here goes. In the spirit of Ian Craib (see my very first post), I'd ask the following:

1) As Craib says death is the ultimate disappointment. Perhaps the focus on the process of dying is a way of not confronting that. Would assisted death be any more bearable or meaningful? Is there a danger here of promoting a different but equally unachieveable ideal of the good death?
2) So much of the rhetoric in this area plugs into the contemporary preoccupation with the notion of a self-managing individual in control of their own life. As Craib and others have suggested, these values are shot through with contradictions, deny social, psychological and biological realities, and are often the means through which power is exercised on us. Seen in these terms our 'right to die as we choose' is not unquestionable.

Norman makes my day

I am quite ashamed of how excited I was to find my blog referred to in another blog; not just any blog mind, but the mighty Normblog. Readers will find the usual insight in a discussion of Eagleton on Furedi and the decline of the public intellectual.

Am I being solipsistic to think that Normblog's defense of Polly Toynbee (is there no taboo Norm will not challenge?) might also have been sparked by my dismissive comments? Normblog rightly highlights a good example of Toynbee's capacity to lift the level of public debate - this time on the proposed law on incitement to religious hatred.

I am more sympathetic than Normblog to the notion that something might be seriously awry with contemporary intellectual life. Then again I have spent my working day struggling with the HEFC QAA Foundation Degree Review methodology so my judgement might be distorted....

Where have all the intellectuals gone?

Terry Eagleton's very good review of Frank Furedi's book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? contains the following:

'One mark of the classical intellectual (more recently dubbed a "theorist") was that he or she refused to be pinned to a single discipline. Instead, the idea was to bring ideas critically to bear on social life as a whole.... In fact, a snap definition of an intellectual would be "more or less the opposite of an academic". Once society is considered too complex to be known as a whole, however, the idea of truth yields to both specialism and relativism.'

The only problem is that Eagleton's example of a contemporary intellectual is Polly Toynbee!

See also review by Dylan Evans in Guardian. Other reviews include Theodore Dalrymple in The Spectator and Noel Malcolm in The Telegraph.

There is an interview with Furedi about the book in Spiked. David Aaronovitch (I'll try and restrain myself) also discusses Furedi's book.

More Norman Geras

An interview with Norman Geras

Is it too difficult for many liberals and lefties to really engage with the horrors of (and implications of) recent terror attacks on civilians? As Norman Geras suggests, we come up with arguments that 'contextualise' acts of terror or suggest that, for example, the US 'asked for' 9/11 (see Zizek?), or argue that there is a moral equivalence between the US and Bin Laden, al-Qaida, and the Taliban. I can't accept Geras' political conclusions and I have done a fair bit of 'contextualising' myself but he is worrying away at some really important issues. The questions that arise out of this for me relate to a) the capacity (or is it necessity) of people (on all sides) to suspend supposedly universal standards of human rights when it suits them b) that we all find it easier to deal in absolutes and certainties than with complexities and disappointments.

Not agreeing, thinking

I suppose if this blog is really going to be in the spirit of Ian Craib I should break the habit of a lifetime and acknowledge that no one argument is all right and all wrong. Most importantly to think about how rigid, simple or all-encompassing arguments are appealing for all the wrong reasons.

A blog that I often read but often don't agree with normblog

Curtis v Zizek

This probably says more about me and my bad reading habits than anything else but ... I am currently reading Zizek's and Mark Curtis' books (sort of) on the Iraq War in parallel. This is having the effect of getting me to think less about Iraq and more about the process of and motivation for reading.

The contrast in tone and style between the two books is sharp: Zizek skitish, oblique, funny; Curtis unwavering but polemical. Zizek plays with the ironies and the paradoxes, Curtis reveals the hidden facts. What works best and why?

Zizek's playfulness, his impulse to shock or show off can be infuriating but it is a way into the complexities. I worry, however, that his style is also a way of managing the faint embarassment that certainty, commitment and moral outrage now seem to engender. Curtis' approach, on the other hand risks precisely that kind of response.

A good reason not to count?

To the UK government's response to the recent study in the Lancet suggesting that 100,000 have died as a result of the war and Tony Blair's rejection of the call to count Iraqi deaths we might add the following from Mark Curtis:

"...Britain bears significant responsibility for around 10 million deaths since 1945...including Nigerians, Indonesians, Arabians, Ugandans, Chileans, Vietnamese..."

Disappointing theory?

I belong to a book club. This month's book is Zizek's 'Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle'.

Reasons why I should like this book:

1) About Iraq War
2) Obscure/fashionable European social theorist
3) Comes from obscure/fashionable European country - Slovenia
4) Left leaning with a twist
5) Mixes politics, psychoanalytic ideas and popular culture
6) Smart arse
7) Writes loads and loads

So why can't I help feeling let down ...


Disappointing picture of Zizek 


More to come on this.