Posts in November, 2007
Martin Amis, ‘demented flasher’
November 25, 2007 14 comments
The sublime Chris Morris on the ridiculous Martin Amis:
Surely we all chuckle at the strenuous ennui of his salon drawl. Didn’t he once accidentally sneer his face off? …
Despite his manifest absurdity (he called the World Trade Centre attacks ‘edificide’ and the towers’ destruction an ‘apocollapse’), people take him seriously and if they do then we must.
Read the whole thing.
Previously in “Martin Amis”: Any ethnicity, Functioning insanity.
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Dawkins’s strange bedfellow
November 23, 2007 90 comments
My interest in reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion began at zero, and if anything decreases each time I read anything about it by mistake, becoming a large stock of negative interest, so that I find myself actively interested in reading pretty much anything else in part because it is not The God Delusion. ((I think Dawkins is a really wonderful science writer, even though I hate memes. But I don’t give a fig what he thinks about the existence or otherwise of a god, just as I wouldn’t hasten to read a textbook on genetics by Pope Ratzinger.))
Still, I read something else about The God Delusion by mistake recently, ((Well, not exactly by mistake: for my Et Cetera column forthcoming in Saturday’s Guardian, for which review I had space to make only a super-compressed version of this post’s point.)) which in itself was interesting to a degree. It was Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to The God Delusion, by John Cornwell. The subtitular conceit is, of course, terribly twee; and many of its arguments are merely warm and fluffy. ((Not that there is anything wrong with warmth and fluffiness per se: they can be excellent qualities in a towel.)) Where Cornwell does score, however, is on the subject of Dawkins’s methodology. Specifically, in the devastating chapter that focuses on Dawkins’s notorious claim:
Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. “Love thy neighbour” didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only “Love another Jew”.
As Cornwell shows (and as you can check via Amazon’s search inside feature), Dawkins offers a single source for this and the other assertions that cluster round it: what Dawkins calls a “remarkable” paper by one John Hartung, an anaesthesiologist with a doctorate in anthropology.
Cornwell argues persuasively that Hartung’s “remarkable” paper, “Love Thy Neighbor: The evolution of in-group morality” (here) has a peculiarly selective approach to citation from the Old and New Testaments. As one open-and-shut example: Hartung’s claim that “Jesus often used the words neighbor and brother without explicitly indicating that he meant fellow Jews whom he sought to unify” is quite demolished by simple reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus tells exactly in answer to the question “Who is my neighbour?” The anaesthesiologist John Hartung unaccountably forgot about this rather famous story, and to this day seems oblivious to its existence, even though the website version of his “remarkable” paper explicitly solicits “corrections and updates to the text and references”.
But the Unspeak point of my post is, rather, a different article by the anaesthesiologist John Hartung — one to which Cornwell also refers. It is this review of a book about “Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy”. The review climaxes thusly:
History is replete with the consequences of that form of reactive racism which we call anti-Semitism, and MacDonald is in the vanguard of those who will broaden our understanding of its origins. The ancient Light unto the nations burned most brightly during Solomon’s reign over the entire Middle East. According to the original account, “the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred and sixty-six talents” (First Kings 10:14, RSV), or about 60,000 pounds – three times the amount that Attila was able to extort from Rome per annum before he sacked it.
Those figures are exaggerated, but the point remains, and contemporary figures need no embellishment. The modern state of Israel receives the monetary equivalent of more than 625,000 pounds of gold per year, primarily from the United States. Isaiah’s dream has come true and it rests on two pillars: (1) most of the citizens of most donor nations are Christian or Jewish, such that, the former religion being a form of the latter, to varying degrees they believe in a god who gave Palestine to the Jews, and (2) the most enormous act of reactive racism ever perpetrated, namely the Holocaust, has been presented, and so is perceived, as having been the psychotic swelling up of a form of evil that resides disproportionately in the souls of Goyim — and so they have been induced to irrationally atone for their special evil by enabling descendant and nondescendant coreligionists of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to systematically purloin the land and property of people who were not those victims’ persecutors. MacDonald’s work will help us chip away at this second pillar, and that makes it very good work indeed.
You can imagine how fascinated I was by the phrase “reactive racism”. To call anti-Semitism a form of “reactive racism” surely means nothing other than that it’s the Jews’ fault. This is certainly what Kevin MacDonald himself appears to mean, in a paper cited at Slate:
[T]here are several important historical examples where increased levels of resource competition between Jews and gentiles have triggered reactive processes among gentiles, resulting in gentiles developing highly cohesive anti-Semitic group strategies in opposition to Judaism — what I term ‘reactive racism.’
Those “reactive processes among gentiles” — they must have been triggered by something the Jews did first, right? Right, as he writes in his 1994 book A People That Shall Dwell Alone, the book that Hartung was reviewing, as cited here:
Western anti-Jewish movements have tended to be in response to intense competition from Jews.
That’s clear enough. Clear enough, too, is the anaesthesiologist John Hartung’s description of the Holocaust as an “act of reactive racism”. It plainly means, I am afraid, that the Jews provoked it: perhaps, y’know, with their secret cabals that ran the world.
I’m not sure whether “reactive racism” holds any respectable currency in anthropology or related disciplines generally: Google finds a mere 158 usages when the search terms exclude MacDonald’s and Hartung’s names; and Google Scholar a mere 14. These are mostly in regard to historically recent examples of groups that were formerly oppressed or continue to be oppressed by whatever is considered the dominant “race”, and in turn set themselves against it. Even so, we are advised to be circumspect about the term, as by Thomas Teo in his 1999 paper “Methodologies of critical psychology: Illustrations from the field of racism“:
Yet, I want to emphasize theoretical caution here, as there might be good reasons to challenge reactive racism as a concept. Conceptual caution is required as one takes the societal power of construction and action into account. Who, within a given society, has the power to propose constructions and meanings that gain acceptance? Who has the power to evaluate these constructions? Who has the power to put these constructions into practice? Victims of racism rarely have the cultural or political power to make their constructions dominant.
Moreover, the phenomenon of reactive racism has been abused to render everyone equally a racist, so that the victims appear no better than the perpetrators. If everybody is racist, then why should there be a special effort to challenge the racism of any one group? However, this political strategy is used to maintain structural and societal forms of racism. Of course the basic error in such thought is the individualistic neglect of societal power. Yet, despite the danger that the dominant group imposes reactive racism as a concept, it seems appropriate — from a psychological point of view — to include this type of racism, while being aware of the problems associated with this concept.
Even with such cautious acceptance of the concept’s potential utility in mind, however, I regret to report that I cannot find an article by the anaesthesiologist John Hartung which offers to explain in detail just how Germans were in fact oppressed by Jews in the years leading up to the Holocaust, in order to lend credence to his claim that industrialized genocide was an act of “reactive racism”. I conclude that the phrase “reactive racism” as used here is thoroughgoing Unspeak, attempting to perform an instant mitigation of the crime and to stab the finger of original blame in the direction of the crime’s victims. And so I am led inexorably to the view that the writing of the anaesthesiologist John Hartung is anti-Semitic trash.
As Cornwell concludes his chapter, addressing Dawkins with beautiful understatement:
In view of the controversial nature of Hartung’s views, including his espousal of MacDonald […] I find it strange that you should have been so reliant on this single source for what forms such an important charge against Judaism and Christianity in your book.
But, you know, Dawkins is flying the flag for empiricism and truth. Isn’t he?
90 comments
‘Concerned Citizens’ in Iraq and elsewhere
November 14, 2007 6 comments
In a comment to the previous post, dsquared pointed out a story about the US making new alliances in Iraq. Extract:
Abu Abed, a member of the insurgent Islamic Army, has recently become the commander of the US-sponsored “Ameriya Knights”. He is one of the new breed of Sunni warlords who are being paid by the US to fight al-Qaida in Iraq. The Americans call their new allies Concerned Citizens.
“Concerned Citizens” is indeed wonderful, as though such people were peeping out from behind their net curtains at youths defacing postboxes and rushing to ring the Neighbourhood Watch hotline. The extent to which anyone in Iraq currently enjoys all the rights and institutions that enable people living in more fortunate countries to describe themselves as “citizens” is also quite debatable.
On the other hand, I’m not overly enamoured of “warlords” either, as the newspaper report flatly describes Abu Abed and his fellows. I fear that the practice of calling militia leaders in certain countries warlords operates in two undesirable directions at once — firstly, it makes them sound like brutish historical throwbacks, a mere bunch of battling savages, perhaps because they don’t have F-16s and “smart bombs” at their command; but secondly, to my ear at least, it also sounds quite cool and glamorous, as though they are characters out of Tolkein in leather straps and flowing fur capes.
Turning for guidance to the OED, we find that its first citation, from Emerson as recently as 1856, uses “war-lord” exactly in the sense of my first implication, as a fearful figure from a less civilized era. Emerson notes gladly that:
Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics, and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord.
Other uses of “war-lord” are given, meanwhile, from 20th-century western accounts of the rum goings-on in China, another place of exotic archaism; and it is also used as a translation of one of the titles of the German Kaiser, not to be trusted.
It’s hard to escape the suspicion, then, that “war lord” as it is most often used nowadays encodes some amount of xenophobia and moral superiority. Happily, there is no inescapable reason why it should. The OED defines a warlord simply as: “A military commander or commander-in-chief.” I therefore suggest that the US government should begin referring proudly to George W Bush as a warlord. This would be a thrilling coup of public diplomacy. It would call to mind irresistibly the exciting medieval-themed gorefests of many videogames; as well as, perhaps, Lord Vader. What better way to get disaffected American youth finally behind the Iraq adventure?
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Alain Dershowitz’s torturous Unspeak
November 11, 2007 23 comments
Alan Dershowitz, the celebrated American lawyer and apologist for torture, has made another apology for torture. As apologists for torture go, Dershowitz is on the subtle side. He likes to pretend that he doesn’t support torture, while concocting arguments in favour of it, and, if it suits his purposes, ignoring the law to boot. (On which I wrote this post at CT last year.) Anyway, in his latest apology for torture, Dershowitz writes:
Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president–indeed any leader of a democratic nation–would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.
I submit that there is already something deeply wrong with the fourth word of this extract, where Dershowitz claims that he is personally against torture. The word “personally” is not required to convey Dersowitz’s sense – “I am opposed to the use of torture” would be perfectly clear. Well, perhaps it would be too clear. So it is as well to add “personally”, thus diluting the statement beyond repair.
“Personally” is exquisite Unspeak: it enacts a sort of intimacy with the reader, inviting a rapport with the writer’s innermost emotions, while at the same time catastrophically weakening the statement of which it is a part, for the argument has now been stealthily downgraded – from one of moral principles to one of “personal” feelings. One could be personally in favour of torture, and that would be just fine too. One’s opinions on torture, your and my opinions as well as Dershowitz’s, are merely personal, on the order of idiosyncratic preferences.
Dershowitz’s language could also be read as taking an even more minimalist position: although he would not like to torture anyone himself, he doesn’t mind at all if anyone else does it. Personally I do not like eating Brussels sprouts, but I’d have to be crazy to try to prevent anyone else from doing so.
Let us translate Dershowitz’s argument to a different context. What if someone were to write: “Although I am personally opposed to murdering children, I have no doubt that people will continue to murder children”, and then to go on to suggest that in some special situations an individual ought to be granted a child-killing warrant, so as to reduce society’s pain in seeing illegal things done?
So goes Dershowitz, pretending glibly that he is not in favour of torture, when everything he writes about the subject without exception represents a plea for torture to be made legal. Personally, I consider him a disgrace to his profession and to the university of Harvard.
In the mean time, counter-terrorism veteran Malcolm Nance has a brilliant post here on why forced partial drowning, or “waterboarding”, is torture.
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Better = Less
November 4, 2007 7 comments
The author of this post at CiF about the enormous untrammelled good that “private equity” brings to society as long as it is not taxed too much, also happens to be a member of a British governmental body of whose existence I was until now blessedly ignorant, the “Better Regulation Commission”. On its website, the “Better Regulation Commission” describes its purpose thus:
To advise the Government on action to:
• reduce unnecessary regulatory and administrative burdens; and
• ensure that regulation and its enforcement are proportionate, accountable, consistent, transparent and targeted.
Perhaps I am missing something, but this appears to add up to minimizing regulation as much as possible. So it would seem that “Better” is now a feel-good synonym for “Less”, as in what the body might more accurately have been called, the Less Regulation Commission. No doubt Gordon Brown will soon announce that he wishes to create Better Child Poverty and Better Train Crashes the length and breadth of the country. Bill Gates will spend more billions in the cause of Better Malaria, and I will strive to do Better Work For More Money.
Do you object, supposing quite reasonably that the people appointed to decide what counts as “unnecessary” regulation and what is “proportionate” must be a panel of sage and disinterested economicalistical scholars? It is not quite thus:
The Government announced in Budget 2005 that it would establish a Better Regulation Commission (BRC) to provide independent advice to government, from business and other external stakeholders, about new regulatory proposals and about the Government’s overall regulatory performance.
Ah, so the Less Regulation Commission provides “independent advice to government, from business”, about regulation. Um, in what sense is business an “independent” source of advice on the extent to which, er, business should be regulated? Well, IANAE. And if “better” means “less”, there is no reason why “independent” cannot mean “with vested interests”. It’s all part, no doubt, of a laudable strategy to provide Better Transparency in Public Language.
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The de Menezes verdict
November 1, 2007 20 comments
The Metropolitan Police has been found to have broken the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act on the day in 2005 that they shot electrician Jean Charles de Menezes seven times in the head with dumdum bullets on a London Tube train.
Certainly Menezes’s own health and safety were thereby rather permanently compromised. (For him, it was definitely a safety event.) But that was not exactly the point of the trial, despite the somewhat confusing emphasis of the first two paragraphs in the BBC report:
London’s Metropolitan police force has been found guilty of endangering the public over the shooting dead of a man officers mistook for a suicide bomber.
The force broke health and safety laws when officers pursued Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes to a Tube station and shot him seven times, a jury found.
In fact, the burden of what the court found the police did wrong was to let Menezes get on a bus, and then a Tube train, in the first place, while the Keystone Cops were miscommunicating and urinating at inappropriate moments. Their letting a person suspected of involvement in terrorism run around on public transport is what was found to have endangered the public safety.
Quite so. If the police had been more efficient and shot de Menezes dead immediately he left his flat that morning, there would have been no grounds for censure at all.
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Rumsfeld’s ghost at the banquet
November 1, 2007 5 comments
In the Washington Post today are printed extracts from some of the “snowflakes”, or internal memos, produced by Secretary of “Defense”, Donald Rumsfeld, during his last tenure. For no good reason that I can see, the WP does not provide facsimiles of the actual documents in its possession, so we have to rely on the reporter’s partial and selective quotations. Even so, it is fascinating language:
In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid “physical labor” and wrote of the need to “keep elevating the threat,” “link Iraq to Iran” and develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war. […]
“Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,” he wrote.
People will “rally” to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. “They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory.”
The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him “go out and push people back, rather than simply defending” Iraq policy and strategy. “I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can’t win on the defense,” he wrote. “We can’t just keep taking hits.”
Rumsfeld’s reminder of the need to “keep elevating the threat” is further proof (were any needed) that he and his colleagues were knowingly and deliberately indulging in fearmongering. (He does not talk of informing the American public of an objective threat that is actually increasing.)
Like most people who make thrilling, inspirational calls for “sacrifice”, meanwhile, Rumsfeld has in mind the sacrifice of anyone but himself. It is interesting to note further how he self-pityingly characterises his own position in terms of violence, “taking hits”, while at the same time not forgetting to congratulate himself on his fortitude (“They say I do it well”), and all the time in fact expecting those under his command, ordinary American soldiers, to take the real “hits” of bullets and bombs, in the service of his brilliant strategy to terrify the public into thinking that they are under attack from all sides.
(For more on civilian politicians bigging themselves up with military metaphors, compare also the juvenile bully’s glee with which Dick Cheney boasted that he “dropped the F-bomb on” Patrick Leahy.)
As these scraps remind us, Rumsfeld’s unique style of communication, in which jazzy egotism regularly won out over Machiavellian prudence, shone an especially bright light on the mind of this administration. He is sorely missed.
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