Chris Bertram

I saw Ken Loach’s latest film, “Ae Fond Kiss”:http://www.iconmovies.co.uk/aefondkiss/ , last night. Very good it was too. I don’t want to post spoilers, but the film is about a love affair between Casim (Atta Yaqub), a Glaswegian Muslim with a Pakistani background and Roisin (Eva Birthistle), an Irish Catholic schoolteacher. His family, who have arranged for him to marry Jasmin, a cousin he has never seen, and are less than thrilled at his relationship. I thought the depiction of the intergenerational tensions within this Muslim family was terrific. The film works dramatically because Loach is sensitive enough not to play it just in terms of true love versus backward tradition: Casim’s parents aren’t ogres or dictators but caring and engaging characters who are nonetheless bewildered by their children. One of the best films I’ve seen in ages.

[I also saw Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy in “Before Sunset”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381681/ . I’d estimate that a third of the audience walked out. I wish I had.]

Matthew Turner has been reading John Gunther’s _Inside Europe_ , a classic from 1936, and (in “two”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2004/10/british-politics-in-1936.html “posts”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2004/10/more-british-politics-in-1936.html )regales us with some of the facts about Britain contained therein. I particularly liked this one:

bq. * The decline in the birth rate, which, according to competent estimates, will reduce the population to thirty-three million by 1985.

Matt Yglesias had “some sensible comments”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/the_new_phillis.html the other day concerning Paul Berman’s philistine reaction to The Motorcycle Diaries. As a film, I thought it was OK, though I looked at my watch from time to time. There’s a real question, though, about how to portray Guevara and I’ve strugged with writing something about this for a week. I haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion, just assembled some provisional thoughts partly inspired by Hegel and partly by Alasdair Macintyre.

Hagiography should be out, but so should the sort of reaction that just carpingly lists bad things he did or unwise decisions he made. One reaction to that type of braying criticism is “Hegel’s discussion of critics of Alexander in the Philosophy of History”:http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm (scroll down to § 34). But Hegel’s remarks are inappropriate for Guevara because of the way in which he points to Alexander’s success in the conquest of Asia. Lack of success and damaging facts should not necessarily be enough to deprive a hero of heroic status: Achilles was flawed, and Achilles was cruel, and Achilles failed, but we still respond to him.

And then there’s the question of sympathetic identification with the cause. In his essay “How not to write about Lenin”, Alasdair Macintyre argues:

bq. For those who intend to write about Lenin there are at least two prerequisites. The first is a sense of scale. One dare not approach greatness of a certain dimension without a sense of one’s own limitations. A Liliputian who sets out to write Gulliver’s biography had best take care. Above all he dare not be patronizing…..The second prerequisite is a sense of tragedy which will enable the historian to feel both the greatness and the tragedy of the October Revolution. Those for whom the whole project of the revolutionary liberation of mankind from exploitation and alienation is an absurb fantasy disqualify themselves from writing about Communism in the same way that those who find the notion of the supernatural redemption of the world from sin disqualify themselves from writing ecclesiastical history.

Guevara wasn’t Lenin, just as he wasn’t Alexander, but he did personify a historical moment and he did turn his back on a comfortable future as a communist bureaucrat to pursue the goal of the revolutionary liberation of humanity. Thersites from Des Moines (or wherever) can carp all he wants — and much of the carping will consist in a recitation of facts — but criticism that isn’t appropriately informed by a sense of grandeur, tragedy, heroism and tragic failure just misses the mark.

It is National Poetry Day here in the UK, and though it is presumably _not_ National Poetry Day in many of the nations from which CT contributors and readers come, I’m not going to let that stop me. “Nick Barlow is assembling a list of participating blogs”:http://www.nickbarlow.com/blog/2004_10_03_archive.html#109714776137102153 and among them is “Backword” Dave Weeden “who opines that”:http://backword.me.uk/2004/October/nationalpoetry.html 130 is the greatest of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He may be right, but my favourite — especially in Britten’s setting in his Nocturne — is 43. Here it is:

bq. When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form, form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made,
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

“The Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture series for 2004–5”:http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/lecture_series2005.htm has just been announced and includes several people whose work we’ve discussed on CT (Jonathan Wolff, Mike Otsuka, G.A.Cohen and John Kekes, to name but four).

Jon Snow’s autobiography is being “excerpted in the Guardian”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1319059,00.html . The would-be future leader of Ewekip puts in an appearance:

bq. Meanwhile, we found our cause: anti-apartheid. Liverpool was effectively Tate & Lyle’s British capital. The university had sizeable investments, and a goodly portion found its way to investments in South Africa, where Tate was still big. “Disinvest from South Africa” became our clarion cry. One of the most active staff members was Robert Kilroy-Silk, a junior lecturer in the politics department. In those days, Kilroy was a rabid revolutionary.

A little later on ….

bq. Three days later, 10 of us, mostly elected officers of the students’ union, were charged by the authorities with bringing the university into disrepute. Of Kilroy-Silk, so voluble at the start, there was no sign.

Chris Brooke has “an entertaining discussion of this year’s IgNobel prize for Medicine”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_10_01_archive.html#109670769406562944 (“Effects of Country Music on Suicide”). A perusal of “all the winners over the years”:http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html reveals some really good stuff. It turns out that the 1999 prize for physics was shared between Len Fisher — a former student of mine — who calculated the optimal way to dunk a biscuit and Professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia who worked out how to make a teapot spout that doesn’t drip. I know I’m risking the ire of at least two of my CT colleagues here, but I can’t help having the thought that Vanden-Broeck’s researches potentially represent a greater contribution to human happiness than those of the majority of winners of the real Nobel prize for economics.

“Gene at Harry’s Place writes”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/09/30/who_will_they_blame_this_time.php :

bq. I know I’m expecting too much, but I really hope the “we can’t be choosy” Western supporters of the Iraqi “resistance” will find a way to blame the murder of dozens of Iraqi children– at a ceremony in Baghdad to mark the opening of a new sewage plant– on those who actually perpetrated it, without in some way implicating the US government.

I’m no supporter of the Iraqi “resistance”, but I still guess it would be expecting too much to hope that the contributors to Harry’s Place desist from making this kind of heavy-handed point every time something nasty happens in Iraq. In any case, the presupposition of Gene’s point — which he may or may not endorse when it is brought to the surface — is that if one gives the bombers the blame they deserve one must thereby absolve the US government. Not so, and for two reasons. First, if a government’s policies bring a situation into being in which crazy fanatics take the opportunity to slaughter innocents, a situation that would not otherwise have obtained, then that government is sure as hell implicated. Compare: if the British government gave an amnesty to all Britain’s sex offenders, it would in no way be exculpatory of the rapists to hold the government to account for the increase in rapes. Second, if you invade a country, destroy or disband the existing state apparatus, and assume responsibility for the peace and security of its citizens, then it is hardly unreasonable to hold you responsible when that peace and security fails to obtain. None of which, of course, settles the question of whether there should have been a war or not. But it does settle the question “Is it possible to blame to fanatics appropriately and still implicate the occupiers.” The answer to that question is “yes”.

Various things have caught my eye around the blogosphere. First up, Chris Brooke ran with a suggestion of mine concerning “our latter-day Widmerpool”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_09_01_archive.html#109637795060626791 (and _splendid_ work he has done too). Chris also “reacts to Melanie Phillips’s response”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_09_01_archive.html#109639297627260980 to the Blair speech. Marc Mulholland comments on the latest “degenerate hackery”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/index.blog?entry_id=461417 from Christopher Hitchens. Brian Leiter “posts”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/002121.html moral philosopher Jeff McMahan’s “essay on the the injustice of the Iraq war”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/McMahan%20on%20Iraq%20War.rtf (rtf). Finally, Damian Counsell has “disturbing news”:http://www.pootergeek.com/index.php?p=408 on the racism in the campaign around a change to Switzerland’s nationality law.

Michael Brooke has “a post up today about Ladybird books”:http://www.michaelbrooke.com/2004/09/ladybird-rarities.html and their value to collectors. This sent my scurrying to look for an old post of mine on the subject from back when I was Junius. It had disappeared from the archives! I eventually managed to locate the source in blogger and republish — so “here it is”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2003_01_05_junius_archive.html#390156623 — but I wonder how much else has faded out of existence due to the general flakiness of blogger. Anyway it was one of my favourite posts, and resulted in “an interesting reaction by Kieran”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000224.html . An important moment in the prehistory of Crooked Timber.

Jim Holt in the New York Times raises “the old question of whether it is rational to vote”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26WWLN.html . The issue is this (for those who don’t know): the rational voter decides what to do by weighing the expected cost and benefits of actions. Suppose I value the victory of Party X at $1000. In working out the expected benefit of voting, I also have to take account of the probability of my vote making a difference, a probability which is extremely low (say 1/100,000). Assigning, therefore an expected benefit to voting of 1c, I see that going to the polling booth involves an expenditure of time, shoe leather and incurs the opportunity cost of missing a few minutes of my favourite soap opera. Since these costs will certainly by incurred if I vote, and dwarf the expected benefit of voting, the expected _net_ benefit is always negative, and so, rationally, I shouldn’t vote.

What’s wrong with this argument? Well, one thought, which I remember hearing first from my friend Alan Carling, is this: the argument involves inconsistent assumptions about rationality. The assignment of a low probability to my vote making a difference assumes what the conclusion of the argument denies, namely, that rational persons would vote. But the argument says they wouldn’t. Well if they wouldn’t then I would be the only voter (a dictator, in effect). In which case I would certainly be rational to vote since I can count the full expected benefit of $1000 in favour of doing so. But if that’s the case, and I should vote, then so should everyone else … in which case I shouldn’t … in which case nor should they … in which case I should ….

Sorry to keep posting about the Cat Stevens brouhaha, but it really is revealing about the world we are now living in. The latest reports suggest that what happened was basically a mistake — “a spelling mistake”:http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,702062,00.html , in fact. I don’t know it that’s true, but if it were, what would that say about the bloggers who rushed to construct justifications for the action and the “experts” who went into print in the Weekly Standard and elsewhere to explain why deporting Stevens was the right thing to do? It raises the possibility of an interesting exercise:

bq. You are a right-wing blogger or a writer for TechCentralStation or FrontPage Magazine. Famous non-American person X is detained and deported from the US. Construct a rationalization for the decision based only on material you can find using Google.

Suggestions for X: David Beckham, Amartya Sen, Sting, Tom Jones, Gunther Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In shock news veteran Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has been deported from the United States. After the historian’s name appeared on a no-fly list, his UA flight was diverted 600 miles to Maine, the elderly scholar was removed and, after questioning by FBI agents he was placed on the first available flight to the UK. Homeland Security officials said “we’ve been watching this guy for a while, we had new intelligence….”

Hobsbawm has long been a controversial figure, in “a notorious interview with Michael Ignatieff he appeared to justify the Soviet Gulag”:http://web.pitas.com/alinas/04_08_2003.html :

bq. Ignatieff: “In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?”

bq. Hobsbawm: “This is the sort of academic question to which an answer is simply not possible. . . . If I were to give you a retrospective answer which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said, ‘probably not.’”

bq. Ignatieff: “Why?”

bq. Hobsbawm: “Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. Now the point is, looking back as an historian, I would say that the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile. The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I’m looking back at it now, and I’m saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure.”

bq. Ignatieff: “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?”

bq. Hobsbawm: “Yes.”

Seeking to justify Hobsbawm’s deportation on the grounds that he was a threat to the security of the United States, “guys-with-websites”:http://www.xoverboard.com/cartoons/2004_09_13.html all across the internet cited Hobsbawm’s remarks by way of justification. Prominent US liberal bloggers, such as “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/2004_09_01_juancole_archive.html#109592379002363404 , “Mark Kleiman”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/terrorism_and_its_control_/2004/09/cat_stevens_john_ashcroft_and_salman_rushdie.php and “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004759.php also mentioned the repulsive remarks and said that in their view, the fact that Hobsbawm had made the remarks had left them indifferent in the face of Homeland Security’s actions. As one of them said: “If you excuse the execution of dissidents, you and John Ashcroft deserve one another.” “Screw him,” was another’s comment on the affair.

My head is clearly stuck some time in the 1970s, because “I just can’t understand this story”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/boxing/3682358.stm :

bq. The Amateur Boxing Association is set to offer Amir Khan £70,000 a year, tax free, to stay in the amateur ranks. Khan has said he wants to remain an amateur with the ABA planning to make a formal offer to the Olympic silver medallist on Friday. …. [Lennox] Lewis said he did not subscribe to the view that Khan needed to turn pro to make the most of the commercial opportunities available. “There is a lot of amateur money out there,” said Lewis.

Huh?