Chris Bertram

“David Aaronovitch in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1298909,00.html , defending the idea that poor people in the US might have good reason to vote for George W. Bush:

bq. But suppose, for a moment, that the Kansas voters aren’t so dumb. Suppose, first, that they don’t buy the economic prospectus unwittingly along with the social populism, but consciously because they actually agree with it – because (and this hurts) it does actually tie in with their concrete experience. In other words, their consciousness is not false at all. Why might a poor person be opposed to tax increases and social benefits? Possibly because they hope to be richer themselves, maybe because they believe that high benefits are a disincentive to work and conceivably they believe both because that is exactly what they see happening around them – folks getting rich and folks idling.

I’m sure that Aaronovitch underestimates the importance of stupid people in determining elections. There are, after all, a lot of stupid people about (even here in Yoorp). Nevertheless, we can ask whether the beliefs Aaronovitch attributes to the Bush-voting-Kansas-poor are rational, given what we know about social mobility in the US, the extremely small section of society that benefits from Bush’s tax cuts etc. It is also rather odd that he decries the idea their beliefs might be the product of false consciousness on the grounds that they are rather the product of their lived experience. But the Marxist-educated Aaronovitch ought to know that it is a highly characteristic feature of ideological beliefs that they involve extrapolation by the believing subject from the immediate and local features of their experience to beliefs about the social world as a whole. So Mrs Thatcher’s belief that national economies should be managed on the model of a greengrocer’s shop in Grantham certainly “tied in with her conscious experience” and was ideological for all that. Why is Aaronovitch writing this stuff?

Jonathan Derbyshire of The Philosophers’ Magazine, “on his new blog”:http://jonathanderbyshire.typepad.com/blog/2004/09/emthe_guardian_.html :

bq. here’s a view, call it the “Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question. In one recurrent variant of this view, true statements about what, for shorthand purposes, I’ll call “political Islamism” ought to be circumscribed, if not actually withheld, for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”. Now, I’ve conceded in the comments section of an earlier post the persuasiveness of the point about perlocutionary effect, though I did wonder whether one of its proponents hadn’t unhelpfully mixed it up with a much less congenial argument about meaning. And it seems to me obvious that the point applies in contexts different to the one in which it’s usually applied over at Crooked Timber.

I think that the most reasonable way to read Derbyshire’s statement here, which seems to have been picked up enthusiastically by CT-bashers whom I can’t be bothered to link to, is that it contains a claim about what has been argued here on Crooked Timber. That claim would be that people at Crooked Timber have argued _repeatedly_ (“recurrent variant”, “usually applied”) that we shouldn’t tell the truth about political Islamism for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”. [1] Trawling through our posts, I _can_ find some evidence for the claim that we have alleged that it is possible to utter true statements (about political Islamism or anything else for that matter) in a manner that demeans (or threatens, intimidates etc) either the person to whom the utterance is made or other hearers. That doesn’t seem to be a thesis to which Derbyshire objects, though. (Which is just as well, since it is a true thesis.) Note, by the way, the ambiguity in Derbyshire’s formulation. He could be saying that we have said that people should _sometimes_ be careful about uttering true statements about political Islamism out of due regard for the perlocutionary effect of those utterances. But he expresses the thought in an unrestricted way, such that the effect on the reader is to mislead them into the false belief that people at CT have claimed that political Islamism just shouldn’t be criticized. Nobody here holds _that_ view or anything remotely like it.

fn1. I can find just two instances of the word “Islamophobia” on CT. The first was in the title of a blog post by me, where the point of using the word was to point to someone else’s writings on the subject. The second is by Ophelia Benson (with others picking up on her use) in comments to another post.

Those who have been following the decline and fall of the Conrad Black empire (a group which surely _must_ include those bloggers fond of quoting the ravings of his wife, Barbara Amiel ) will be amused to learn that “his friend Richard Perle has now deserted him”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/06/business/media/06perle.html?pagewanted=1&hp.

bq. … last week, Mr. Perle’s view of Lord Black changed. Issuing his first public statements since being heavily criticized in an internal report for rubber-stamping transactions that company investigators say led to the plundering of the company, Mr. Perle now says he was duped by his friend and business colleague.

Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other once said.

I just read “the transcript of Putin’s speech”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3627878.stm following the murders in Beslan. In it, Putin expresses nostalgia for the old USSR. Obviously it is intended for a domestic audience and plays to their concerns and expectations. What should we make of the following passage? And who are the “they” of the penultimate paragraph below?

bq. Today we are living in conditions which have emerged following the break-up of a vast great state, a state which unfortunately turned out to be unable to survive in the context of a rapidly changing world. But despite all the difficulties, we have managed to preserve the core of the colossus which was the Soviet Union.

bq. And we called the new country the Russian Federation. We all expected changes, changes for the better. But we have turned out to be absolutely unprepared for much that has changed in our lives…

bq. On the whole, we have to admit that we have failed to recognise the complexity and dangerous nature of the processes taking place in our own country and the world in general. In any case, we have failed to respond to them appropriately.

bq. We showed weakness, and the weak are trampled upon. Some want to cut off a juicy morsel from us while others are helping them.

bq. They are helping because they believe that, as one of the world’s major nuclear powers, Russia is still posing a threat to someone, and therefore this threat must be removed.

bq. And terrorism is, of course, only a tool for achieving these goals. But as I have already said many times, we have faced crises, mutinies and acts of terror more than once.

The recent visit to Britain of Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and his reception by London mayor Ken Livingstone generated a lot of controversy. I confess that I was a little bit skeptical about some of the claims made about him by his opponents on a “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” basis. His latest declaration calling on Muslims to fight the Americans in Iraq and including civilians as legitimate targets should remove any doubt. Juan Cole — who can read the Arabic sources and is not one of the people who recycles the ravings of Daniel Pipes — is disgusted, “and provides a good deal of further background”:http://www.juancole.com/2004_09_01_juancole_archive.html#109419064196351096 .

I tried to write something earlier about “the horrifying developments in Russia”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3624024.stm where it seems that perhaps up to 300 people may have been murdered. I couldn’t find the words then and I can’t now after watching the scenes on TV. Parents especially will have experienced a rush of sympathy for the poor people desperate to learn whether their children had survived. There have been some bad days since September 11th, but this is one of the worst. Terrible.

I bought my copy of Blom’s “Encyclopédie”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0007149468/junius-20 yesterday afternoon and it promises to be an entertaining read rather than a scholarly one. Leafing through for Rousseau references I found that the author claims that JJR’s unexpected death in 1778 may have been suicide. This is the first time I’ve come across such a speculation and it is certainly at odds with what Maurice Cranston has to say in “The Solitary Self”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226118665/junius-20 . Cranston tells us that Rousseau suffered a brief illness and died of a stroke. Incidentally, the relevant page of “The Solitary Self”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226118665/junius-20 also covers Rousseau’s re-interrment in the Pantheon in 1794. The fashion these days on the libertarian right (you know, the sort of people who bang on about “the wisdom of the founders”) is to see the French and American revolutions as springing from very different impulses and to hold Rousseau as responsible for the collectivist faults of the French model. For many reasons I think this latter is deeply mistaken, but the American participation in the Pantheon ceremony at least reminds us that people back then didn’t see the two traditions as so sharply divided:

bq. The procession escorting Rousseau’s remains was led by a captain of the United States Navy carrying the stars and stripes, along with others bearing the tricolour and the flag of republican Geneva. At the end came members of the national legislature, preceded by their “beacon”, _The Social Contract_ . The American Minister in Paris, James Monroe, accompanied by his staff, was the only foreign guest invited to witness the ceremony inside the Pantheon. (p. 186).

“Tariq Ramadan has an article in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/opinion/01ramadan.html responding to the revocation of his visa and to some of the accusations made against him.

Today’s Telegraph has two reviews of Philipp Blom’s Encyclopédie: one by “Graham Robb”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/08/29/boblo29.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/08/29/botop.html and the other by “Anthony Daniels”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/08/29/boblo229.xml (aka Theodore Dalrymple). It sounds like another volume to add to my Enlightenment pile (some of which I’ve even read). From Daniels’s review:

bq. Because censorship was still strong, though not completely inflexible, in the France of Louis XV, the authors of subversive articles in the various volumes had to adopt an indirect Aesopian approach (a most aesthetically and intellectually satisfying technique that is closed, alas, to authors who have no censorship to evade). My favourite practitioner of such subtle subversion is the Abbé Mallet, who undermined religious dogmas by discussing them in deadpan and literal-minded fashion. He meditates, for example, at great and pedantic length on the precise geographical location of Hell – was it in Terra Australis, in the sun, or in the environs of Rome? And how many species of animal Noah would have had to take aboard the Ark, how many bales of hay and straw, and how often he would have had to clean out the animals’ stalls? No dogma can long withstand the onslaught of this kind of concrete-mindedness, posing in the garb of credulous orthodoxy.

At some point soon I want to write an extended post on the Enlightenment and the common references on blogs to “the Enlightenment Project” and “the values of the Enlightenment”. Pending that, here’s a link to Robert Wokler’s essay “The Enlightenment: The Nation-State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity”:http://www.colbud.hu/main/PubArchive/DP/DP46-Wokler.pdf (PDF) which digs overs some of the questions concerning the relationship between the Enlightenment and “modernity”. (The essay also appears in a collection co-edited by Wokler and “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ — _The Enlightenment and Modernity_).

Our very own Harry Brighouse — who is away from the internet at the moment — features in “the latest Times Educational Supplement”:http://www.tes.co.uk/this_weeks_edition/opinion/story.asp?id=24230 . Harry is engaged there in a debate with … his dad. But since Tim Brighouse is commissioner for London schools and Harry has written extensively on justice in education, that’s just as it should be. The subject of the debate: for and against the comprehensive ideal in Britain’s schools. (To read the whole thing, you’ll need to buy the paper version.)

I managed a mere 39 per cent on “Chris Lightfoot’s estimation quiz”:http://roughly.beasts.org/ I’m sorry to say. Instructive and entertaining it is though. (Hat-tip “Dave Weeden”:http://backword.me.uk/ ).

“Four posts on al-Sadr: it’s getting to be an obsession isn’t it?” writes a commenter on “John Quiggin’s post below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002396.html . Not really, one might think, since the continuing events in Najaf look to be of enormous significance for the future of Iraq and for the nature of whatver regime emerges. I’ve just done a tour of the various British blogs that supported the war from of liberal/lefty pov, and I find, amazingly, that they haven’t been discussing Najaf at all. Not a mention! (I’m sure commenters will dig up exceptions.) Perhaps events have deviated too far from the script? Data does not compute! What I do find is generic comment on the war or on the “war on terror”, derogatory comment on opponents of the war, occasional mention of “good news” from Iraq, and links to unreliable sources suggesting Iranian or Syrian nefariousness. The American pro-war blogs seem to have dropped everything in favour of endless comment on the Kerry/SBV affair. Those interested in the detail of what is actually happening in Iraq will, of course, continue to consult “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/ .

A cleaner at Tate Britain has taken a “work of art”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=555511 that takes the form of a bag of rubbish, and thrown it away.

Final call for anyone who wishes to joing the Crooked Timberites fantasy football league (“instructions here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002341.html ). I’m off to Germany on Saturday, so anyone who doesn’t email me details before tomorrow evening will get added in the middle of next week. (You can always register a dummy team now, mail me your number and tinker with your selection until the Saturday deadline).