Chris Bertram

The (London) Times is running a series on Muslims in the UK . Not profound stuff, but a useful antidote to the demonization that prevails in parts of the blogosphere. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that young Muslims have views about sex and alcohol (among other things) that resemble in important respects the views that many young Catholics have about contraception.[1]

fn1. The article is freely accessible from within the UK, but may require registration from elsewhere. My information about whether those attempting to access from elsewhere need to subscribe varies.

I thought I’d indulge my fantasy of joining the hard-core techie kids (like Kieran) by installing Linux on my home PC at the weekend. Bravely ignoring the concerns of my family — who feared for their own future access to the computer — I downloaded a disk image for Suse 9.1 (Personal edition) and rebooted from the CD-ROM. I even managed successfully to repartition my hard disk (and Windows still works). But under Linux I have no mouse (mine’s a Logitech Optical USB creature) and no network (despite faithfully copying down and reproducing details of DNS servers, gateways etc.). Much googling and initialization of modules later, I’m no further forward. The problem isn’t Linux as such, since Knoppix works fine direct from the CD, recognizing the rodent, happily working with other USB devices, and auto-configuring the network. But I’d like a “proper” version, nicely installed on my new partition, so that I can escape the “told you sos” and “what did you expects” of partner and children. All advice gratefully received.

I finished Andrew Crumey’s Mr Mee last night, and, to adopt the Chris Brooke evaluative vocabulary , it is truly splendid and I’m going to read his other books as soon as I can. Crumey weaves together three interlocking stories: the unworldly octogenarian Mr Mee, and his discovery of the internet, porn and sex; the reflections of a terminally ill professor of French literature on his life, work on Rousseau, Proust, and (most pressingly) his plan to seduce his favourite student; and the adventures of Ferrand and Minard, two characters from Rousseau’s _Confessions_. I’ll avoid posting spoilers, but along with the Monty Hall problem , we’re also treated to versions of Searle’s Chinese Room and Ned Block’s entire population of China, and one of the protagonists, seduced by an 18th century anticipation of the functionalist theory of mind, tries to construct a computer from string and paper. Anyone who has ever taught or been taught elementary logic will laugh aloud.

In the light of some recent discussions at Butter flies and Wheels, Daily Moiders , Harry's Place, Normblog , and even here, I thought I’d post a link to this OpenDemocracy interview with Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan , which I found of interest.[1] I also see that Norm has just posted some lines from Andre Glucksmann on anti-semitism in France which are sort-of relevant, since a polemic against Glucksmann (among others) raised accusations of anti-semitism against Ramadan, a charge Ramadan rejects in the O-D interview.

fn1. Since these are sensitive times, and readers sometimes think that linking suggests endorsement, let me insist, self-defensively and for the record, that I’m not endorsing, just linking to something interesting.

The Financial Times has a profile of Jane Jacobs , author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which I think of as a very great book indeed). Jacobs’s other works haven’t achieved as much and some of them have been pretty crazy, but she’s still at it, now aged 88. Worth a look.

I’d planned to post on the obesity panic before Belle's latest , but no harm in making it theme of the day. I was reading John Ardagh’s Germany and the Germans and was interested to come across the following passage, which suggests that the current obesity panic in the US (and the UK) has a precedent in postwar German experience:

bq. For centuries the Germans were famous for their hefty appetites — and their waistlines proved the point. The fat-faced, beer-bellied Bavarian, two-litre tankard in hand before a plate pile high with _Wurst_ or dumplings, was a stock character and no far from reality. In pre-war days, poverty often dictated diets, and potatoes, bread and cakes were staple items of nutrition. In the 1950s this pattern changed dramatically as sheer greed steadily replaced subsistence eating. The _Wirtschaftswunder_ period was equally that of the notorious _”Fresswelle”_ (“wave of guzzling”), when a new-rich nation reacted against the deprivations of wartims by tucking in more avidly than ever before — and this time to a far richer diet. This continued until about the early 1970s, when alarming medical statistics appeared suggesting that 10 million Germans were overweight, including 25 per cent of children (spas began to offer cures for fat children).

Ardagh recounts that in the face of this panic the Germans did succeed in changing things, and that consumption of potatoes fell from 163 to 82 kilos per capita per annum between 1953 and 1987. Meanwhile consumption of fresh fruit and green vegetables went up over the same period.

I’m in the middle of reading Andrew Crumey’s rather intruiging novel Mr Mee at the moment. One minor point of interest is that this may be the first work of fiction to contain a description of the Monty Hall problem (see Brian's post below ) in the form of a letter, supposedly written in 1759 from a Jean-Bernard Rosier to the Encyclopedist d’Alembert:

bq. Sir, you may know that many years ago one of our countrymen was taken prisoner in a remote and barren region of Asia noted only for the savagery of its inhabitants. The man’s captors, uncertain what to do with him, chose to settle the issue by means of a ring hidden beneath one of three wooden cups. If the prisoner could correctly guess which cup hid the gold band, he would be thrown out to face the dubious tenderness of the wolves; otherwise he was to be killed on the spot. By placing bets on the outcome, his cruel hosts could enjoy some brief diversion from the harsh austerity of their nomadic and brutal existence.

bq. The leader of the tribe, having hidden his own ring, commanded that the unfortunate prisoner be brought forward to make his awful choice. After considerable hesitation, and perhaps a silent prayer, the wretch placed his trembling hand upon the middle cup. Bets were placed; then the leader, still wishing to prolong the painful moment of uncertainty which so delighted his audience, lifted the rightmost cup, beneath which no ring was found. The captive gave a gasp of hope, and amidst rising laughter from the crowd, the leader now reached for the left, saying that before turning it over he would allow his prisoner a final opportunity to change his choice. Imagine yourself to be in that poor man’s position, Monsieur D’Alembert, and tell me, what would you now do?

There’s been much discussion of the Marc Mulholland post that I linked to the other day, though the ratio between heat and light varies somewhat from post to post and from comment to comment. Somewhat frustrating for me has been the fact that the main critics of the original post are people who take themselves to be defenders of liberalism and opponents of moral relativism. Since I think of myself as both of those things, and don’t share their reaction to the original piece, something has gone wrong somewhere. One of the more sympathetic critics has been Norman Geras who points to an ambiguity in Marc Mulholland’s characterization of liberalism:

bq. On the one hand, he says:

bq. bq. It’s worth recalling that liberal modernity is itself a historic and contested construction, not a revelation of reason and human essence.

bq. Again:

bq. bq. Liberals have a tendency to treat their own norms as self-evident and, as [an] expression of ahistorical ‘rights’, not only universally applicable but necessary components of full human morality.

bq. We can read these statements in two ways. They could just be saying what can be said of any cultural or political outlook: that it has a historical genesis and grounding, a social milieu, and so on. It’s not pre-given; it’s not written in the stars. Or Marc’s two quoted statements could be intended as saying, more strongly: (and therefore) liberalism, like every other outlook, is just an outlook, no better or no worse than other outlooks.

I happen to agree with Norm that liberalism is a damn sight better than other outlooks, and with his rejection of moral relativism. But there is a reason for insisting upon the (recent) historical genesis of liberalism which he doesn’t entertain, but which seems to me important, and has to do with a certain inappropriateness of attitude.

The inappropriateness I have in mind is that of the person who used to believe P and now believes not-P, but who now denounces and attacks all those who still believe P as stupid or malicious, since “any fool can see” that P is false. Ex-Marxists of the “God that failed” type are especially prone to this, but it isn’t limited to them. The utterer of self-righteous denunciation seems to hide from himself or herself a due acknowledgement of the fact that he or she used to believe what, apparently, only the stupid or malicious _could_ believe.

There’s a leap from the individual to the group or cultural manifestation of this phenomenon, but it is one that I’m going to make. In his post, Mulholland pointed to a number of attitudes, opinions and values characterisic of “liberal modernity” (note, not “liberalism” as such). They included attitudes towards homosexuality, sex with young teenagers, wealth and celebrity and a whole host of other things. Assume, and it is a pretty big assumption, that the attitudes characteristic of “liberal modernity” on many of these issues are broadly justified. The fact remains that those attitudes weren’t embedded in the public culture “around here” as recently as the mid-1960s. And there are large swathes of “the West”, where some or all of them still aren’t the common cultural currency (those parts of the United States with sodomy laws, for example).

Many of the people who make up the various Muslim communities within Western Europe come from social and cultural backgrounds which reject all or some elements of the newly acquired _conscience collective_ of the West. To the extent to which those elements are good — and obviously I happen to think some of them such as acceptance of homosexuality and equality for women — then rejection of them by Muslims is a bad thing (without qualification). And we ought to say so. But we need to able to do this without saying, in effect “You backward medieval morons for believing that P!”, where P is some belief that very many of “us” held a mere generation or two ago.

Via Norm , I see that the United Nations Human Development Report 2004 is out. Most of the headline coverage is about various country rankings in the Human Development Index. Oil-rich Norway comes top, the US is 8th, the UK 12th, and France has slipped to 16th with Germany down at 19th. But, for the high-income nations, this is not particularly meaningful. As the report warns:

bq. The HDI in this Report is constructed to compare country achievements across all levels of human development. The indicators currently used in the HDI yield very small differences among the top HDI countries, and thus the top of the HDI rankings often reflects only the very small differences in these underlying indicators. For these high-income countries an alternative index—the human poverty index (shown in indicator table 4 and discussed in Statistical feature 1, The state of human development)—can better reflect the extent of human deprivation that still exists among these populations and help direct the focus of public policies. (p. 138)

So what rankings (p. 151) do we get for high-income countries on the human poverty index?

bq. 1 Sweden
2 Norway
3 Netherlands
4 Finland
5 Denmark
6 Germany
7 Luxembourg
8 France
9 Spain
10 Japan
11 Italy
12 Canada
13 Belgium
14 Australia
15 United Kingdom
16 Ireland
17 United States

Cold comfort for the advocates of the “anglosphere”, “anglo-saxon capitalism” etc etc. one would have thought. No doubt they’ll be posting shrill comments: “It just isn’t trooo!” etc.

One thought that went through my mind during the recent fuss over the visit of Yussef al-Qaradawi to Britain was this: what did those who, after September 11th, uttered variations on “Islam needs a Reformation” expect the agents of such a Reformation to look like? Martin Luther or Calvin maybe? Because those guys had some pretty nasty views, and yet ….

Marc Mulholland has written a very useful and serious post on “liberal Islamophobia” over at Daily Moiders, and, in comments, Anthony Cox responds.

Norm's rock stars poll closed the other day, and, like others , I’m inclined to protest a little about the results. [1] The source of _my_ dissatisfaction is that the incomparable Grateful Dead not only miss the top 25 but aren’t even among the further 30 also-rans. Meanwhile, talentless losers like REM (someone had to say it) capture 11th place. Young people today….

fn1. I fear I may have misread the rubric, since the results include bands and I voted _inter alia_ for Keith Richards, Joe Strummer and Jerry Garcia. I assume that Norm just folded those in as votes for the Stones, the Clash and the Dead.

British socialist journalist Paul Foot, contrarian and campaigner against many miscarriages of the criminal justice system, is dead.

The Hansard Society have produced a report on political blogging

bq. Political Blogs – Craze or Convention? [pdf] reports on the relatively new phenomena of political blogging and examines whether these blogs can offer an alternative to traditional channels of political communication in the UK . The research study focuses on eight political blogs as representative examples of how individuals and organisations are harnessing blogging as a tool to promote political engagement. The research monitored activity on these blogs and, in addition, a blogging “jury” of members of the public with little or no experience of blogging scrutinised the blogs to assess their relevance as channels of political thought and debate.

[via Harry's Place ]

Online bookies BlueSquare now have Kerry and Bush neck and neck at 5/6 , which represents a significant shortening of Kerry’s odds. (Compare their odds on the next British general election, which have Labour 2/7 on.)