Chris Bertram

I’ve been following a “debate that’s been going on (and off) at Butterflies and Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=342 over the past few weeks and wondering about a move that my fellow atheist Ophelia Benson makes there. Ophelia quotes Michael Ruse thus:

bq. People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.

To which she replies:

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Two hundred years after the foundation of the world’s first black republic, “Ian Thomson, writing in the Guardian, hails Toussaint L’Ouverture”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1134518,00.html . For those who don’t know his story, C.L.R. James’s “The Black Jacobins”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679724672/junius-20 is the place to look. And here is Wordsworth’s poem in full:

bq. Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den; —
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

In partial reply to “Brian Leiter’s (statisticallly supported) claim”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000797.html that people are better off living in social democratic nations (Western Europe, Canada …) than in the United States, “David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy writes”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_08_volokh_archive.html#107635122273206108 :

bq. I don’t recall any American I’ve met in my entire life permanently settling in Europe….

Well those I know aren’t dead yet — so it may depend on what you mean by “permanently” — but it wasn’t hard for me to get into double figures from people I know reasonably well here in the UK, some of whom have been resident for over thirty years.

Human rights barrister Conor Gearty stole the show at the recent Oxford Political Thought Conference, with a brilliant, witty and well-informed speech. He has an “article on Hutton”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n04/gear01_.html in the new London Review of Books. His view doesn’t exactly coincide with my own, but it is a fascinating look at the changing public reputation of judges, their relations with the media, why this judge and not that one gets picked for an inquiry. It is hard to decide on the most quotable bit, so this will have to do:

bq. One of the more mystifying aspects of the Hutton process was the media’s treatment of Hutton himself, before the publication of his report, as an Olympian demigod, hovering above the fray, fastidious in his search for truth and justice. His appearance and extraordinary accent have helped; the media love caricature, and here was a judge who seemed to have walked into the limelight directly from the 1950s. But underpinning the blind trust that was placed in him, and which has now rebounded so badly, was a more general enthusiasm for the judiciary which is all the more remarkable for having been so recently acquired and for being (as far as the commitment to media freedom is concerned) largely without foundation.

bq. It is not so long ago that judges were the most maligned group in the entire body politic. Their naked partisanship during the miners’ strike, the Spycatcher debacle, and then the succession of miscarriage of justice cases of the late 1980s and early 1990s had established the senior judiciary in the eyes of most people (and particularly in the eyes of the media) as inclined to authoritarianism, unaccountable in their exercise of power and entirely out of touch. The refusal of judges to give any interviews, under cover of antiquated ‘rules’ which a long forgotten lord chancellor had invented, compounded the sense that they were all, or almost all, malevolent recluses.

“Christopher Hitchens”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2095158/ in Slate (via “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ ) :

bq. I’m a single-issue person at present, and the single issue in case you are wondering is the tenacious and unapologetic defense of civilized societies against the intensifying menace of clerical barbarism. If in the smallest doubt about this, I would suggest a vote for the re-election of George Bush, precisely because he himself isn’t prey to any doubt on the point.

Unlike many of his supporters it would seem, who think clerical barbarism would be an excellent idea…. Brian Leiter should be congratulated for his assiduous reporting of “the activities of the Texas Taliban”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/cat_texas_taliban_alerts.html . The “sayings of Pat Robertson”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000383.html#000383 , friend of Bush’s Attorney General, are worth a special mention.

The deaths of “nineteen Chinese illegal workers”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/3464203.stm who were cockling on the treacherous sands of Morecambe bay has generated much comment in the British press. Much of that comment has focused on their illegality, the exploitation of such workers by gangmasters, the need or otherwise for tighter immigration controls, globalization and so on. Indeed. There was a similar burst of indignation when “some immigrant workers were hit by a train back in July”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000204.html . But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals. In his “Development as Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385720270/junius-20 , Amartya Sen discusses two examples where workers, in order to assure basic capablities (such as nutrition and housing) for themselves and their families, have to expose themselves to the risk of injury or death. Jo Wolff and Avner de-Shalit have “a paper on this theme”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/download/seminars/Wolff_De-Shalit_disadvantage.doc (Word format) that is on the “programme”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/seminars/seminars_2004.php of the UCL’s School for Policy Studies for this Wednesday, they recount Sen’s examples:

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Today’s Guardian has a review of Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. There are also extracts “here”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1131153,00.html and “here”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1131917,00.html . Crystals, astrology, rebirthing etc all get explored, as well as management guruism. Philosophers and civil servants both have reason to enjoy Wheen’s acccount of Edward de Bono (from the 2nd extract):

bq. In the autumn of 1998 more than 200 officials from the Department of Education were treated to a lecture from De Bono on his “Six Thinking Hats system” of decision-making. The idea, he explained, was that civil servants should put on a red hat when they wanted to talk about hunches and instincts, a yellow hat if they were listing the advantages of a project, a black hat while playing devil’s advocate, and so on. “Without wishing to boast,” he added, “this is the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.” So far as can be discovered, the education department has yet to order those coloured hats, but no doubt it benefited from his other creative insights: “You can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper”; “With a problem, you look for a solution”; “A bird is different from an aeroplane, although both fly through the air.”

I’ve just finished watching Sorious Samura’s documentary “Living with Hunger”:http://www.insightnewstv.com/hunger/ on the UK’s “Channel 4”:http://www.channel4.com/news/2004/01/week_4/30_hunger.html . It seems to be screening worldwide over the next few days including on “CBC in Canada”:http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeyemonday/feature_090204.html and repeatedly on “Discovery/Times”:http://dtc.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=105681&gid=0&channel=DTC in the US. It is an extremely vivid portrait of how some of the world’s poorest people live, how hard they work, and their dignity in conditions tougher than most of us will ever face. Highly recommended.

A pub conversation about the current composition of the English Premier League led me to check the regional distribution of teams at the moment. The best represented region is Lancashire (historic boundaries) with 6 teams, followed by London with 5. The West Midlands has 3, the South of England 2, the North East 2, and the East Midland and Yorkshire one each. All of which raises an issue: if Leeds are relegated and Sheffield United are not promoted, will next season be the first season ever without a Yorkshire team in the top division of English football?

“Daniel posted on Hutton”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001229.html the other day, and was gracious enough to say that the Blairites should enjoy their day in the sun (whatever else he said elsewhere in the post). During the inquiry, it looked to me as if Gilligan and the BBC were in deep trouble and “I posted back in August saying as much”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000381.html . Since the report journalists have been queuing up to denounce Hutton for coming to conclusions other than the ones they were all hoping for and using words like “whitewash”. Typical examples are Gilligan’s mate “Rod Liddle”:http://media.guardian.co.uk/huttoninquiry/story/0,13812,1133385,00.html (on whom see “Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian”:http://media.guardian.co.uk/huttoninquiry/story/0,13812,1137632,00.html ), “Simon Jenkins in the Times”:http://business.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,2020-9076-983327,00.html and “Peter Oborne”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2004-01-31&id=4227 in the Spectator (see also “Liddle”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2004-01-31&id=4213 in the Spectator).

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The Guardian has “a readable and disturbing piece”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1134105,00.html about what happens if you try to fake your way into a mental instutution:

bq. In 1972, David Rosenhan, a newly minted psychologist with a joint degree in law, called eight friends and said something like, “Are you busy next month? Would you have time to fake your way into a mental hospital and see what happens?”

Lauren Slater reports on the extreme hostility this researcher faced when he published and since, on the fact that his fellow inmates could tell he was sane even when the doctors couldn’t, on how he wrote down his experiences and had this labelled as “writing behavior” (which I suppose it was). But what would happen if you tried to do the same thing today? Slater tried ….

It is a great pity that so much of the media is disappearing behing subscription-only walls. This includes the Financial Times where the estimable Simon Kuper has “a subscription-only article”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1073281404815&p=1012571727132 debunking the common American perception of a rise in European anti-Semitism. Some facts from the article. Kuper reports on two opinion polls conducted by the Anti-Defamation League in Western Europe in 2002. These found that roughly a quarter of Europeans had some anti-Semitic attitudes. This compares with a similar ADL survey in the US in the same year which has 17 percent of Americans espousing anti-Semitic views. Not a great difference, and one brought further into perspective when we learn that most anti-Semitic Europeans are over 65 whereas age is not a good predictor of such views among Americans. True, there has been a significant increase in anti-Jewish violence (especially by young Muslims in France), but in the US the FBI recordes 1039 hate crimes against Jews in 2002. There also doesn’t seem to be a very good correlation between attitudes to Israel and anti-Semitism: 7 per cent of the Dutch population are judged to be anti-Semitic by the ADL which is a lower figure than anywhere else in either Europe or the US, but 74 per cent of the Dutch view Israel as a threat. Attitudes to Israel are pretty mixed though, with Europeans more likely to blame Israel than the Palestinians for the current situation (but only by 27 per cent to 20, with the rest presumably “don’t knows” or distributing blame equally). 86 per cent of Europeans see no justification for suicide bombers. None of this is reason for complacency, of course, but the view peddled by US-based commentators such as Thomas Friedman and their blogospheric echo-chamber of Europe as a seething cauldron of ancient Jew-hatred is plainly garbage.

This is really Daniel’s department, but I’ve been waiting for Samuel Brittan to update his website with “his review”:http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text173_p.html of John Allen Paulos’s “A Mathematician Plays the Market”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465054803/junius-20 for a while, and he’s finally done it. The most bloggable point is borrowed — I think — from Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587991845/junius-20

bq. In financial discussions you often hear how about Ms.X or Mr.Y who has had a consistently good record in beating the market indices. Paulos shows how such “successful” analysts can emerge purely by chance. Of 1,000 analysts, roughly 500 might be expected to outperform the market next year. Of these another 250 might be expected to do so well for a second year and 125 in the third. Continuing the series we might expect to find one analyst who does well for ten consecutive years by chance alone. But will she do better in the 11th year? Your guess is as good as mine.

Norm has “posted the results”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/favourite_movie.html in his top movies of all time poll. My “own two favourite movies”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001053.html got absolutely nowhere and fifteen people (10 per cent of the total!) were deluded enough to vote for the Shawshank Redemption (4th= best movie of all time? — you must be joking!). Still, it gives us something to talk about and has been a lot of fun. So thanks to Norm for his efforts.