I heard an interesting paper last year from Yael Tamir which stressed what a good predictor class is of party allegiance in Israel. Things there are “the wrong way round”, though, with the workers voting for the right. So I was interested to read “this Ian Buruma piece from the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1068681,00.html on the Israeli left, and what remains of it.
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Chris Bertram
Travellers on Britain’s rail network are used to long delays and an all-round miserable experience. They are also used to implausible sounding announcement involving excuses aimed at “customers” (“passengers” having been abolished by some deranged management consultant around the time of privatization). One well known one is “leaves on the line”. Now the Guardian “has an account”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1067932,00.html of why the leaves might indeed have become a problem, and only recently! “The wrong kind of snow” still awaits an adequate explanation. (Hat tip to “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html .)
I’ve just given a talk on education and social justice over at our Graduate School of Education. It was a fairly low key affair, aimed at some graduate students with no prior knowledge of political philosophy (and one CT-reader, as it turned out). So I concentrated on elaborating Rawls’s principles of justice and explaining how they might or might not feed into debates on educational policy. (I was greatly helped in this by reading Adam Swift’s extraordinarily clear and well-argued “How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415311179/junius-21 . Even if you disagree with Swift, he’ll help you to sort out your own thinking.) The point of the talk wasn’t to say that Rawlsian principles mandate this or that solution, but rather to explore how they could inform policy arguments. One of the questions I had from the floor concerned the permissibility of home schooling. Here’s, roughly, what I said as an off-the-top of my head Rawlsian response.
“Iain Murray links”:http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000381.html to a “police-sponsored report”:http://www.operationscorpion.org.uk/design_out_crime/policing_urbanism.htm claiming that housing estates built on “new urbanist” principles are more vulnerable to crime than private estates built in cul-de-sac format incorporating the notion of “defensible space.” Interesting stuff, especially since many of the ideas that inform the new urbanism are very influential with both local authority planners and amenity societies. I’m a little sceptical when too much is claimed for design. Just like carpenters thinking that a hammer and a nail is the answer to all problems, architects like to put everything down to design (I’m sure I’ve stolen that line from Colin Ward). And I’d like to know more about the other factors distinguishing the two environments studied in the report. But this certainly warrants further attention.
UPDATE: I’ll try to say more in a few days. But a more careful look at the police document suggests that this isn’t a matter of comparing the experience of similar communities but rather a “projection” of data some of which is derived from experience of estates from an earlier period which (according to the police) incorporate “similar” design features.
On the design front, I understand that the police SBD philosophy frowns on features like recessed porches and collonades (good for hiding) leaving us with the a general flattening of building surfaces. Attractive? I don’t think so.
Do “conservatives”:http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000381.html and “libertarians”:http://nataliesolent.blogspot.com/2003_10_19_nataliesolent_archive.html#106672975377523361 really want their urban spaces designed according to a police approved philosophy? Really? Do the urban environments people like, such as Bath, Venice, Florence, …. (fill in your preferred name) conform to Secured By Design principles? As I said, more when I’ve got a moment…
OpenDemocracy has “an interview with anti-Straussian Shadia Drury”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1542.jsp . Drury’s obsession with Strauss seems to have been about as damaging to her good sense and judgement as that of the pro-Straussians has been to theirs. Hence the following absurd rheorical question:
bq. How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat?
How could an intelligent person of _any_ political persuasion _not_ admire Plato and Nietzsche?
Unsurprisingly “Mahathir Mohamad’s speech”:http://www.oicsummit2003.org.my/speech_03.php to the Islamic summit has met with outrage in the blogosphere. And quite right too, since his remarks about the Jews are pretty vile. But there’s a kernel of interest in what the bigot has to say. He’s worried about the historical transformation of Islam’s fortunes. After all, as he says:
bq. The early Muslims produced great mathematicians and scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers etc. and they excelled in all the fields of knowledge of their times, besides studying and practising their own religion of Islam. As a result the Muslims were able to develop and extract wealth from their lands and through their world trade, able to strengthen their defences, protect their people and give them the Islamic way of life, Addin, as prescribed by Islam. At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilisation, respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the rest of the world and able to protect the ummah from foreign aggression. The Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.
But that was then, and this is now. And as Mahathir notices and regrets, the Islamic world has been in a pretty miserable intellectual and cultural condition since the Ottomans. He’s obsessed with the contrast between Muslims and Jews. He may not be right that Jews rule the world, but he is right to notice their extraordinary achievements, and especially their intellectual achievements, and the contrast with the miserable contribution of modern Islam.
I’ve just started, as part of a reading group, Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 . Otsuka is a political philosopher at University College, London, and well published in journals like _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ , so I’m expecting this to be an important contribution to the literature on self-ownership and justice. We’ve covered chapter one so far, in which Otsuka outlines his claim that robust self-ownership is compatible with equality, understood along the lines of Richard Arneson’s equal opportunity for welfare rather than Dworkinian equality of resources. What I say here is therefore highly provisional, probably involves misunderstandings, and probably gets an adequate answer from Otsuka later in the book. But anyone else who has _either read the book, or is reading it_ should feel free to post comments (we’re doing about a chapter a week and I hope to post some remarks on each chapter as we read).
I’m always on the lookout for media references to Rousseau, even if they usually perpetuate the “noble savage” myth. For some reason, I especially liked this “write-up of US tv show Tarzan”:http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,274%7C83718%7C1%7C,00.html :
bq. In his 1755 “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men,” French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated, “Man in his natural state was born essentially good and free of all prejudices.”
bq. In a summer when Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” has attempted to tweeze, wax, massage, redecorate and redress man in his natural state in the hopes of making something more civilized out of him, Rousseau’s “noble savage” seems in danger of being replaced by the urbane metrosexual.
I just heard that Neal Wood, Marxist historian of political thought and author of at least a couple of books on Locke has died. “The Guardian carried an obit”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1058891,00.html .
An email this morning brings a copy of a begging letter from Guardian columnist Paul Foot, on behalf of his Socialist Workers Party (British version) comrades Lindsey German and Alex Callinicos. (Full text below). The letter arises because said “comrades” accused Quintin Hoare and Branka Magas, long-time scholars of the Balkans and, as it happens, friends of mine, of being apologists for the government of Holocaust revisionist Franjo Tujdman. Not unreasonably, given that the accusation was wholly false and a grave libel disseminated by the several thousand sellers of the SWP’s literature, Hoare and Magas sought the advice of m’learned friends. German and Callinicos have had to back down and apologise for thus damaging their reputation (apology “here”:http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=8610 ). Foot’s letter appeals to the convention that disputes on the left should not be taken to the lawyers (a very convenient convention for a an influential and powerful organization which resorts to tabloid-style smears against its opponents). He also claims that “The publisher, Lindsey German and Alex Callinicos cannot possibly afford these sums.” Since the sum involved is about £13,000 and Foot and Callinicos at least are reasonably affluent, this claim is plainly untrue.
There was a particularly nasty court case in my home town of Bristol recently. I forget all the details, but the essence was that a stable-owner was fined for maiming and neglecting her horses and was banned from keeping horses for life. That seems to me to be entirely reasonable. In fact a great deal of animal-cruelty legislation, such as bans on dog and cock-fighting and on bear-baiting, is something that I’d want to support. Leaving aside controversial matters like fox-hunting (on which I have a pretty libertarian view), and just taking those most extreme cases of wanton cruelty, it seems to me that there’s a problem for both libertarians and liberals. Such legislation can’t be justified either in terms of protecting the rights of (human) individuals or without appealing to some controversial conception of what gives value to life that we can’t presume is universally shared. I’d welcome thoughts on how we might adapt or extend liberal or libertarian theories to cope with these cases.
There’s quite “an extraordinary column in today’s Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/10/13/do1301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/10/13/ixopinion.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=147311 in which the ghastly Barbara Amiel, who no doubt has no more access to the evidence than any other member of the public, declares the as yet untried footballer-rape case to be of dubious merit, and opines:
bq. In the past, any woman crying rape under such factual circumstances would have had to show feeble-mindedness to warrant society’s protection. Going voluntarily up to a stranger’s room for intercourse or its preliminaries, and expecting a man to behave as a light switch that can be turned off at will, may be technically her right, but it is both biologically and logically mad.
Those following the case will know that it is suggested that the woman was attacked by a number of persons other than the one she had gone upstairs with. I’d be interested to know if Amiel’s piece amounts to contempt of court.
Norman Geras’s “greatest jazz albums”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_10_12_normangeras_archive.html#106604352478301127 poll is up. I managed to vote for just one in the top 15, Ellington’s Newport album. There’s rightly a lot of Coltrane in there, but, disappointingly, my own top pick, his “Live at the Village Vanguard”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000065KK/junius-20 didn’t make it.
Those interminable debates about whether criminals are to blame for their crimes or whether we should look to their circumstances are now repackaged as a standoff between those who want to hold terrorists responsible for their atrocities and those who look to root causes. The right answer, of course, is “both”. But here’s a simple and plausible model, entirely _a priori_ , to help us to think about things.
Imagine a population who vary in their susceptibility to pressure. We can call the property in which they vary “virtue”. Some are so virtuous that no matter what the pressure, they never perform an evil act. Some are so vicious that even if the pressure is negative, they do vile things just for the hell of it. Most people are in between (since virtue is normally distributed). As pressure — caused by poverty, social dislocation, military occupation, whatever — rises, more and more of the population switch, given their underlying propensities, from virtuous to vicious actions.
The FT’s economist-as-agony-aunt column takes a look at the “costs and benefits of suicide”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480520343&p=1012571727126 .