Chris Bertram

Regular readers will know of the Euston Manifesto, a British-based initiative by various self-described leftists some of whom were big supporters of the Iraq war and all of whom share an obsession with the idea that “Enlightenment values” are under threat from a nefarious coalition of Islamists, postmodernists and Chomskyites. Now they have “a US chapter”:http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=page&id=44&chapter=0 , launched by people around the journal Telos. The list of initial signatories and supporters is interesting, but contains figures not usually thought of as having much to do with the left as traditionally construed. They include Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Walter Laqueur, Martin Peretz and Ronald Radosh. Laqueur has become the victim of a Mark Steyn-like obsession with demography and recently gave a positive review of Michael Gove’s execrable Celsius 7/7 in the the TLS, Peretz – a member of the pro-war “Democratic Leadership Council” – has just joined the advisory board of Lewis Libby’s defense fund, and Radosh is a regular writer for David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.

update: a link to Tony Judt’s essay “The Strange Death of Liberal America”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/judt01_.html from the latest LRB seems right (via “Marc Mulholland”:http://moiders.blogspot.com/ ).

In a “recent comments thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/ , I got into trouble for asserting that Christopher Hitchens had clearly never read Günter Grass’s ” _Crabwalk_ “:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 since, in the course of “a polemic”:http://www.slate.com/id/2148094/nav/tap1/ that was nasty even by his standards, he described the book thus:

bq. suddenly there is Grass, publishing a large and cumbersome account of the sinking of a German civilian vessel in the Baltic in 1945 ….

By contrast, Dan Jacobson gives “an accurate and balanced account”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/09/writers_choice__1.html of the book (warning: plot spoilers), coupled with some reflections on Grass’s recent disclosures about his SS membership as part of the “Writer’s Choice” series at Geras’s site. (I wrote about _Crabwalk_ in “a post last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/27/crabwalk/ , before the recent revelations.)

Update: Ian Buruma, in the New Yorker, has “an interesting piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060918crat_atlarge on l’affaire Grass.

The open letter on childhood written by a bunch of academics, authors, celebrities and others (including Harry’s dad) seems to me causing a bit of a stir. Why did they send it to the Telegraph I wonder, rather than the Times (the traditional place) or the Guardian (read by more people who work with children, I imagine). Perhaps they think that Cameron’s Tories are going to win the next UK election and that they might make more impact on policy via the Telegraph. Anyway, it is hard not so sympathize with their sentiments even if the list of issues is an odd assortment:

Well what do you expect? If you make a lot of noise about having to have a competitive and flexible labour force — as NuLab have — then mum and dad are going to be working all hours to pay the mortgage, and when they are at home are going to slump in front of the TV after they’ve heated the ready-meals in the microwave. It wasn’t alway like this, of course. Look at _Astérix chez les Bretons_ (1965) and you’ll see the Brits being ridiculed by the _French_ for their relaxed pace of life, for taking time off for tea, and for keeping the weekend sacred. I guess we had time for children then too.

I guess my Irish co-bloggers are rather used to foreigners thinking that they come from a gigantic theme park that bears no resemblance to their country as it actually is. For me it was rather more of a shock, when, for family reasons, I got dragged along to “British Day”:http://www.britishday.de/ in Hamburg ( “photo gallery”:http://www.britishday.de/en/gallery.shtml ). This was the UK (assisted by the Irish who seemed to count as honorary Brits for rugby and drinking purposes) as depicted in _Horse and Hound_ or _Country Life_ , re-enacted by enthusiastic Germans. There was polo, there was rugby, there were endless stalls selling Harris tweed and barbour jackets, there was a welly wanging contest, and a Highland games section where characters called Otto and Diemut (or something like that) tossed the caber whilst dressed in Royal Stewart tartan. English boarding schools — though not the really famous ones — were there too, touting for business among the Hamburg anglophiles: “send Hans to Hogwarts and make him into a real gentleman” was the message. Really quite bizarre. I’m afraid I missed the “last night of the Proms” part, where enthusiastic Hamburgers joined in the singing of “Land of Hope and Glory”, but I could hear it all in the distance. And the stall that came closest to the actual lives of most of us … Indian food, naturally.

Jeffrey Sachs, William Easterly (and Bono for that matter) can stop their bitching, Christopher Hitchens has “an explanation”:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_objectid=17550835&method=full&siteid=94762-name_page.html for a good deal of global destitution:

bq. … the mass murder of people on aeroplanes is a leading cause of poverty.

If only Larry Summers were still in post, he could have offered Hitch a job. (shamelessly stolen from “Marc Mulholland”:http://moiders.blogspot.com/2006/08/political-economy-of-under-development.html ).

For the next week “Ingrid Robeyns”:http://www.ingridrobeyns.nl/ will be guest-blogging here at Crooked Timber. When Ingrid is not busy trying to convince her 8-month old son to eat his vegetables, she works on topics such as Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Ingrid has just been given a big grant from Dutch National Science Foundation to do research on social justice and the new welfare state, with a special focus on parenthood, gender and the elderly. She’s Belgian by nationality, but studied and worked all over the place, including in Germany, the UK and the US, and is currently based in the Netherlands. Ingrid reports that she was once introduced to the Crown Prince of Belgium as “A great Belgian feminist”. Apparently this produced a reaction of incredulity and fear and the question “Are you _really_ a feminist?” She’s trained as an economist, but has worked in political science, philosophy and social policy. I’m sure she’ll have lots to say to us over the next week.

When I was at the ALSP conference in Dublin a while back, one of the more interesting papers was “Sanctioning Liberal Democracies” by Avia Pasternak of Nuffield College Oxford. Pasternak’s paper addresses the question of when it is appropriate to take action against liberal democracies for human rights violations. After all, as we are often being reminded, there are far worse violations of human rights going on elsewhere in the world. It might be thought that there are “double standards” here and that there is something wrong about giving special emphasis to, say, Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Pasternak argues that we should hold democracies to higher standards. Central to her account is an idea of a community of democratic nations and the notion that they are, in some sense, involved in a collective project to promote democracy and human rights. When one member of such a community lets the side down, so to speak, by failing to live up to its commitments, it thereby undermines that collective project and can justifiably be the object of sanctions by the other members.

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I went to see “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460989/ last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There are at least three Timberites better qualified than I to judge of the historical accuracy of the film, so I won’t comment on that. There did seem to be points of universal interest though. A group of farm-boys with a semi-theocratic ideology successfully holding off the high-tech army of a modern industrialized power next door seems to be a theme that gets repeated in other times and places. And the way in which a revolutionary nationalist movement divides into warring factions in when faced with a pragmatic compromise of its maximal goals has some parallels with the Palestinian story. An unexpected pleasure was the close physical resemblance between pompous landowner Sir John Hamilton (played by Roger Allam) and Christopher Hitchens. Recommended.

The “IBM PC is 25-years-old today”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4780963.stm . Me, I resisted at the time, but I’m not sure I could have afforded one. I’m pretty such that the first personal computer I used was a “Commodore 64”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 in the early 80s, followed by an “Apple IIc”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc when I worked at Verso around 1985 (I remember seeing “the first Mac”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K in a window by Liverpool Street Station at about the same time). Liking Macs but not being able to afford them meant that I invested in an “Atari 1040STFM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_st in about 1987 which I used at home for about five years or so (lovely crystal clear b&w monitor). I also spent a good deal of time on “Amstrad PCWs”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW. When I arrived in Bristol (1989) my Department had one (1) “BBC Micro”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc_micro in the basement, and there was a great deal of resistance to my suggestion that we should all have pcs on our desks. Some time in the mid 1990s, we all got i386 based clones, and it has been all upgrades to Pentiums since. Except that I just got my “MacBook”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbook , and had a new “iMac”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imac delivered to my office.

I was reading a paper by Samuel Freeman the other day and came across a passage that I found arresting. I found it arresting because it asserted propositions that looked false to me. But Freeman is a very smart guy (and a very distinguished Rawls scholar) and I rather suspect that the points he’s alluding to are symptomatic of some very deep differences in philosophical opinion. They’re also of interest because Freeman’s denial that a state’s control of its territory is akin to property ranges him against both those who are more egalitarian than he is (Pogge and Tan in the passage quoted, but also those like Philippe Van Parijs who claim the existence of borders is sufficient to establish that there is a global basic structure) and Lockean libertarians. I reproduce the passage below together with some (possibly inept) reactions from me.

bq. The one significant practice or norm Rawls’s critics allude to which might at first appearance be regarded as a basic global institution is peoples’ recognition that nations have “ownership” or control of the land and natural resources in the territories they occupy. Pogge, K. C. Tan, and others see this example as justifying a need for a global distribution principle to regulate this practice, and decide how global resources are to be distributed. But it is a mistake to regard this norm as a basic institution, on a par with the institution of property. For control and jurisdiction over a territory by a people is sui generis: it is the condition of the possibility of the existence of a people and their exercising political jurisdiction. As such it is not a kind of property; for among other reasons, it does not have the incidences of property: it is not legally specified and enforced, nor is it alienable or exchangeable, but is held in trust in perpetuity for the benefit of a people. But more importantly, rather than being a kind of property, a people’s control of territory provides the necessary framework for the legal institution of property and other basic social institutions. Finally, peoples can and have controlled territories without norms of cooperation or even recognition by other peoples at all. Indeed this has been true of many countries for most of history; they have existed in a Hobbesian state of war. The point is not that there is anything just about this situation – on the contrary, it has been sustained by aggression and injustice for most of history – but that, unlike property and other basic social institutions, a people’s control of a territory is not cooperative or in any way institutional. It is then misleading to call a people’s control of a territory and recognition of others’ boundaries “property,” a “basic institution,” or part of a “global basic structure,” simply in hopes of showing an inconsistency in Rawls and smuggling in a global principle of distributive justice. (Samuel Freeman, “Distributive Justice and _The Law of Peoples_”, in Rex Martin and David A. Reidy (eds) “Rawls’s Law of People’s: A Realistic Utopia”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1405135301/junius-20 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).)

The following points strike me as relevant:

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Via “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/archives/002661.html , I see that the Bush administration “is now proposing amendments”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/08/AR2006080801276.html to the War Crimes Act in order to protect CIA operatives and former military personnel from prosecution for violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The proposal is to replace general protections against degrading treatment with a list of specific offences. Guess what gets excluded:

bq. … humiliations, degrading treatment and other acts specifically deemed as “outrages” by the international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia — such as placing prisoners in “inappropriate conditions of confinement,” forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and merely threatening prisoners with “physical, mental, or sexual violence” — would not be among the listed U.S. crimes, officials said.

I’m really very sorry to hear the news of the death of Robbie Wokler. Wokler may well have known as much about the life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as anyone of the past half century. Sadly, much of that knowledge never made it into print, as Wokler was often reluctant to hand over final versions of his work to editors. Maybe there is material that will emerge. His essays, though, on Rousseau — and on the Enlightenment more generally — were often brilliant, insightful, iconoclastic and scholarly, all at the same time. He was a lively character, who often asked questions at conferences in a pretty robust manner, and was often willing to share a few drinks afterwards. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to learn from him a little. There’s “an obituary in the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2296552,00.html , I’ll add more as an when I hear of them. UPDATE: Josh Cherniss has “a fine appreciation”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1856123,00.html in the Guardian.

The Guardian has “a piece by Julian Borger”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julian_borger/2006/08/post_279.html on the different versions of the Lebanon war being presented to British and American audiences. It seems that British reporters have focused far more on the the sufferings of the Lebanese, with lots of eyewitness interviews with distressed people there, whereas the Americans have concentrated far more on the perpective from the bomb-shelters in northern Israel.

I’ve been a participant in various discussions on and off blogs, about the laws of war, just war theory and so on, as it applies to recent events. Though I think it is necessary to get clear about those things, there’s a horrible disconnection and abstractness about the debates, which doesn’t seem respond appropriately to the human miseries, to the people who are most human to us just as they are stripped of their humanity. Two texts came to mind when I thought about this, and felt feeling of disgust at myself for treating such matters as theoretical exercises. The first was Yeats’s “On a Political Prisoner”:http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/on_a_political_prisoner.html , and the second was Rousseau’s _The State of War_ from which I reproduce the opening lines below:

I open the books of law and morality, I listen to the sages and the philosophers of law, and, imbued by their insidious speeches, I am led to deplore the miseries of nature, and to admire the peace and justice established by the the civil order. I bless the wisdom of public institutions and console myself about my humanity through seeing myself as a citizen. Well instructed concerning my duties and my happiness, I shut the book, leave the classroom and look around. I see wretched peoples moaning beneath a yoke of iron, the human race crushed by the fist of oppressors, a starving and enfeebled crowd whose blood and tears are drunk in peace by the rich, and everywhere I see the strong armed against the weak with the terrifying power of the laws.

All this takes place peacefully and without resistance; it is the tranquility of the companions of Ulysses shut into the Cyclops cave and waiting their turn to be devoured. One must tremble and keep silent. Let us draw a permanent veil over these horrible phenomena. I lift my eyes and I look into the distance. I notice fires and flames, deserted countryside, pillaged towns. Ferocious men, where are you dragging those wretches? I hear a terrible sound. What a confusion! What cries! I draw closer and I see a theatre of murders, ten thousand men with their throats cut, the dead trampled by the hooves of horses, and everywhere a scene of death and agony. Such is the fruit of these peaceful institutions. Pity and indignation rise up from the the depths of my heart. Barbarous philosopher: try reading us your book on the field of battle.