Chris Bertram

I linked to a piece by Steven Poole last week, and here he is again with “a terrific review of recent books”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060412142020/index.html by sages left and right. That whole “Enlightenment” theme is given some attention:

bq. Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for a clash of incompatible fantasies. According to the conservative essayists in Decadence, a misty golden age of “genuine virtue” has passed, to be replaced by bogus slogans and psychobabble. This is all the fault of the Enlightenment. But here comes Frank Furedi in Politics of Fear, arguing that conservatives no longer appeal to tradition, and that the problem is that we have turned our back on the Enlightenment. Evidently, both these views cannot be right.

Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other often says.

The “decent left” who brought us Unite Against Terror, Labour Friends of Iraq, Democratiya, Engage and any number of other internet fronts, have now launched their “Euston Manifesto”:http://eustonmanifesto.org/joomla/ . Together with lots of general commitments to motherhood and apple pie, there are the usual obsessions: Iraq, Israel, the alleged anti-Americanism and anti-semitism of those who disagree with them. There’s also a the usual whining reinteration of the complaint that they have difficulty in getting their voice heard given the domination of the meeja by their foes. As “Matthew points out”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2006/04/oh-dear-big-night-in-pub-i-cant.html this is a bit implausible give the cvs of the participants:

bq. Nick Cohen, columnist in the Observer, the Evening Standard and the New Statesman, with the report signed by Francis Wheen, deputy-editor of Private Eye, columnist in the Guardian, John Lloyd, editor of the FT Magazine etc.

Personally, my attention was caught by sections 13 and 14 on “Freedom of Ideas” and “Open Source”. I conducted a search of the Crooked Timber comment logs last weekend wondering if that would reveal the identity of someone who vandalized a Wikipedia page. I discovered that the vandal’s IP address had been used in comments from both from someone who shows up as a prominent signatory of the Manifesto and by a pseudonymous blogger. I can only suppose that, like Hesperus and Phosphorus, they are identical. No doubt the other signatories have a stronger commitment to open source and freedom of ideas.

For futher reaction see “Matthew”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2006/04/oh-dear-big-night-in-pub-i-cant.html , “Jamie K”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2006/04/by_euston_stati.html and “Mike Power”:http://mikepower.net/mrpower2/2006/3/13/the-whine-approaching-platform-2-is.html .

I recently wrote a review of a couple of books on global justice, one of which expended a great deal of effort in explaining how a liberal cosmopolitanism could be consistently combined with a reasonable patriotism. For some reason, the concern to combine these positions seems to especially concern liberal Americans who want be good patriots and think of themselves as endorsing universal values at one and the same time. Well I guess I agree about this far: that, within the limits justice allows, one both may feel an affection for one’s country and compatriots and promote the good of that nation and community, just as one can legitimately promote the good of one’s family and friends within the bounds set by justice. (I guess I think that promoting the interests of one’s family and friends is not merely permissible but also required, whereas promoting the interest of one’s country within the bounds allowed by justice is allowed but not obligatory.)

What I don’t agree with is the proposition that the citizens (or the government, for that matter) of a country are under any duty to promote the interests of that country in terms of its relative prosperity or military power, where their doing so is at the expense of the citizens of other countries. I’m mentioning this now partly because of some of the reactions I’ve read to the infamous Mearsheimer and Walt paper. Mearsheimer and Walt are neorealists, and, as such, they believe that governments (and their citizens) do have a duty to promote their country’s interests in the sense I indicated. So insofar as they claim that some group (the Israeli lobby) fails to do so, and promotes some other country’s interests, they are saying something bad about that group from their own perspective. [1]

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Yesterday was a big day in the Bertram household, as we are season-ticket holders at “Bristol Rugby”:http://www.bristolrugby.co.uk/ and Bristol beat Newcastle Falcons convincingly and thereby secured our Premiership status for next season (Leeds would need to win every remaining game with a bonus point, with no further points for Bristol to catch us — it isn’t going to happen). Bristol came up from National Division One last season and were every pundit’s tip to go straight back down. So it is a very nice feeling that the critics have been proved wrong. I expect it will be tough again next season, but at least there will be a next season in the top division.

The great Madeleine Bunting/Enlightenment debate rolls one, with a “synoptic response from the columnist herself”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1750579,00.html . I’m not a great fan of Bunting’s brand of handwringing multiculturalism myself, but she doesn’t acquit herself badly despite getting in a bit of a muddle about rationalism and anti-rationalism. (It is instructive to contrast the calm engagement of her latest contribution with the “ill-tempered hectoring and puerile name-calling”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/04/10/she_wouldnt_let_it_lie.php that the self-styled defenders of the Enlightenment are engaging in, a mark of desperation if you ask me.) She also asks a very good question: why are this particular bunch of people wrapping themselves in this particular cloak at this particular time? I guess the answer is that once they have cast themselves in the role of historic defenders of reason and civilization against the barbarians, they can spare themselves the trouble of worrying too hard about the messy details of Guantanamo, torture, “extraordinary rendition”, and thousands upon thousands of dead bodies. They can also deliver stern lectures about “relativism”, “universalism”, “moral clarity” etc whilst applying one set of standards to them (the fanatical headchoppers) , and a different set to us (the shining defenders of civilization) . Steven Poole has written a “quite brilliant post”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060407120225/index.html on the use of the rhetoric of universalism to justify double standards by one of the foremost peddlers of this tosh, the ever-pompous Oliver Kamm.

The website “Sign and Sight”:http://www.signandsight.com/ (an English-language version of “Perlentaucher”:http://www.perlentaucher.de/ ) is a year old, and I’ve only just noticed it. There’s lots of excellent stuff there, including “a piece by Friedrich Christian Delius on the state of Italy”:http://www.signandsight.com/features/697.html , which tells us, inter alia, that the World Bank ranked the Italian legal system 135th/136 (just ahead of Guatemala!) for effectiveness:

bq. The main reason is that the limitation period for crimes continues to run after a trial has opened, and even after a verdict has been passed, right up until the final day of the final instance. Consequently lawyers try to prolong legal proceedings as long as possible. In 2004 alone 210,000 cases fell under the statute of limitations. The perfect scenario for well-off defendants to get away scot-free. Berlusconi himself has profited this way several times.

bq. A well-governed state might have an interest in changing this state of affairs, for example by introducing the usual procedure of suspending the statute of limitations when a trial begins. The governing majority has indeed gathered the energy to make changes, but in an unexpectedly creative way. The limitation periods have now been considerably shortened, from fifteen to seven and a half years, specifically for economic crimes and corruption. There will be no more sentences for the top ten thousand criminals, Mafiosi, corrupt politicians.

There’s much much more.

Here in the UK we’re all being entertained/informed by “BBC4’s 1973 week”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/features/seventies1.shtml . Back in 1973 (I was 14/15) I remember my Dad telling me to pay close attention to the news one day and that people in the future would say it was a big year, a year when everything changed. He was right about that. So far there have been excellent documentaries about the “Poulson Affair”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poulson (1972-4), one about Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson and a fantastic 1973 episode of Panorama with Alistair Burnett where a nurse, a car worker, a “businessman” and a merchant banker are asked what they think about their relative salaries. (Everyone accepting that one of the government’s jobs was to decide fair pay relativities). Naturally, nearly everyone said the nurse should earn most and the merchant banker least. The distance between then and now was also brought home to me by the remark that in 1973 everyone knew the names of the top union leaders. Today almost nobody does. The pervasiveness of the sense of national crisis was well brought out by clips from Blue Peter where Valerie Singleton and John Noakes explained to children facing power cuts to surround candles with earth to make them safer and to interleave the bedding of elderly relatives with newspaper too keep them warm. Revolution (or a military coup) seemed just around the corner ….

Madeleine Bunting is getting a real kicking from various “decent left” blogs for the “following paragraph”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/madeleine_bunting/2006/03/post_12.html about the Enlightenment:

bq. [Jonathan] Ree countered by saying the Enlightenment had never happened – or at least certainly not in the shape we think it did. It was a retrospective creation in the nineteenth century designed to make the eighteenth century look silly – the gist was that excessive pride in human rationality was a story which had ended in tears in the brutal terror of the French Revolution. Ree pointed out that all the great thinkers attributed to the Enlightenment such as Hume, Locke, Kant were actually religious believers and none of them believed in progress.

Three initial remarks: (1) Bunting is reporting what she remembers from an exchange involving others; (2) as she notes, she is not a philosopher (or an intellectual historian); and (3), she probably wrong about Hume (though his religious views remain a matter of controversy).

Nevertheless, it would be uncharitable not to notice both that it is certainly correct to say that the Enlightenment and “the Enlightenment project” are movements and events that were discerned in retrospect, that the contours of those events remain in dispute, and that the figures that we today think of as central to the Enlightement didn’t think of themselves as belonging to any current under that description. The idea of reason’s over-reaching ending in tears in the Terror is also, recognizably, the story Hegel tells in the Phenomenology and elsewhere.

There are many ironies in Bunting’s critics waving the flag of Enlightenment as they do. Among them is the fact that as Robert Wokler explains in his “The Enlightenment, the Nation State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity”:http://www.colbud.hu/main/PubArchive/DP/DP46-Wokler.pdf (pdf), many of the central ideals of the Enlightenment were lost to the rise of the modern nation state. As Wokler puts it:

bq. Not only individuals but whole peoples which comprise nations without states have found themselves comprehensively shorn of their rights. At the heart of the Enlightenment Project, which its advocates perceived as putting an end to the age of privilege, was their recognition of the common humanity of all persons. For Kant, who in Königsberg came from practically nowhere and went nowhere else at all, to be enlightened meant to be intolerant of injustice everywhere, to pay indiscriminate respect to each individual, to be committed to universal justice, to be morally indifferent to difference. But in the age of the nation-state, it is otherwise. Thanks ultimately to the father of modernity [the abbé Sieyès] , ours is the age of the passport, the permit, the right of entry to each state or right of exit from it which is enjoyed by citizens that bear its nationality alone.

The fact is, of course, that far from being advocates of the kind of cosmopolitan universalism championed by Kant, most of the “decent” left are actually advocates of or apologists for some form of 19th-century ethnic nationalism. Of course, the case for and against such nationalism has to be argued on its merits, but there is something radically inconsistent in simultaneously banging on about the Enlightement and endorsing nationalisms antithetical to the ideals of thinkers like Kant and Voltaire. (The Wokler piece, by the way, appears in The Enlightenment and Modernity edited by Robert Wokler and Norman Geras.)

UPDATE: Stop reading here and go over to The Virtual Stoa for some “sensible reflections”:http://tinyurl.com/gzlxt on the whole business of defining the Enlightenment.

I finished Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594200637/junius-20 at the weekend and very much enjoyed it. For those who don’t know it’s a novel about academia, loosely modelled on Forster’s “Howard’s End”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/014118213X/junius-20 , and centred on the relations between the Belsey and Kipps families. Howard Belsey, an post-modern art historian from an English working-class background is bitterly antagonistic to Monty Kipps a black conservative critic/pundit who has made a career out of baiting liberals. They are forced to deal with one another thanks to the involvement of Belsey’s son with Kipps’s daughter. There are no plot spoilers so far (you’d know all that by about page 6) and I don’t want to post any — just to recommend it. I liked it more than her “White Teeth”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375703861/junius-20 , which she didn’t know how to end, but like that book it is witty and well-observed and has much to say about the lies people tell to themselves about themselves.

(I wrote something like the previous paragraph yesterday, but when I pressed “publish” WordPress sent me to a login screen and then eat my post. So I had to do it all again. In between I’ve read a few of the online reviews and reader reactions at places like Amazon. And I’m astonished by how many people seem to have just hated the book. Now like Smith, I’m British, and I’ve noticed that many of the complaints are from Americans who thinks she gets America wrong in various respects (most of the action is set in Cambridge/Boston) and has a poor ear for American dialogue. I’d be interested to hear if any commenters had that same reaction. Anyhow, I thought it was terrific.)

I had tickets to “Welsh National Opera”:http://www.wno.org.uk/ ‘s production of “The Flying Dutchman”:http://www.wno.org.uk/what.opera.106.html last night (my second trip in a week, having seen “Figaro”:http://www.wno.org.uk/what.opera.107.html on Wednesday). We Bristolians had been feeling slightly sore, since “Bryn Terfel”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/music/sites/brynterfel/ had sung the lead in Cardiff but had been replaced by Robert Hayward for later dates on the tour. Just before the was due to rise there was an announcement: Hayward was unwell and couldn’t sing. So now we get the third choice….? Not a bit of it! They had located Terfel on a golf course in North Wales that afternoon, put him in a car and rushed him down the M6/M5! Apparently it was touch and go whether he would make it in time. When the announcement was made the audience went wild (which made me feel extra sorry for poor Hayward). Terfel was, naturally, simply fantastic. A great singer with a tremendous presence. And a great guy … thanks for stepping in.

The British Library has just released a “CD of bird mimicry”:http://www.bl.uk/acatalog/wildlifecds.html?EMK_LK01_pubshopx_bl_home_wildlife from around the world. Both the “Independent”:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article352784.ece and the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2097400,00.html have articles, and the Times has a few soundclips (I liked the German bullfinches best, though the modem-connecting blackbird is startling.)

I’m somewhat reluctant to enter into the debate started by the “John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt article in the LRB”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html about the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Certainly I don’t know enough to judge the accuracy of many of their claims. But I can read, so I can read both what the article says and what hostile critics say about it. Norman Geras “reprints”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/03/a_reply_to_mear.html a letter of protest to the LRB by Jeffrey Herf and Andrei S. Markovits. Here is Geras’s comment on the letter:

bq. I add just one comment of my own relating to this sentence: ‘American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States.’ Yes, and Jewish citizens anywhere and everywhere likewise, mutatis mutandis. It is high time that the suggestion that somehow Jews are especially disqualified from having a voice in the affairs of whatever nation they belong to (lest they come to be a sinister cabal) was banished from acceptable political discourse. By that I don’t mean it should become a criminal offence; I mean merely that it should be regarded and roundly condemned by everyone of progressive democratic outlook for what it is: at best, a disgraceful exercise in the operation of double standards; at worst, anti-Semitism.

One might get the impression from all that that Mearsheimer and Walt had asserted that “Jews are especially disqualified from having a voice ….” In their article, however, they write the following:

bq. In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.

Mearsheimer and Walt are entitled to take the view that US foreign policy is biased towards Israel and that part of the explanation for that is the effectiveness of the pro-Israeli lobby. Critics might legitimately counter by saying that such a bias is justified, or that there is no such bias, or that the lobby is not as effective as they say it is, or some combination of those thoughts. (One might have similar arguments, of course, about the historical influence of the Irish diaspora on US policy and attitudes towards the British in Northern Ireland. Again, it was entirely legitimate for US citizens of Irish descent to lobby their elected representatives as they did. Similarly there might have been good reasons to deplore the effects of that influence, reasons that might be embraced by people not in the grip of visceral anti-Irish prejudice.)

He’s far too shy to announce it over here, but Daniel has “a piece”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/03/defining_protectionism_down.html about the shifting meaning of “protectionism” over at the new Guardian “Comment is Free” pseudo-blog.

Johann Hari, Independent columnist and one-time contributor to the “decent left” blog “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ , writes “eloquently in the Indie today”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=831 about why he was wrong about the Iraq war and how he now regrets his pro-war stance.

(I note, btw, that there is “a dismissive post at HP”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/03/20/whither_iraq.php referring to Hari as a “London-based journalist” but omitting to mention his former association with the site.)