Chris Bertram

The last time Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was discussed on this blog, he was “being deported from the US as a threat to national security”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/09/22/cat-stevens-banned-from-the-us/ . Now, via “Amanda”:http://flopearedmule.blogspot.com/2005/10/crossposted-at-hickorywind_11.html , I see that he’s been busy recording with Dolly Parton. As Amanda puts it:

bq. call me profane, but the idea of a noted religious ascetic picking with the Texas Whorehouse lady herself really appeals to me.

MEG: Have you got your paper?

PETEY: Yes thanks.

MEG: That’s nice? Anything interesting?

PETEY: Not really.

MEG: That’s nice.

PETEY: “Someone won a prize”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4338082.stm .

MEG: That’s nice. Who?

PETEY: I don’t think you’d know him.

MEG: What’s his name?

PETEY: Harold.

MEG: I don’t know him.

PETEY: No.

Reading Ronald Dworkin’s chapter “Political Equality” from “Sovereign Virtue”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674008103/junius-20 and James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385503865/junius-20 back to back was a rather odd experience. I first read Dworkin as saying something like the following.

bq. Leaving things up to the electors is all very well for issues where what the right answer is actually depends on what people want. But lots of issues, especially one’s of basic justice, aren’t like that. There’s not special reason to think that ordinary people are much good at those questions, so better to put them in the hands of people like me the justices of the US Supreme Court.

Aha! I thought, after reading Surowiecki. Maybe Dworkin goes too quickly in assuming that a panel of experts is better than the electorate is at deciding such questions. Let’s go back and see what he says. But apart from a bit of handwaving in the direction of Condorcet (inconclusive according to Dworkin, and mentioned by name by neither D nor S) there isn’t really any argument. And Dworkin’s positive claims end up looking really elusive. Like this:

bq. For some matters where the right answer is independent of what citizens want it might , sometimes be better to have judges decide (though “it would be outrageous to suggest that only lawyers and moral philosophers should be allowed a vote on choice-insensitive matters” (p.207). And, by the way, judicial review doesn’t impugn equality of the vote “because it is a form of districting” (p. 209).

So I’d be grateful if someone out there can formulate a nice crisp thesis about these matters that I can pin on Dworkin with confidence and which doesn’t contain so many qualifications and get-outs as to be nearly worthless. I also wonder, insofar as my first attempt at a summary is an accurate rendition of what Dworkin really thinks, whether the impending Republican majority on the Supreme Court will give him cause to regret and retract his view.

Robert Winston “writing in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1590776,00.html :

bq. While nobody has identified any gene for religion, there are certainly some candidate genes that may influence human personality and confer a tendency to religious feelings. Some of the genes likely to be involved are those which control levels of different chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain. Dopamine is one neurotransmitter which we know plays a powerful role in our feelings of well-being; it may also be involved in the sense of peace that humans feel during some spiritual experiences. One particular gene involved in dopamine action – incidentally, by no means the only one that has been studied in this way – is the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4). In some people, because of slight changes in spelling of the DNA sequences (a so-called polymorphism) making up this gene, the gene may be more biologically active, and this could be partly responsible for a religious bent.

Well I’m quite open to the idea that those specially drawn to religion have a chemical imbalance in their brains, but this thesis surely has to contend with the startling temporal fluctuations in religiosity that different societies undergo. The Irish and Italians, two name but two, don’t seem especially religious at the moment, but go back a generation or three …. I doubt very much that their genetic stock has changed that much.

It is always dangerous to start a Middle East thread on CT. But I just wanted to react to the first episode of the BBC’s new series “Israel and the Arabs: The Elusive Peace”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/elusive_peace/default.stm , which British viewers saw last night [and some Americans on PBS, it turns out! H/T Nick in comments]. Others will undoubtedly disagree, but I thought nearly everyone depicted in the first episode, which centred on Clinton’s attempt to broker peace, came out of the documentary with credit. Both Barak and Arafat emerged as serious about peace, but as being too limited by their respective constituencies to deliver an agreement: Barak feared electoral defeat, Arafat assassination. The other players, especially Albright and Clinton, came across as the tough, competent and impressive people they are (such a contrast with their successors). And one was left with a sense of how recent all this was, and how distant it now feels (post 9/11).

I said nearly everyone emerged with some credit. There were two exceptions: Chirac and Sharon. Chirac for the way in which he let his absurd vanity interfere with a historic chance for peace, Sharon for his irresponsible and provocative grandstanding at the Temple Mount.

“Yesterday on Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/10/shock_and_mock.html :

bq. Is it just that, for secular liberals and leftists, all those invoking a line to, or about, God in decisions and actions in the public realm, with far-reaching effects on others, are to be seen as laughable, grotesque, or worse? I guess that must be it. But hold on. This seems to apply only sometimes. Like to the US President; or to Republican voters of devoutly Christian outlook; or to fundamentalist Jews in the occupied territories. It seems not to apply so much, or at all, when Islamists appeal to religious sources as a basis for blowing up themselves and, more particularly, others.

Today in the Guardian, “George Monbiot”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1589101,00.html , who must surely exemplify the Guardian-columnist-in-Norman’s-head (if anyone does):

bq. Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for atheists to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up – whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes – do so in the name of God.

Ascription to a whole group, of the sort Geras engages in here, is now a standard move of the “decent left”. I don’t believe it is dishonest, I think they have constructed an image in their own heads of what most “secular liberals and leftists” believe, an image sharpened by their own sense of embattlement and by every BBC or Guardian story that doesn’t exactly resonate with their own views. In this, of course, they increasingly reproduce the paranoid groupthink of the American right about “liberals”.

Chris Brooke of “the Virtual Stoa has been waiting”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emagd1368/weblog/2005_10_01_archive.html#112895907444293364 for the “Brick Testament”:http://www.thebricktestament.com/ to get round to its Lego re-enactment of a key Biblical episode for Rousseau scholars, the Levite of Ephraim, a tale of gang rape, murder and dismemberment, and the occasion for one of JJR’s most obscure scribblings. Follow the links from the Stoa.

I’m just back from Germany where I’ve been to a very interesting interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Bremen ‘s Sonderforschungsbereich “Staatlichkeit im Wandel”:http://www.staatlichkeit.uni-bremen.de/ on Trade Governance, Democracy and Inequality. As usual in such cases, the bringing together of philosophers and practitioners was both stimulating and revealing of how little we know about one another. Starting my own, basically normative, paper, I asserted that a central purpose of trade rules should be to promote justice. I was informed that “justice” was one word that would never pass the lips of a WTO negotiator. Which, doesn’t show, of course, either that I’m wrong about what should happen or that concerns about justice aren’t lurking in the shadows somewhere. But it suggests a startling disconnect between the public rhetoric about global inequality and the concerns at the negotiating table.

This paragraph from Brian Hinton’s _South by South West: A Road Map to Alternative Country_ could perfectly well do service as a caption to a Far Side cartoon:

bq. Lazily labelled as “folk rock” during their ten-year career together, Richard and Linda were as attuned to Americana as anyone living in a Sufi commune in rural Norfolk could ever hope to be.

Probably the high-point of a book which mainly consists of a long list of obscure band names.

My interest in americana and similar was noted by a former student who runs the music pages of a local arts magazine, so I was drafted in to review a performance by “Tom Russell”:http://www.tomrussell.com in Bristol the other day. As you’ll see from “the review in Decode magazine”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php?page=Tom+Russell+28+Sept , I had a good time, and I’m hoping for similar commissions in the future!

I’ve been noticing a more and more frequent theme in the writings of the pro-war “left” recently, but no-one, I think, has managed to achieve “the narcissism and self-pity of John Lloyd”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/63736aa8-2fc4-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8.html in the Financial Times:

bq. The great betrayal of liberalism and of the left was not opposition to the war but the insouciant, opportunist, morally indignant denunciation of those who, for diverse motives to be sure, sought to give force to the rhetoric of liberation. They have been so content to denounce that they think nothing of what they damage. It is the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself.

Good intentions should count for nothing here. You backed a disastrous project, mismanaged by morons, sold by lies, and it has turned into a bloody mess. But those who point this out attack “freedom itself.” Sheesh!

I’ve been engaged in some correspondence which began around the question of whether or not “Mark Steyn rejects Darwin”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/mark_steyn_space_dwelling_robot_brain/ , but which has switched into a discussion of the views of philosopher and metaphysician, “Peter van Inwagen”:http://www.nd.edu/~ndphilo/faculty/pva.htm . Specifically, the following passage from Van Inwagen’s essay “Quam Dilecta”:

bq. I remember reading a very amusing response made by David Berlinski to Stephen Jay Gould’s statement that modern science was rapidly removing every excuse that anyone had ever had for thinking that we were much different from our closest primate relatives. Berlinski pointed out that you can always make two things sound similar (or “different only in degree”) if you describe them abstractly enough: “What Canada geese do when they migrate is much like what we do when we jump over a ditch: in each case, an organism’s feet leave the ground, it moves through the air, and it comes down some distance away. The difference between the two accomplishments is only a matter of degree.” I am also put in mind of a cartoon Phillip Johnson once showed me: A hostess is introducing a human being and a chimp at a cocktail party. “You two will have a lot to talk about,” she says, “–you share 99 percent of your DNA.” I’m sorry if I seem to be making a joke of this, but…well, I am making of joke of this. I admit it. Why shouldn’t I? The idea that there isn’t a vast, radical difference, a chasm, between human beings and all other terrestrial species is simply a very funny idea. It’s like the idea that Americans have a fundamental constitutional right to own automatic assault weapons: its consequences apart, it’s simply a very funny idea, and there’s nothing much one can do about it except to make a joke of it. You certainly wouldn’t want to invest much time in an argument with someone who would believe it in the first place.

I’m not a scientist (or a metaphysician for that matter), but I’m not shy to ask the advice of those who are. So comments are open for general observations on the passage. I’d be interested to know, though, whether anything as unvarnished as that can actually be pinned on Gould (van Inwagen provides no reference). I can well imagine him saying that chimpanzees and humans have a great deal in common compared what they share with, say, sharks or spiders (but that’s a different claim). The other thing that occured to me is that it is rather rich for someone to propose a laugh test to rule out counterintuitive scientific generalization when they themselves believe that “only human beings and elementary particles exist”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000189.html . My correspondent has corrected me to say that my characterization of van Inwagen’s view is inexact and that he holds that not only human beings by anything else with a “unified consciousness” can exist. So God and the angels are in too. That doesn’t really diminish my sense that when it comes to claims that are, on the face of it, laughable, van Inwagen may be a man throwing stones in a glasshouse.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of blogospheric comment yet about the more surreal aspects of the British governments “intention”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/16/nterr16.xml to “criminalize”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,15935,1571350,00.html the “glorification” of terrorism. Saying that a particular terrorist act or event was a good thing is set to be a criminal offence unless the event was more than 20 years ago, except that the Home Secretary will draw up a list of older events the “glorification” of which will also be an offence. So far there’s no clear indication of what will be on the list except the suggestion that glorifying the Easter Rising of 1916 or the French Revolution (1789-whenever you think it ended) will not be illegal. Will it be illegal to praise the following events?

* The Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel (1946)

* Any bombings or shootings by the Baader-Meinhof gang.

* ETA’s assassination of Prime Minister Carrero Blanco in 1973

* Any acts of Palestinian terrorism.

* The assassination by Mossad of Palestinian leaders in foreign countries.

* The assassination of any member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

* The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by the French secret service in 1985.

However repusive it may be to praise some of these acts, it is just incompatible with a free society for it to be in some politician’s gift to decide which historical events it is or isn’t acceptable to “glorify”.

Alan Johnson of Labour Friends of Iraq emails to tell me of a new online journal he’s editing, “Democratiya”:http://www.democratiya.com/default.asp . It won’t be any great secret around here that we’ve not exactly seen eye-to-eye recently with people who call themselves the “pro-liberation” left (or similar). But Demokratiya includes writings from some people who didn’t think the war was such a great idea, such as Gideon Calder (who has an “interesting review of Walzer on war”:http://www.democratiya.com/details.asp?id=2 ), and involves some others whom I continue to like and respect. And I certainly share with them the hope (against hope) that Iraq somehow turns into a flourishing democracy. So surf over there and take a look.