Chris Bertram

I’m in Madison Wisconsin for the week and enjoying my first experience of the US away from the east coast. As visitors are, I keep being struck by the micro-details of life and how they differ from the UK. Harry and I just had lunch in a student cafeteria. Having finished our sandwiches we got up to get some coffee from a machine and simply left our coats and bags by our table whilst we did so, even though they were not always in sight. The cafeteria was also organized with the tills at one end and the seating back in the same space as the self-service access to food. Everyone stands in line and pays before taking their seats. All of this is radically different from the UK where (a) one learns from an early age to hang on to all one’s property because otherwise it will be stolen and (b) where given an opportunity to take food from the university, sit down and eat it and not pay, many (even most) students would do so.

(On the downside, the built environment has far too much concrete, especially on roadways and pavements (flagstones would make such a difference) and people eat dinner barbarically early — 6pm!!).

(On the very downside, I tuned into Country Music TV in my hotel room and found no overlap whatsoever with the stuff that gets played by Bob Harris : Emmylou, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch — forget it — it is all wall-to-wall pap by people wearing cowboy hats. Appalling.)

Over at Normblog, Sophie Masson has been defending the French model against its detractors , pointing out the France has successfully assimilated generations of Portuguese and Italian immigrants and turned them into French men and women. The funny thing is, that, leaving aside a bit of Napoleonic rambling around Italy in the 1790s, France never colonized Italy and Portugal. Nor did it fight a bitter war in Italy and Portugal as recently as the 1960s. Nor did it employ methods including massacre and torture against Italians and Portuguese in the recent past. Moreover those recent events have, as far as possible, been brushed under the carpet and France recently passed a law making schools teach the allegedly positive aspects of its colonial regimes in North Africa. Whilst the Algerian War was the subject of one of the greatest films ever made, French cinema (to mention just one popular cultural medium) has not faced up to the Algerian war in the way the Hollywood has addressed the American experience in Vietnam. I don’t assert that there is some direct causal connection between the Algerian war and the recent riots, but one cannot think seriously about the situation of the banlieue without noticing the unmentionable facts and silences. There has been no Truth and Reconciliation Commission for France, but until these wounds are acknowledged and examined, those of North African origin cannot be treated as just another immigrant group — like the Italians and Portuguese — they are not.

A friend alerts me by email that a new Rousseau biography is out in the US. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An Unruly Mind by Leo Damrosch is reviewed in the books section of the NYT today. It is hard to see how this will better Cranston, although Cranston unfortunately died before he completed his final volume (it was finished by someone else and is the thinnest of the three). I’m off to the US tomorrow, and will get myself a copy of Damrosch’s book asap.

I don’t often just reproduce someone else’s post verbatim, but I just surfed over to the Virtual Stoa where Chris has the following from the US Department of Justice

bq. ALMOST 7 MILLION ADULTS UNDER CORRECTIONAL SUPERVISION BEHIND BARS OR ON PROBATION OR PAROLE IN THE COMMUNITY

bq. WASHINGTON, D.C. — The number of adults in prison, jail, or on probation or parole reached almost 7 million during 2004, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The number has grown by more than 1.6 million adults under correctional authority control since 1995.

bq. The nation’s total correctional population was 6,996,500 in 2004, of which 4,151,125 were living in the community on probation; 1,421,911 were in a state or federal prison; 765,355 were living in the community on parole; and 713,990 were in jail, according to the BJS report on probation and parole. At year-end one in every 31 adults were under correctional supervision, which was 3.2 percent of the U.S. adult population…

As Chris says, wow.

Surfing over to Nationmaster — which uses the stats for 2003 and so has slightly fewer actual prisoners — I see that the US also has the highest absolute number of prisoners in the world (more than China!) , and the highest number per capita (715 per 100k). For comparison, the higher number per capita in the EU is 210 per 100k (Poland) and 144 for “older” Europe (Spain). For some reason the UK isn’t listed, but I think the figure works out at about 125.

I see that the left sidebar now has a permanent link to Eszter’s Frappr Map of Crooked Timber readers (scroll down: under Frenzy of Renown). Add yourselves (if you want to and you haven’t already – especially if you come from Africa, South America, Eastern Europe or Antarctica).

Today’s Guardian editorial concerns the recent legal case involving Hyperion Records . Hyperion are best know for their wonderful series of Schubert song recordings — Ian Bostridge’s Die schöne Müllerin being a case in point. Their survival is now threatened because the editor of the works of a rather obscure French composer was successful in an action claiming musical copyright in the work . I offer no opinion on the legal merits of the case, though it is claimed that this effectively lowers the threshold on what counts as an original work. Hyperion will probably face small damages, but they must now meet their own and the plaintiff’s enormous legal costs. They are appealing for donations .

I went to see Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (film website here ) last night, and came away with ambivalent feelings about it. On the one hand, it is good to see this extraordinary moment of heroism get a cinematic treatment, but on the other, it didn’t work especially well as a film. The film is supposedly based on Gestapo transcripts — but can it be true that Scholl and her interrogator engaged in lengthy speechifying against (and in defence of) the Nazi regime? These were the sort of exchanges that might work well in a stage play, but seemed stilted and artificial on the screen. There was also the matter of the film’s focus on Sophie as an individual rather than on her brother Hans when, from the point of view of their heroism, there seems little to choose between them. That seemed to exploit a tacit assumption that there was something specially noble about a woman resisting rather than a man. The film was good in bringing out their religious convictions, and the importance they had in motivating their acts. Certainly a film very much worth seeing for its moral and political qualities, but perhaps not for its aesthetic ones.

I got quite a bit of flak in comments last week for using the word “pogrom” to allude to the parallels between the rumour-driven riots in Birmingham and the persecution of Jews in 19th-century eastern Europe. Insofar as “pogrom” suggests some kind of official sanction, the word probably had slightly misleading connotations. But I see that both the conservative columnist Theodore Dalrymple and the Observer's Nick Cohen have also noticed the echoes. Dalrymple wrote:

bq. The rumour that a 14-year-old black girl had been caught shoplifting by a Pakistani shopkeeper in the Lozells area of Birmingham, and subsequently raped in revenge by a score of his compatriots, is highly reminiscent of the blood libels that used to sweep through Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century and led to vicious pogroms.

And comments:

bq. Of all the paradoxes of the situation, none is greater than that the Muslim traders of Lozells, among whom an unthinking anti-Semitism is probably widespread, should now find themselves in the position of the petty-trading Jews of Tsarist Russia, Moldavia and Romania.

And Cohen refers to Dalrymple and then generalizes the the work of Amy Chua:

bq. In World on Fire, published two years ago and which deserved far more attention than it received, Amy Chua showed how globalisation had created an explosion of racism in the anti-semitic tradition. The new wave of capitalism had raised the living standards of ordinary people by a little and the rich by a lot, her argument ran. The supporters of free markets and democracy thought everyone was benefiting and hadn’t noticed that their ideas helped fuel resentments in those countries where ethnic minorities dominated business.

Thoughts that are outrageous on Crooked Timber on Monday, are conservative talking-points by Wednesday and the conventional wisdom of the “decent” left by the following Sunday. Maybe I should be worried about that!

Today’s Guardian has this :

bq. Doctors today called for a change in the law so that graduate medical students do not have to pay fees of up to £3,000 a year upfront.

Which to my mind sits somewhat ill with this :

bq. Accountants believe average GP pay will burst through the £100,000 barrier this financial year for the first time.

Just to emphasise, that’s _average_ GP pay.

The New York Times reports (hat-tip JD – via The PoorMan ):

bq. You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda – stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

It is difficult to get a clear picture of what went on in Birmingham (England) at the weekend. But what seems to have happened is that unsubstaniated rumours of a sexual assault by members of a particular minority that was already resented for its local economic success began to circulate, and that vigilantes then felt entitled to attack random members of that group and their places of worship. Two people have died so far. The BBC has a report here , and the Guardian has some of the background . A very worrying development.

I caught the Guinness evolution ad (QuickTime movie) when I went to see the (rather excellent) Sommersturm last night. (I doubt that cinemas in Kansas will be showing the ad any time soon — or the movie for that matter!)

[Aaargh! It turns out that this is the _third time_ we’ve linked to the Guinness ad on CT (sorry Eszter and Kieran ) — we really must start reading one another’s posts!]

Der Spiegel has an interview with Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk — currently facing criminal charges for having publicly discussed the mass murder of Armenians during the First World War — which touches on his career as novelist, the political evolution of Turkey, the possibility of Turkish accession to the EU, among other matters.

I happened to be reading a paper by a friend today and came across a lovely passage by William Morris on the principle of distribution that would obtain in a socialist society. The passage is from Morris’s What Socialists Want and I found it interesting in the light of the arguments that go on today among egalitarian liberal political philosophers. Thus spake Morris:

bq. when a family that is comfortably-off sit down to a leg of mutton how do they act? do they bring in a pair of scales and weigh out to each one his share of the victuals? No that is done in a prison, but not in a family: in a family everybody has what he needs and no one grudges it: Mary has one slice, Jack has two, and Bill has four: but Mary and Jack don’t feel wronged, since they have had as much as they wanted: and the reason for this is that enough has been provided, and that the members of the family trust one another. My friends it is for you to choose whether you will live in a prison or a family: we Socialists beg you to choose the latter.

The important thing for Morris is that everyone have enough, and that everyone trusts one another sufficiently to be assured that others are not taking more than they need. And he contrasts this with an attitude of (suspicious) calculation. I’m not sure whether Morris is enunciating a principle of justice here, or whether he would say that justice is inherently calculative and that these are circumstances of abundance where the watchful attitude of strict justice no longer applies. But if (and it’s a big if) this is taken as a principle of justice, then it is notable that he isn’t endorsing a principle of strict equality, but rather one of sufficiency. Indeed this contrast is even clearer towards the beginning of the text where Morris writes:

bq. So you see whatever inequality I admit among people, I claim this equality – that everybody should have full enough food, clothes, and housing, and full enough leisure, pleasure, and education; and that everybody should have a certainty of these necessaries: in this case we should be equal as Socialists use the word ….

Again, a principle of sufficiency and the suggestion of the dimensions of human existence in which we should have sufficient that prefigures some of the lists of essential capabilites that Martha Nussbaum enumerates in various places.